In season of comeback stories, Gary Woodland and Will Zalatoris fit right in

Gary Woodland and Will Zalatoris, two guys who attended basketball schools and know their way around the back of the alphabet, would otherwise seem to have little in common.

Woodland (four PGA TOUR wins, with a major) went to University of Kansas; Zalatoris (one win) attended Wake Forest. Woodland, 39, is built like a Major League Baseball slugger; Zalatoris, 27, like a car antenna. But they cut strikingly similar figures in Round 1 of The Genesis Invitational on Thursday.

After enduring brain surgery (Woodland) and a major back operation (Zalatoris), they needed sponsor exemptions just to be here but were climbing up the leaderboard early.

Zalatoris shot a front-nine 29 to take the lead at 6-under par; Woodland eagled the par-5 11th hole to get within two of him. The Get-Well Invitational – hosted by rehab/recovery expert Tiger Woods (1-over 72) – was off and running.

“I think I’m trending every week,” said Zalatoris, who shot 66 at The Riviera Country Club and was two behind leader Patrick Cantlay. “I'm learning something new every week about my game and where I'm at and the changes that I've made and just getting used to it.”

Added Woodland, who played with Justin Thomas and Tiger Woods and shot 1-under 70, “That was the best I played all year. My caddie even said that when I got done. I saw a lot of things today that I hadn't seen. … I just did a lot of things well.”

It’s been said that everyone is dealing with something, and while that’s no doubt true, the travails of Woodland and Zalatoris have been especially harrowing.

Zalatoris was sidelined from the 2023 WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play until the first round of the Hero World Challenge in November, a span of 251 days. He’d thought he might avoid surgery and be in good enough shape to play in last year’s Masters but withdrew and underwent microdiscectomy surgery on the Saturday of the third round.

His long stretch of inactivity – “I found the end of Netflix,” he said – eventually gave way to limited golf at home in Dallas. He modified his swing to take pressure off his back and returned at the Hero in the Bahamas, where he finished last by nine shots. He laughed off the result.

“That was kind of an R&D week,” he said at Riviera.

Indeed, the important thing was he didn’t panic. And sure enough, he has played his way back into the form that saw him capture his first TOUR title at the 2022 FedEx St. Jude Championship. He missed the cut at the season-opening Sony Open in Hawaii but finished T34 at The American Express and T13 at the Farmers Insurance Open.

Now he’s back where it all began. Zalatoris made his first career TOUR start at the 2015 Genesis Invitational (MC) after winning the Genesis Invitational Collegiate Showcase as a freshman at Wake Forest. He’s one of three past winners in the Genesis field this week – Scottie Scheffler (2018) and Sahith Theegala (2017) are the others.

Given the trajectory of Zalatoris’ early career, it would have been tempting to rush back after surgery. He didn’t.

“I think the extra time helped off,” he said. “You know, I could have come back in six months, but I took eight. It really gave me time to kind of really think about things.”

Part of his job now, he added, is to play less so as not to reinjure himself.

Woodland, who underwent a craniotomy last September to remove a brain lesion, can relate. Sometimes he wants to practice, but his team shuts him down. Well, mostly they do – he hit a shot into a net in his backyard two weeks after surgery. “I almost fell over, but I hit it,” he said with a laugh.

Sometimes, he added, he not only isn’t allowed to practice but he needs to just go into a dark room to avoid over-stimulation. Athletes in other sports know it as post-concussion protocol.

After three missed cuts in three starts this season, Woodland’s focus is returning. So is his swing. He and Butch Harmon looked at video and realized he was swaying but not rotating, and Woodland rectified that Thursday. The flurry of solid shots that came off his clubs opened not only his eyes, but also those of his playing partners.

“What Gary has gone through and what his whole family has gone through is scary, right?” said Woods, a close friend who extended him the invitation to play this week. “I just thought it was so important for him to be out here with us. It couldn’t have been any better with the group. JT gave him a lot of grief, I gave him a lot of grief, they gave me a lot of grief. It was great interaction and it’s great to have Gary out here playing.”

Woodland said he began feeling symptoms at the Mexico Open at Vidanta last May. He started waking up with a jolt – small seizures – and having thoughts of death. He was nauseous the week of the PGA Championship, and his doctor ordered an MRI, which revealed the lesion.

He went on medication and was advised to wait and see regarding surgery, but with symptoms worsening, it seemed that the lesion might be growing. It was time to operate.

“They cut me open all the way down to my ear,” he said at the Sony. “Cut about a baseball-sized hole in my skull and went in through that and then put it back with plates and screws.”

Doctors told him they’d gotten most of the lesion, and that it was benign. Since then, Woodland has been busy reconnecting with friends and loved ones happy to see him upright again, to say nothing of playing on TOUR. For four and a half months, he said at the Sony, he thought he was going to die. It’s been a lot.

But playing with Woods on Thursday, he said, helped him find a focus that’s been missing.

“It's been a little bit harder than I thought,” Woodland said, “but it's coming.”

A certain slender guy with a broomstick putter could say the same.