The Comeback Kid: The Return of Matteo Manassero

Matteo Manassero Celebrates Victory

The rise and fall of Matteo Manassero is one of golf’s more unexpected tales. His tale of redemption is one of its most heart-warming and ahead of his return to the Major stage at the US Open, he told his story to TG.

There is a touch of the boy band survivor about Matteo Manassero. He was the star who blossomed at a remarkably young age and enjoyed a series of big hits. The future appeared golden, then it all went terribly wrong, and now he’s back. Still popular, still handsome, and still blessed with a thick mop of dark hair.

Having recently gained admittance to the 124th US Open via Final Qualifying at Walton Heath Golf Club, shooting a steady one-under-par 71 in his first round, followed by a clubhouse-leading 65 in the second round, Matteo seems poised to take his game back to the highest levels of professional golf – he’ll need it to compete in the ever-challenging conditions of the US Open.

When the 31-year-old Italian sat down with Today’s Golfer during February’s Bahrain Championship, it was staggering to think that he’d first announced himself to the world almost half his lifetime ago.

He was the youngest winner of the Amateur Championship in 2009, just a few weeks after his 16th birthday. A month later, he played the first two rounds of The Open at Turnberry alongside his idol Sergio Garcia and Tom Watson, who was launching his astounding quest to become the oldest winner of the Claret Jug. “Imagine it,” Manassero says with a laugh that suggests even he struggles to do such a thing. “I was witnessing history – what an unbelievable experience. Tom, who had made me feel like a member of his family all week, was one meter from winning The Open at 59 years old. The week was a dream for me.”

The teen sensation finished just four shots shy of the play-off in a share of 13th and won the Silver Medal for low amateur. The following spring he became the then-youngest player to make the cut in the Masters. Shortly after turning 17, he turned pro and made the cut in every one of his first 12 starts in carefree fashion. His breakthrough moment came at the Castello Masters in October 2010 when he defeated Garcia on El Nino’s home course and became the youngest-ever winner on the then-European Tour.

The progress was literally prodigious. He won again in each of the next three seasons, each title more prestigious than the last. He was the first teenager to win three times on the Tour and, aged 20, he made it four with the 2013 BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, a triumph which was famously completed – pure boy band – in an outfit that thrilled the fans (left).

“Seve Ballesteros had always been my idol and my sponsor at the time decided to create a pair of Sunday green trousers in honor of him,” laughs Manassero now. “A lot of people still talk to me about those trousers!”

In his end-of-tournament press conference, he confirmed he was still living with his mum and dad and was asked if he had “noticed a bunch of signorinas following you”. He replied that he had.

A week later he led through 36 holes in the Nordea Masters but he wouldn’t hit top spot on another end-of-round leaderboard for seven and a half years. In that period he would record as many lows as he had registered highs before then.

He landed only one top 10 in 2014, missed 16 straight cuts in 2016, lost his card in 2018, and made just two cuts in 2019. From a high of 25th in the world ranking, he plummeted to 1,805th.

In the final start of 2019, he carded an 83 in the first round of the Portugal Masters which left him bottom of the leaderboard and 20 shots behind the leader. By the time he had missed the cut, his two attempts at the par-5 12th hole had required 16 blows. He was left in no doubt. He had no option but to step away from the game. “I couldn’t keep going along the same path,” he says. “I wanted to start from fresh. I knew that things had to – and were going to – change.” Intriguingly, it is while discussing the good times that Manassero reveals the real torment of the bad times. That first professional win in Spain had come shortly after he had twice experienced the heat of Sunday contention.

‘WHEN THINGS WENT WELL, I DIDN’T REALLY THINK ABOUT WHY. BUT WHEN I STRUGGLED, I THOUGHT TOO MUCH ABOUT IT’

“Both times it was true that I gained vital knowledge which helped me to win soon afterwards,” he says. “But really? The pressure in those final round moments is not the hardest pressure you can feel in golf because you’ve played three days of good golf to get there. You’ve proved that you’re good enough and you have reason to trust your game and be confident. It’s a privilege to be in contention. Someone might play better than you and they may win, but it’s still a great experience.

“The much harder pressure is when you’re not making cuts, when you’re stuck playing badly or when your game is just not there. That’s real pressure because you struggle to believe that you can ever get through it.”

Between June 2013 and the end of 2019, Manassero recorded just three top-five finishes in 163 starts. Was it possible to find any positives with those oh-so-rare highs?

