Brandt Snedeker back in familiar form at the 3M Open

BLAINE, Minn. -- Brandt Snedeker anticipated a learning curve. It’s not unusual coming off an extended absence. Given what Snedeker has dealt with over the last year, he’s just happy there is a lull to fight through.

Sidelined since September of last year due to a rare condition that led to an even rarer surgery, Snedeker returned to the PGA TOUR at the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday in June. He made the cut at Muirfield Village Golf Club but missed the cut in his next four events.

Then on Thursday, he shot 64 at the 3M Open, his first sub-70 round since his return and his lowest score on TOUR since December 2021.

“It's been coming,” Snedeker said of his bogey-free round of 7-under. “I've been playing good at home and been making some dumb mistakes the first couple rounds, not putting rounds together, just kind of rust.”

Rust is forgivable, considering the situation. The nine-time TOUR winner has been hampered by a sternum injury since 2016. The official medical diagnosis was an “unstable manubrium joint.”

“Pretty much you have a joint in the middle of your sternum that kind of flexes and bends a little bit so if something happens to it, you have a little bit of mobility. Mine was kind of separated, for lack of a better term. It would come back together, but it was pretty much a broken sternum when I started to hit golf balls,” said Snedeker, who researched the injury and said there have only been about “12 cases in the world in the last 15 years.” The difference was traumatic injuries like car accidents caused all of those cases.

”Mine was the only one that was on record of non-trauma related,” he said. “I assumed it to be repeated trauma of hitting a golf ball.”

The 42-year-old managed the pain for years with steroids, stem cell and PRP injections, Tylenol and everything “that was legal under the sun.” It would get him through a month or two before the pain popped back up. It led Snedeker to pursue an experimental surgery that had only been done by one doctor once before. To Snedeker, the choice was between surgery with the possibility of playing again or retiring from the sport.

He had to convince the surgeon, Dr. Burton Elrod, just to do it. The Nashville, Tenn., doctor performed the procedure on Steve McNair in the early 2000s and was initially resistant to doing it again for Snedeker.

“I told him, ‘You have to do it. I don’t have a career otherwise,’” Snedeker said in an extensive interview with Golf Channel last month.

Eventually, Elrod obliged, and the surgery was performed by taking a bone out of Snedeker’s hip, splitting it in half and placing it around the cut-open sternum. Then it was a matter of popping it all together.

“Kind of like a Lego snapping back into place,” Snedeker said.

The 19-year pro began the slow rehab process, unsure whether the procedure worked. It wasn’t until he was cleared to hit balls on April 1 that he got confirmation. The swings that normally left him in pain no longer did. There was no loss of mobility, either. Besides a lack of strength, he felt great.

Then began the long road back to finding TOUR shape. Snedeker opted to “jump into the deep end” and make his return at Muirfield Village, known to be one of the toughest tests all season. He wanted to know that he could hold up on a stiff test. A T41 finish proved it to him. His results since then have been less than ideal. Snedeker missed the next four cuts on his minor medical exemption and is now using a career money list exemption to finish the rest of the season (Snedeker ranks 22nd on the career money list with over $40 million in earnings).

His scores got progressively lower in each round, from a first-round 79 at the RBC Canadian Open to a second-round 70 at the John Deere Classic.

His round at TPC Twin Cities on Thursday morning is the most encouraging sign that the former FedExCup champion is back in good form. He did it with a well-rounded game, gaining more than three and a half shots tee-to-green and nearly three shots putting. He made 97 feet of putts and poured in seven birdies, including four straight on his front nine.

“I knew it would happen eventually, but you've got to see it,” Snedeker said. “You know, you need to see a putt go in or see a shot kind of bounce the right way (to) kind of step on the gas and go.”

Snedeker is moving full speed ahead. Where he ends up is unknown. He’s just happy it’s no longer backward.