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In 2019, Gary Woodland was at the top of the golf world after winning the U.S. Open on the legendary Pebble Beach Golf Links. Since then, his life has been a whirlwind, leading to a recent PTSD diagnosis that he recently opened up about.
Woodland, now 41, had three previous wins on the PGA Tour and had established himself as one of the top Americans on tour by the time he won the U.S. Open by one shot ahead of Brooks Koepka, who was the world’s top-ranked golfer at the time.
However, Woodland had to step away from the game entirely in 2023 after having surgery to remove a lesion found on his brain. At the time, Woodland was taking anti-seizure and anti-anxiety medications, and he admits that he feared dying.
Now, he’s back on the course and competing in PGA Tour events. But the mental side effects are something he’s not sure will ever go away.
Gary Woodland Says He’s Like He’s Dying When People Commend Him On Comeback
Woodland doesn’t have his full-time PGA Tour card anymore after finishing outside of the top 125 of the FedEx Cup standings last season. However, he still competes at a number of events via exemptions, thanks in large part to his 2019 U.S. Open win.
Despite the exemptions, he’s struggled both on and off the course this season amid ongoing symptoms after surgery and a PTSD diagnosis about a year ago.
Gary Woodland sits down with Rex Hoggard to discuss his struggle with PTSD following brain surgery in September of 2023. pic.twitter.com/zf7A3EFulk
— Golf Channel (@GolfChannel) March 10, 2026
“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 told Golf Channel when asked why he revealed the diagnosis publicly. “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 then brought up an incident involving the walking scorer in his group at the Procore Championship last year that sent him over the edge.
“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.”
While going public with his diagnosis and his situation in general was not easy, Woodland says he hopes doing so makes things easier going forward.
“There are days where it’s tough,” he told Golf Channel interviewer Rex Hoggard. “Crying in a scorer trailer. Running to my car to hide it because I’m scared … I don’t want to live that way anymore. If I’m feeling something, I want to let it out, let it go.”
But even despite the struggles, Woodland says he doesn’t plan on walking away from the game of golf anytime soon.
“Doctors have said in an ideal world, I’m probably not playing,” he told Hoggard. “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.”
Who knows whether things will ever return to “normal” for Woodland? Or what his new “normal” even looks like. But it’s wildly impressive and brave of him to be so open about his life, and we’ll surely be rooting for him going forward to get to a place where he can continue to play competitive golf without dealing with the hardships that PTSD presents.