“It’s hard to answer that,” he says. “In truth, I was making the mistake of focusing on results. For example, I finished third at the 2016 Scottish Open and felt great, then I missed one cut and it felt like the end of the world. And I was missing a lot of cuts. It was a roller coaster that was never going to end well.

“Sometimes people would ask me why I didn’t do what I was doing in 2011? Did they think I wasn’t trying?! I was actually trying to become better!

“The thing is, when everything went well I didn’t really think about why. When I struggled, I thought about it too much or I thought about it in the wrong way. This game is very strange. We play a lot of tournaments, we’re away a lot, there are many opportunities to go a little sideways, it’s a very quick turnover.” He raises his eyebrows with a wry smile. “You need to be balanced. But it’s difficult.”

Two factors called a halt to the downward spiral. The second was the forced pause prompted by COVID-19 in 2020. “Many people had bad times and struggled, I know this,” he says. “But I had time to work on what mattered. It was just my now-wife Francesca and myself, and that was good for me.”

Before then, during his voluntary hiatus after the previous year’s Portugal Masters, he started working with the performance coach Alessandra Averna, a former teammate in the Italian national team.

“She cleared my mind of the dirt that was in there from those bad years,” he smiles. “Yeah, literally dirt! That’s the way it felt. We work well together. She helps me face up to tough situations and it’s a process that won’t ever stop. That year (2019) had been tough. I needed to be patient. I had to start again from the bottom.”

POSITIVE VIBES

Some former champions of the game cannot cope with the descent into the lower tiers. One found the experience of playing with golfers who were pulling their own trolleys beyond the pale. Manassero, in contrast, is no prima donna. Very few would have accepted and embraced the trials he endured with the dignity he did.

In September 2020, he claimed victory on the third-tier Alps Tour. “I was producing good shots under pressure. That was a huge relief and proof that I was going in the right direction, but it was still a work in progress.”

His caution was shrewd because the next three seasons were spent plugging away on the second tier.

“It’s quite funny. I started with such high expectations. I was playing on the Challenge Tour,
I went to South Africa and I played terrible golf. Really bad. But through those long years I had developed a strong faith that if I do the right things, the results will come. Don’t get me wrong, I still get upset about results. But if you’re ready, things will come.

If you’re not, they won’t.” The last week of May 2023 was the 10th anniversary of his Wentworth triumph and he traveled to Denmark, home of his coach Soren Hansen, for the Copenhagen Challenge event. “We worked really well in the run-up, I had a clear mind about my swing and I had Francesca on the bag. I had good energy.”

The positive vibes were prophetic. He completed victory and two months later won again, this time on home soil in the Italian Challenge Open and once more with Francesca on the bag. With it, he guaranteed a return to the main tour.

In a DP World Tour website blog at the end of the year, Manassero wrote of his revival: “It took time and I guess I had good resilience.”

He was about to prove it yet again. After going seven tournaments without a top 30, he shot the “best round” of his life, an 11-under-par 61 in the second round of the Jonsson Workwear Open at Glendower GC. It saw him grab the halfway lead, which he maintained through the weekend until a thunderstorm forced players off the course in the final round. At the time, he was on the 17th hole, holding a one-shot lead. The near three-hour delay that followed would have been agony to any golfer, but surely it was worse for Manassero? Or maybe he was more prepared for it. He’d waited 3,942 days for DP World Tour win No.5 – what difference did a few hours make?

The metaphorical darkness of that decade was, by the time the players returned to the course, a quite literal darkness. His resilience was tested yet again but he passed with flying colours. He completed a birdie at the par-5 17th, then added another at 18 for good measure. The finish helped him secure a three-shot victory.

The victory speech that followed felt especially poignant because it could easily have been referring to his entire career so far. “After a fast start, I had a difficult time at 12 and 13. It was hard but I got through it. In every round of golf you have tough times. If you can get through them, you can see the light.”

An emotional return to Wentworth in September will bring his comeback story full circle, though you get the sense that there are still plenty more chapters left to write – starting with the US Open at Pinehurst No.2, and then on to the Paris Olympics in August.

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About the author

Matt Cooper
Contributing Writer

Matt Cooper has been a golf journalist for 15 years. He’s worked for, among others, Golf365, SkySports, ESPN, NBC, Sporting Life, Open.com and the Guardian. He specializes in feature writing, reporting and tournament analysis.

He’s traveled widely in that time, covering golf from Kazakhstan to South Korea via Seychelles, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

More straightforwardly, he’s also covered numerous Majors, Ryder Cups and Solheim Cups.

Follow Matt on Twitter.