Fear, thoughts of death: Woodland’s harrowing journey

One night last June, while he was preparing to play the Memorial, Gary Woodland was jolted awake. He’d always had a fear of heights, but this was different. He was sound asleep and then practically jumped out of bed, stricken with fear.

“I’m lying in bed at 1, grabbing the bed to tell myself that I wasn’t falling from heights, I wasn’t dying,” he said.

But this wasn’t just a bad dream.

By that point, Woodland had experienced terrifying symptoms for more than a month. He noticed after the Masters that he wasn’t feeling like himself. He was shaky, his hands trembled. He had little appetite, chills, no energy. One of the game’s most confident alphas, he found himself racked with fear – and the worst of it arrived at night.

“I’m a very optimistic person; I believe good things will happen,” Woodland said. “But I was very fear-driven every day, mostly around death.”

An MRI determined that Woodland had a lesion on his brain.

“The jolting and everything I was experiencing at night was partial seizures,” he said. “The lesion in my brain sat on the part of my brain that controls fear and anxiety. [My doctor] was like, ‘You’re not going crazy. Everything you’re experiencing is common and normal for where this thing is sitting in your brain.’”

Woodland was prescribed anxiety seizure medicine and continued to play on Tour; after his initial MRI on May 24, he competed in seven more events, missing the cut just once. From a physical standpoint, he felt great. The competition was a welcome reprieve from his off-course struggles.

Woodland didn’t tell anyone else about his health concerns. After all, he wasn’t completely sure what it was, nor the doctors’ plan of attack. His wife started flying out to stay with him most weekends, since he feared being alone.

“Every day it was a new way of dying, a new way of death,” he said. “The jolting in the middle of the night scared the heck out of me.”

After the Wyndham Championship in August, Woodland’s caddie finally pulled him aside and told him to seek help. Woodland would stand over an iron shot and forget what club he was hitting. He would line up a putt and, all of a sudden, just step in and hit it, since he was tired of waiting. He had trouble focusing and, by the end of the round, no energy.

“You can’t play this way,” caddie Brennan Little told him. “You’ve got to get fixed.”

The next week, Woodland saw a specialist in South Florida who recommended surgery. Doctors told him they likely couldn’t remove all of the tumor; where the mass was sitting, against his optic tract, it was too risky. The blood vessels in the surrounding area were connected to the left side of his body, so there was a chance he could have lost his eyesight or, worse, function on his left side.

“It was the risk,” he said.

But Woodland said the surgery was deemed a success; doctors removed as much of the lesion as they could and cut off blood circulation to whatever was left. The surgery, which involved making a baseball-sized incision in his skull, led to two nights in the intensive-care unit.

“They brought a wheelchair to the ICU room,” he said, “and I said, ‘I’m sorry, I walked in this place, and I’m walking out.’ I got out of bed and I walked straight to my car and got home.”

Woodland spent much of the next four weeks on the couch before he turned to the next steps. He transformed his dining room into a putting green. He started swinging a club five weeks after surgery. And after playing nine holes for the first time, he called swing coach Butch Harmon and told him he was coming to see him in Las Vegas. Woodland breezed through airport security, even with a new set of plates and screws in his head.

Thirty minutes into the session, Harmon told him: “G-Dub, you’re right where you’re supposed to be.”

Playing at home with his buddies at Pine Tree was one thing. But a Tour return? Woodland said it was an open question how he’d hold up to the intense focus and concentration required for a week of work. Physically, he said, he can hit any shot. He has plenty of power and speed. He plans on being competitive quickly.

“It’s what can I handle?” he said. “Next week will be four months from surgery. That’s probably the date where they said after four months I should be pretty good. We’ll see.”

Woodland was speaking from the media center at the Sony Open, where he is set to return to competition. He was relieved by the MRI report a week and a half ago that showed everything was stable. He has been sleeping well. The fearful fits are gone. He’s due to come off the medications in the next few months. Still just 39, he has big plans for the future – plans that won’t be altered even after his harrowing health concern.

“At the end of the day, I just want to prove you can do hard things,” he said. “I want to prove to my kids nobody is going to tell you you can’t do anything. You can overcome tough, scary decisions in your life. Not everything is easy. This came out of nowhere for me, but I’m not going to let it stop me.

“I don’t want this to be a bump in the road for me. I want it to be a jump-start in my career. I’m here because I believe this is what I’ve been born to do – play great golf. I want to do that again. It’s been a while. Been a couple years.

“But nothing is going to stop me. I believe that. I believe a lot of great things are ahead.”