Golfer Gary Woodland said he is battling post-traumatic stress disorder after having brain surgery in 2023, adding he is not going to ‘waste energy’ trying to hide it.
Woodland, who won the U.S. Open in 2019 and has four PGA Tour victories, had tests that revealed a lesion pressing on his brain and had surgery in September 2023. Woodland returned to the PGA Tour in 2024, but was experiencing symptoms as doctors could not remove the entire tumor.
‘Every week, I come out and everyone is so excited and happy that I’m back. I hear that every week: ‘It’s so nice to see you passed this. It’s so nice to see you 100%,” Woodland said to the Golf Channel. ‘And I appreciate that love and support, but inside, I feel like I’m dying. I feel like I’m living a lie. And I don’t want to waste energy on that anymore. I want to focus my energy on me and my recovery, my dreams out here, my family. I don’t want to waste energy hiding this.’
Woodland said that while playing in the Procore Championship last September, a scorer in his group got a little too close to him, which scared him, but he continued to play in the tournament. He said he would wear sunglasses and go into bathrooms to cry.
‘I stepped aside, I pulled my caddie and said, ‘This stuff is hitting me, man. You can’t let anybody get behind me,” he said. ‘Next thing you know, I couldn’t remember what I was doing. My eyesight started to get blurry. And a hole later, I just said, ‘Butch, I can’t handle it.’ And I start bawling in the middle of the fairway. It was my turn to hit, and I couldn’t hit.’
Woodland, 41, is in the field for this week’s Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.
‘Doctors have said in an ideal world, I’m probably not playing,’ Woodland said. ‘I’m probably not in a stressful, overstimulating environment. But my response was, in an ideal world, I don’t have (PTSD). (Golf) is my dream, this is what I’m going to do, and no matter how hard it is, I’m going to play.’