Morgan Hoffmann’s comeback attempt just took a giant leap

Morgan Hoffmann was on the 16th hole at Lakewood National Golf Club, home of the Korn Ferry Tour’s LECOM Suncoast Classic, when he looked at the leaderboard.

There was his name, right at the top.

He turned to his caddie. “This is what we play for,” Hoffmann said. “This is what we live for.”

One day after shooting a season-best 65, he would sign for a second-round 64 to reach 13-under par. Although he fell one off the lead thanks to Brandon Crick’s 62, it was a positive sign for Hoffmann, a one-time PGA TOUR fixture who was diagnosed with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy in 2016.

“It’s huge progress,” Hoffmann said. “You know, I’ve been knocking rust off, I guess, since the beginning of the season. I haven’t played the last two years. It feels really good to be back out here competing again.

“This course really fits my eye and I feel good,” he added.

Hoffmann reached world No. 1 as an amateur and was an All-American at Oklahoma State before playing the PGA TOUR from 2013-17. He never won – it’s still on his to-do list – and began feeling unwell around the time he realized his right pectoral muscle had begun to atrophy. He searched high and low for a diagnosis before doctors told him he had muscular dystrophy and there wasn’t much he could do.

Frustrated with the limitations of western medicine, Hoffmann turned to psychedelics, yoga, surfing, veganism, breathwork, and even a grape cleanse. He went from Nepal for ayahuasca (hallucinogenic medicine) to buying a home in Costa Rica for its healthful Blue Zone attributes.

He also started Greyson Clothiers with Ralph Lauren designer Charlie Schaefer in 2015.

After largely disappearing from public view, Hoffmann returned to the PGA TOUR in 2022, saying he wasn’t ready to be a weekend golfer. Playing on a medical extension, he missed three cuts in five starts. That was of a piece with many of his results at the game’s highest level since 2019. Progress was slow.

The story had been much the same in five Korn Ferry Tour starts this season, as he had missed the cut three times, but on Friday he attributed much of that to poor putting. With a new putter this week, and having put a new set of irons in the bag three weeks ago, Hoffmann has been transformed at the LECOM Suncoast Classic.

“I’m very grateful to be here,” he said. “The last two years have been a lot of ups and downs, working on health still. My wife and I had a baby girl, she’s 1 (year) and 4 months now, and she’s got my heart on a string. Rai. She’s a little ball of light. It’s awesome.

“I want to be there for her,” he continued. “It’s different having a family; going home is very important and healing and rejuvenating for me. I don’t feel as much pressure to be out here grinding non-stop. I think that’s really fulfilling me more and keeping a smile on my face.”

He still talks to his friends on TOUR, and he aspires not just to rejoin them but to win. If and when that happens he will have a legitimate claim to having gone to the greatest lengths to do so. Hoffmann described his hallucinogenic ayahuasca treatment in a lengthy article in Golf Digest, recalling a “geometric butterfly” and a moth feeding him a vine, dirt, trees, and berries, after which the vine was pulled from him, an elephant appeared, and black smoke started pouring from his mouth. “It felt like the disease was coming out of me,” he said.

Unafraid to chart his own course, Hoffmann and his wife, Chelsea, have designs on opening a solar-powered healing center in their adopted home of Costa Rica. When he’s in the States, he has made his home in Jupiter, Florida, playing out of the Bear’s Club. Now he’ll be in the final group on Saturday at the LECOM Suncoast Classic.