Oliver Wilson - Player Blog

In this week’s Player Blog presented by Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Oliver Wilson discusses his remarkable win in Denmark, the power of confidence, reinventing his game and how he still has much he wants to achieve.

The win in Denmark was amazing. It feels good the way I won so it's been pretty cool. I was incredibly proud of myself to get over the line. I was very calm on the course and very confident I could get it done. When I finished I was in control but as soon as I was asked a question, the emotion came out. There were a few more moments like that throughout the night speaking to family and friends.

When you do this for a long time you have to have an inner confidence. No-one else believes in you, you've got to believe in yourself and get the job done and while that has been tested over the years, I feel like I'm playing the kind of golf I want to play this year and that I could get it done.

I can understand how people may look at my results and wonder why I'm confident. But this year I've played a lot of really good golf, I just haven't put it all together. One week I'd drive it great and putt awful or the other way round, or my iron play was good and the rest wasn't. Pretty much every cut I've missed has been by a shot and if you're missing cuts by a shot, you're not playing terribly. I just haven't had the breaks.

I would have been devastated if I'd have ended my career with only one win because I feel like that would have been massively underachieving for what I'm capable of. Two is still not enough but it's still one step closer to where I want to get to.

This is not where I want it to finish but it's a huge stepping stone and a little marker along the way. My ambitions are the same, I still have a lot of goals to achieve and this gets me closer to be able to do that. I'm not increasing my expectations just because I've had one win. It's a huge step forward but I'm nowhere near my goals and I want to achieve a lot more in this game.

I've worked hard for a long time and there's been many ups and downs. I had a lot of success early in my career and I've had moments since then but there's been a lot of down time, a lot of dark times. I never stopped working hard and when you're not getting the results you want, you question everything and the win in Denmark was validation for all the time and effort I've put in and the time away from my family. I got there in the end and it makes it feel like it was worth it.

After playing so great in 2008 and 2009, I had a few injuries and illnesses and made some bad decisions but in recent years I've worked so hard to transform my game. I want to end my career on my own terms in order to do that you've got to be longer and I've put a lot of time and effort into doing that. I worked to get stronger, get longer and adapt my game so that it's time-proofed for the next ten or 15 years.

I feel like my ceiling is so much higher than it ever was but I've had a problem bringing the floor up with it. Now I feel like the floor is moving up and recently it's come up significantly. If I can continue to do that, the ceiling doesn't need to get higher, I just need to get nearer to it more often and I feel like I'm doing that. I'm very, very hungry and as long as I stay like that, anything can happen.

There was a time when I felt like the win maybe wasn't going to come. In this game as you go along, you can have a bad week and you feel like nothing is ever going to happen but I've been playing long enough to realise that you've just got to keep moving forward, working hard, keep showing up, put the effort in, and if you do that you never know what is round the corner and I'm as good an example as anyone.

The win at the Dunhill was hugely different to last week. The Dunhill was incredibly emotional, completely out of the blue and it was a career-saving moment. The Made in HimmerLand was a win on a continued journey. It's incredibly rewarding but it's not career-changing or life-changing but it's a big step forward. I felt like I took it in my stride better and it wasn't out of the blue for me. They were two very different moments. I couldn't speak after the Dunhill, I was in bits. They were both very rewarding and two weeks I'll remember for the rest of my life.

When I was having those nine second-places in four years, it was all frustration. The first few were OK because second is good but in 2008 when I had three seconds in six weeks, second wasn't good enough anymore and it was incredibly frustrating. I was trying to figure out what was missing and it was my swing, I had some issues in my swing that I couldn't quite get over and unfortunately that frustration drove me to explore many different avenues to try and figure that out. It took a long time and on top of that other things happened and I made some bad decisions and suddenly I'd gone from finishing second to losing my card.

The frustration has driven me to this point. The frustration got the best of me and I struggled for a while and had to get things back on track and I've managed to do that. I've got a great team around me, things are becoming clearer and the game is moving in the right direction. It's nowhere near where I want it but I see it's going the right way and things are starting to change. It's exciting.

There are many great memories from the 2008 Ryder Cup even though we lost. I'll never forget playing on that team with the guys I did, it was very special for me. I'd grown up watching half of that team and they had inspired me to get to where I had go to. The other guys were great players in the world and I had so much confidence in them.

I holed a 20-footer on the 17th to win on day two and I'll never, ever forget that moment. The opening tee-shot was special as well because I nutted it down the middle but holing the putt and getting a point on the board for myself and the team was very rewarding.

It's good to win at any level. Winning is winning and it's something you need to learn and I was very pleased with how I won the two Challenge Tour events in 2018. I was very calm in Ireland, I knew I was going to do it and I just got the job done and that taught me something. The following year I had four top fives but I wasn't playing the golf I wanted to play back then despite the good year. It wasn't sitting right with me, it wasn't the way I wanted to continue playing golf and after that when I lost my card in 2020, I made the decision that I was going to change the way I'm going to play.

I wasn't in the field for the BMW PGA Championship last week and I was trying hard to get in the field and it's incredibly exciting to be here. I've lived down the road for the last 16 years so it's a home event. I have memories from the World Match Play and watching the greats waking down the old fairways at Wentworth. There's a lot of history here. It's a special event, the crowd are always fantastic, the course and the event has improved over the years and it's as good as we've got. It still has that soul, it's just evolved.

I played the Daily Mail Under-14s here and I'll never forget seeing the clubhouse for the first time and the first tee. Then I lost to Miguel Ángel Jiménez in a play-off in 2008 and that was one of those seconds where I felt I let it get away from me. I had a one-shot lead with two to go and didn't win so that added to some of the frustration I was feeling at that time.

To win this week would be very, very exciting. You want to win any tournament you play in but you really want to win the big ones and outside of the Majors this is as big as it can get. I remember being distraught in 2008 at the back of the 18th because I knew what it would have meant to have my name on that trophy. You want to leave your name in history and it would be pretty special.