Bud Cauley comes full circle since injury, takes solo lead at Cognizant Classic

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. – When Bud Cauley returned to PGA TOUR golf last month after more than three years away from the game, he did it believing he could win again.

It’s one thing to think about. It’s another thing to actually do it.

Cauley’s proof is playing out at the Cognizant Classic in The Palm Beaches. Cauley fired a second-round 65 at PGA National to jump into the solo 36-hole lead at 11-under overall.

“There were a lot of times where I thought that my career was over,” Cauley said Friday.

There were ample opportunities to call it quits. Cauley, 33, was sidelined for numerous years due to various injuries that stemmed from complications after a 2018 car accident. He suffered six broken ribs, a collapsed right lung and a fractured left leg; he said afterward that he was “so thankful to be alive.”

Following surgery and recovery, Cauley returned to the TOUR in the fall of 2018 and played two full TOUR seasons, keeping his card both years. But his right side began to hurt again in fall 2020, causing him to step away. The time since has been mostly colored with doctor’s visits and physiotherapy clinics. He has had “a couple more surgeries that didn’t heal very well, and it was just a whole mess,” he said during the WM Phoenix Open, his first event back. He had a seroma – a buildup of fluids where tissue has been removed – and a C. difficile infection.

“Everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong,” he said. But he eventually, after a successful surgery on his ribs and chest wall, felt healthy enough to attempt a return.

“It's hard to put into words how much you kind of miss something when you grow up doing it every day and you play golf every day, and when it gets taken away, it does change your perspective on just how fortunate we are to be able to play golf and even to get to do the thing that you enjoy doing,” Cauley said at the WM Phoenix Open.

Cauley made two rehab starts on the Korn Ferry Tour last month in The Bahamas, finishing a respectable T21-T35, then made the cut in his PGA TOUR season debut at TPC Scottsdale, finishing 65th.

This week at PGA National has been a different beast. Cauley opened with a 66 on Thursday and followed it with a bogey-free 6-under round on Friday. Albeit just the second round, Cauley started to feel the juices of contention coming down the back nine.

“I saw the leaderboard when I was coming down 18 and knew if I made birdie I'd have the lead,” Cauley said.

He sank an 11-foot putt to make that the reality. Cauley played the famed “Bear Trap” in 2-under. He made a 16-foot birdie on the par-4 16th and escaped the difficult par-3 17th with a par.

A top finish would go a long way in securing Cauley’s future on TOUR. He has 26 starts remaining on a Major Medical Extension after finishing No. 83 on the 2020 FedExCup, needing to earn 391.355 points to keep his card. He can also earn his card back by finishing inside the top 125 of the FedExCup. A win secures that and plenty more.

That’s Cauley’s focus for now. He’s in a better position than ever before. He held a share of the lead after two rounds of the 2017 Valero Texas Open but had never held the solo lead until this week. He’s never won on the PGA TOUR.

His peers believe he has what it takes.

“He’s just too good of a player to not have won out here at some point,” Cauley’s good friend Justin Thomas told PGATOUR.COM last month.

For a long time, it looked like that win would never come. Nothing is guaranteed this weekend. Cauley knows that. But nothing in his life has been guaranteed for a long time. He’s ready to go out and earn it.

“To be back here playing and playing well, it's nice,” Cauley said. “It just makes me that much more happy that I kept after it and didn't stop trying.”

PGATOUR.COM Associate Editor Kevin Prise contributed to this report.