New normal after brain injury is knowing when to back off and how

The letters were the hardest part.

Gary Woodland gets choked up talking about them, the agony of pouring his heart out and saying what needed to be said to his three young children and wife, a hedge against the unthinkable. Because what kind of hedge was that? If it all went wrong, how could mere words be a husband and father?

To my son: Don’t ever be afraid to ask for help, because that’s something I’ve struggled with …

Woodland can barely get the words out in his episode of the new season of “Full Swing” on Netflix. What would then-6-year-old Jaxson have made of this? What would have become of the Woodlands’ twin girls, even younger?

“Hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Woodland says in the docuseries.

Then again, there were the MRIs, the hushed meetings with doctors, the brain surgery in which they cut a baseball-sized hole in his head. Those things weren’t easy, either.

Maybe, though, it was always going to be hard because the only way out was through. That’s the way Woodland was taught, the way every athlete is taught, and it’s helped him, it really has.

It’s also the impulse he’s had to curb.

You would be hard-pressed to find a more athletic-looking golfer than Woodland, who was named Wednesday as the recipient of the PGA TOUR Courage Award. He played basketball in college and his strapping build would not look out of place in a baseball uniform; you could see Woodland holding down third base for the Kansas City Royals.

And yet the athlete’s way – the way out is the way through – has both helped and hindered him in a medical journey that continues even as he prepares to tee it up against the best players in the world at this week’s Cognizant Classic in The Palm Beaches.

It began in April 2023, with an unfamiliar sleeplessness and panic.

“We didn’t know what was going on, so we didn’t talk to anybody about it,” Gabby, his wife, told the “Full Swing” crew. “It was just the unknown and it’s still the unknown.”

An optimist by nature, Woodland, now consumed by thoughts of doom, consulted his doctor, who ordered an MRI. This revealed a lesion on the part of his brain that controls anxiety and fear, which explained the terrors. Anti-seizure medication worked, but when Woodland tried to keep playing, his mind wasn’t right. Unable to focus, his pre-shot routine became a disjointed mess, and he and caddie Brennan Little realized he couldn’t just play on.

With the operation set for Sept. 18, 2023, Woodland wrote letters to his loved ones. Surgeons got most of the lesion, and he left the hospital on his own two feet, bypassing a wheelchair.

“I walked in this place,” he said, “and I’m walking out.” He was putting in his house two days later, then chipping into a net in the backyard, even if he admittedly almost fell over.

Get up earlier; hit one more bucket; take one more hour on the practice green – this was how Woodland, a four-time PGA TOUR winner, including at the 2019 U.S. Open, had reached his lofty perch in the game. Heck, it was how he’d achieved anything.

“As an athlete, I was like, I’m gonna fight through this,” he says in “Full Swing” Episode 6. “I was raised that if your heart’s beating, you play.”

That mentality had always helped him, but it would now be a mixed blessing.

“I didn’t realize how much preparation, thinking and planning goes into it,” Woodland told PGATOUR.COM. “The stimulation of playing multiple weeks in a row with a major in between and everything that comes with playing golf, I wasn’t prepared for that.

“I didn’t understand how much it was going to affect me.”

Returning to action at the 2024 Sony Open in Hawaii, Woodland missed the cut, but this was to be expected. Rust. It was also the first time he shared with the world just what he’d been through in harrowing detail, so at least that was out of the way.

He also missed the cuts at the Farmers Insurance Open and WM Phoenix Open.

“I knew that he was having a hard time,” said friend Keegan Bradley, “and that’s tough to see because when you look at him, he still looks like Gary. When he swings a golf club he still looks like Gary. It’s hard to see what’s going on inside.”

At The Genesis Invitational, sponsor exemption Woodland shot a first-round 70 – the best of his threesome, which also included friends Justin Thomas and Tiger Woods – and saw glimpses of his old self. He made the cut the next day, but still, progress was halting, at best.

“It’s a helpless feeling as a friend and a peer,” said Thomas, the first player Woodland told about his medical situation. “We have the same management, so I got a schedule from them; a couple times he had big MRIs, so I would set a reminder on my phone to text him, 'Hope it goes well,' or, 'How did it go?' Sometimes it’s easy to push that stuff off to his family and friends.

“It was just to know, 'Hey, I’m here if you need someone that’s not your wife or agent to talk to,'” Thomas added. “I wanted to be there for him as a friend because it was so beyond golf.”

Battling the headaches that come with brain injuries and overstimulation, Woodland missed four of his next seven cuts, with his best a T21 at the Texas Children’s Houston Open. Unbowed, he played on and told the Netflix cameras he was feeling better by the time he made the cut in the cold rain at The Open Championship at Royal Troon in July.

In retrospect, Woodland perhaps could have used more of a break after that, because by the 3M Open in Minneapolis, two weeks later, he was so exhausted he relapsed.

“On Saturday night,” he said, “I was right back into it thinking I was going to die.”

Yet he somehow kept going, even if he shot a third-round 74 on the way to a T37 finish.

The 3M Open prompted a reckoning as Woodland and Gabby consulted with experts to come up with a new approach to honor his limitations and safeguard his health.

“Stuff I can do in the morning before I get out of bed,” he told PGATOUR.COM. “Stuff I can do before I go to sleep to help me sleep through the night, to really give my brain the rest that it needs, the breath work I can do throughout the day when I see a situation coming on that's going to be high stimulation, just to slow my brain down to get in a position where I could be functioning, is something I didn't have a couple months ago.”

Meditation, too, has helped.

“I didn't understand,” Woodland added. “A lot of techniques to target this part of the brain where this lesion is in my head still to really slow that down so I can function on a daily basis.”

In the end, last season was a bust: one top-10 finish in 26 starts. It was instructive, though. He needed to schedule himself better. He needed to leave more of the thinking to caddie Little.

Woodland’s family and friends are in awe of how he’s handled everything.

“It literally came out of nowhere,” Gabby says in their “Full Swing” episode. “Our life was completely changed. The love that we have for each other now is one hundred times what it was a year ago. A thousand times what it was when we got married.”

Given the last couple of years, no one would begrudge Woodland, 40, an early retirement, but he reports a newfound appreciation for his job. “I love showing up at these places,” he said. “The best golf courses in the world, the people you're out here with day in, day out.”

What’s more, he believes his best is yet to come, and his peers would not bet against it.

“I know how talented he is,” Thomas said.

Added Bradley, “I just played a practice round with Gary at Spyglass (Hill), and man, he was swinging it good. He hits it as far as anybody I’ve seen. He’s so talented that it wouldn’t surprise me if he got back to where he was or even better.”

Woodland will have more MRIs to make sure the lesion isn’t growing. Meanwhile, he keeps at it, sometimes encountering others who report having endured a similar battle and found in Woodland a new favorite golfer. Such fans, in turn, inspire him.

Although it’s antithetical to his nature, he has been better about throttling back, and his 2025 results include a T16 at the Sony Open in Hawaii, T22 at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and T21 at the WM Phoenix Open. The three top-25s equal his total from all of last season. They are also a testament to his new normal, which is not about running through a metaphorical brick wall, the athlete’s way, but instead knowing when to ease up, and how.

Woodland is, in that sense, playing against type – a new sort of brick wall but a challenge just the same and perhaps the toughest one yet. The challenge of his life.

“I have to do things to stay healthy, to feel well,” he said, “and it’s not easy, but it’s not easy for everybody, and it's not going to stop. I'll do it every day so I can see my kids, so I can be around my kids all day. I do it every day so I can come out here and chase my dreams.”