Let’s Talk About The Mental Burden Of Pro Golf

Growing up, my dream was to play on the PGA Tour. Maybe you had the same dream, too.

Did you also practice putts to win the Masters? Turn your backyard into a makeshift course? Race to the local muni after school and walk as many holes as possible until it was too dark to see?

I attended Tour events at Doral, Muirfield Village and other venues that were staples of the game. I watched golf nonstop, hoping to glean something from the game’s best. I couldn’t sleep the night before playing a tournament because I wanted to win so badly.

If I could get inside those ropes one day, I will have made it. The dream would come true.

But as time passed, the context of that dream changed. And there were several layers to that.

By the time I reached my teenage years, it became apparent that the game required incredible discipline and work ethic to be mastered. Only a small slice of my high school friends played any level of college golf. And only a small slice of those players could play professionally. And only a small slice of those players could wade through the masses to reach any form of stability in professional golf.

It was simply too difficult to get there. You had to really want it more than anything. Even then, that wasn’t enough for thousands of dedicated and talented golfers.

As I got into the media side of golf, I realized something else: professional golf can be a brutal way to make a living.

If you make it through the gauntlet to reach the highest level—and that “if” is doing enough lifting to be a long drive champ—there are new problems to solve.

It’s lonely. Like really lonely. Countless nights alone in hotel rooms and rented houses. Early wakeup calls. Figuring out the logistics of travel after a missed cut. FaceTime calls with your kids. Grinding on the range for hours. Long pro-am rounds. Media scrutiny. Mental struggles if you can’t perform.

Whoever is on your team—caddie, instructor or anyone else—is often relying on you to play well. Any missed cut is usually a week where you lose money. The vast majority of Tour players are concerned about future status. There are no contracts and no teammates. There is little security unless you are a top player.

The reward can be tremendous, but the process to reach that reward can be treacherous. Most tap out before you could ever know their names.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this heavy professional golf burden over the past week or so.

First there was the tragic passing of Grayson Murray, the 30-year-old Tour player who took his own life. Murray grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I attended college at North Carolina State. He was something of a folk hero in the area, honing his craft at Wildwood Green Golf Club, a perfectly fine but mostly uninspiring public course about a 25-minute drive north of downtown. He attended Leesville Road High School and won a state title.

It was well known that Murray regularly came across as a bit brash, especially in his youth. His talent and confidence was undeniable, but he was wildly immature. He started his college career at Wake Forest—about two hours west of Raleigh—but transferred to East Carolina after one semester. He didn’t get along with the coach. Two months later, he was gone to UNC-Greensboro but never played. Then he was off to Arizona State. And this was before multi-transfer college athletes were commonplace.

Murray felt like that kid who dominates junior golf but just wasn’t enough of an adult for serious golf at the highest level.

When he did break through to professional golf—winning on the Korn Ferry Tour in 2016 and then on the PGA Tour in 2017—Murray was seen, by some, as an asshole. He regularly tweeted idiotic, cringey statements (to the point where he had to delete his Twitter account in 2017). By his own admission, he was playing hungover for three days during his first Tour victory. As someone who covered the Tour and saw it first-hand, Murray wasn’t a particularly well-liked person early in his career.

Over the years, however, it felt like Murray turned that around. Not that he was a saint all of a sudden, but he was improving. He talked openly about his battle with alcohol and depression—as Chris Kirk also did recently—going to rehab and finding a path to becoming sober. He started to focus on his Christianity, regularly mentioning religion in many of the recent interviews he gave. He met a woman and fell in love, getting engaged last year. There was a general sentiment from fellow Tour players that he was maturing.

When he won the 2024 Sony Open earlier this year, Murray talked expressively about that growth.

“My story is not finished,” Murray said. “I think it’s just beginning. I hope I can inspire a lot of people going forward that have their own issues… It just goes back to just my life is so good right now. I wouldn’t trade anything. I have a beautiful fiance. I have beautiful parents. I have beautiful nephews, siblings.

“Everyone in my life right now who is close to me who has been through the struggles with me, it’s all a team effort. I’m not sitting here—I am sitting here alone, but all of them are part of this. I think this is just the start of something really special.”

Those are brutal words to read now.

Anyone can have depression or struggle with alcoholism. It can be even easier for that to happen in professional golf with the mental strain these people have to go through. I hope a part of Murray’s legacy is that he was an athlete who voiced his mental pain—and everyone else should feel safe to do the same.

No amount of money earned or trophies won wipes away the pain of mental illness.

Maybe a little piece of that came through earlier this week when, in a much different situation from the devastating Murray suicide, Lexi Thompson announced her impending retirement.

Thompson, 29, had been in the spotlight since the age of 12 when she played in the U.S. Women’s Open. A few years later, she turned pro at the age of 15.

I grew up in the same town as Thompson—Coral Springs, Florida—and knew the family from local junior tournaments. There was always a thought in the back of my mind that Lexi could get burned out on golf at some point. When you are home-schooled from a young age and golf is such a critical part of your identity—and then you take on the enormous burden of being a leading ambassador for women’s golf—it is hard to maintain that type of motivation forever.

Lorena Ochoa, who was in a similar role, walked away from golf at 28 years old. It’s a lot to handle.

It was well-known that Thompson struggled with her role as a high-profile golfer. She had a love-hate relationship with the game.

“Although this has been an amazing journey, it hasn’t always been an easy one,” Thompson wrote in a letter shared on social media. “Since I was 12 years old, my life as a golfer has been a whirlwind of constant attention, scrutiny and pressure. The cameras are always on, capturing every swing and every moment on and off the golf course.

“Social media never sleeps, with comments and criticisms flooding in from around the world. It can be exhausting to maintain a smile on the outside while grappling with struggles on the inside.”

Good for Lexi that she is taking care of herself by prioritizing her mental health moving forward.

One idea I keep coming back to is that there is a chasm between golf and professional golf. And that chasm only continues to widen over the years.

A lot of us play golf as an obsession, a hobby or a distraction. We are there for the camaraderie, the experience, the challenge—it’s a passion project. If we don’t want it anymore, we stop playing.

Professional golfers often still have passion and a love for the sport, but there are complicating elements. It might look easy when someone is lifting a trophy, but it’s often a difficult way to live—and it’s not always what is best for them as humans. It’s a burden that also exists in other sports, but golf has a certain unspeakable loneliness to it that adds an extra weight.

I’m not saying playing on the Tour is akin to being an eighth-grade math teacher or cleaning out bathrooms in a gas station. Obviously there are harder jobs in the world. This isn’t about that.

What I’m saying is that professional golf was a double-edged sword for Murray and Thompson. What I take away from the past couple of weeks is that the negative side of that equation needs to be discussed more often.

Making a lot of money doesn’t mean the struggles that come with it aren’t valid. Of course they are.

Normalize pro golfers talking about the mental struggles of pro golf. The rest of us don’t need to criticize them for being ungrateful—we can just listen.