U.S. Open Champion Gary Woodland Returns to Golf After Brain Tumor: ‘He Got a Mulligan in Life’

Woodland had brain surgery in September to remove the benign tumor, which doctors say was causing him daily fear

Gary Woodland is back on the golf course and getting back to his old self after a brain tumor diagnosis that “came out of nowhere” last year.

Woodland, 39, spoke with the Associated Press this week about his recovery from brain surgery last September and what it means for him to get back on the course this weekend in Honolulu, Hawaii at the Sony Open.

“I just want to prove you can do hard things,” Woodland told the outlet. “I want to prove to my kids nobody is going to tell you you can’t do anything. You can overcome tough, scary decisions in your life. Not everything is easy. This came out of nowhere for me, but I’m not going to let it stop me.”

The former U.S. Open Champion began having unfounded fears last April, according to the AP, including tremors in his hands, night terrors, chills, and exhibiting an uncharacteristic low energy on the course.

He’d line up for shots, feel like he was taking too long, and just swing away, he told the AP. At home, he’d wake up in the middle of the night gripping the side of the mattress.

“The big one [symptom] was I just wasn't feeling like myself,” Woodland told Golf Digest in another interview this week.

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When the golf pro eventually saw a doctor about his growing anxiety, an MRI instead revealed he had a brain tumor. “He's like, you're not going crazy,” Woodland recalls a doctor telling him. “Everything you're experiencing is common and normal for where this thing is sitting in your brain.”

Woodland continued to play, knowing his diagnosis. He competed in 10 tournaments and made eight of the cuts, meaning he sat high enough on the leaderboard to qualify for the final days of each tournament and play for a top spot.

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But he opted to have surgery in September, when doctors drilled a hole into his skull that the AP reports was the size of a baseball. The tumor was benign and Woodland’s fears seemed to go away, but his recovery was arduous. Woodland went a month and a half without fully swinging a golf club, and this weekend’s Sony Open marks his first full-fledged return to the sport.

“The support from the tour, from people outside the golf world, has been tremendous for me and my family,” Woodland told the AP. “When I woke up and realized I was OK, I was filled with thankfulness and love. That replaced the fear.”

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Woodland told the outlet he went more than four months last summer “really thinking I was going to die,” before he had the tumor removed. “The doctors kept telling me I was OK, but this thing pushing on my brain ... didn’t matter if I was driving a car, on an airplane, I thought everything was going to kill me. You can imagine leading up to surgery how I felt going into having my head cut open and operated on. The fear going into that was awful.”

Now, Woodland is ready to return to his normal self again and get back to “being competitive very quickly,” he told Golf Digest. “I am looking forward to being back and where I'm at and expecting to be ready very soon.”

His family — including wife Gabby, son Jax, and twin girls Maddox and Lennox — and friends, like golf instructor Butch Harmon, are also cheering on his return to the PGA Tour, where he’s won four tournament championships throughout his career.

“To come through it and get back to golf is a joy,” Harmon told the AP. “He got a mulligan in life, a mulligan in his career.”

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