Gary Woodland is making his return to the PGA Tour this week at the Sony Open in Hawaii. On Sept. 18 of last year, Woodland announced via his social media account that he underwent surgery to remove a tumor from his brain.
“I had gone four and a half months of every day really thinking I was going to die,” he said during his pre-tournament press conference Tuesday at Waialae Country Club in Honolulu. “Every day it was a new way of dying, new way of death. The jolting in the middle of the night scared the heck out of me.”
The Tour’s Twitter/X account posted a video of Woodland’s press conference, and various pros, media members and fans responded with words of encouragement and support.
Here are some of the best photos from the week in Honolulu.
The Sony Open, the second leg of the two-week Hawaii stretch on the PGA Tour, was won by Grayson Murray at Waialae Country Club in Honolulu.
With the final group on the 14th hole during the final round of the 2024 Sony Open in Hawaii there were five players tied for the lead at Waialae Country Club in Honolulu. Keegan Bradley (67), Grayson Murray (67) and Ben An (64) separated from the pack just enough to reach a three-way playoff at 17 under. In the end, it was Murray who came out on top.
Waialae Country Club is a par-70 track measuring 7,044 yards.
Here are some of the best photos from the 2024 Sony Open.
After a week at Kapalua’s Plantation Course for The Sentry, the PGA Tour heads to Honolulu for the Sony Open in Hawaii. Defending champion Si Woo Kim played in Maui last week, tying for 25th.
Matt Fitzpatrick, Ludvig Aberg, Tyrrell Hatton, Sahith Theegala, Hideki Matsuyama and Brian Harman are among the big names joining Kim in the 144-man field. The purse this week is $8.3 million with $1.494 million going to the winner.
Will Zalatoris will play in his first official Tour event since withdrawing prior to last year’s Masters. Zalatoris played in the Hero World Challenge back in December, but finished last in the 20-man field.
The tournament also features the return of Gary Woodland to the Tour. He’ll be playing in his first even since having brain surgery four months ago.
From tee times to TV and streaming info, here’s everything you need to know for the first round of the 2024 Sony Open in Hawaii. All times listed are ET.
Thursday tee times
1st tee
Tee time
Players
12:10 p.m.
Denny McCarthy, Alex Noren, Taylor Montgomery
12:20 p.m.
Aaron Rai, Callum Tarren, Austin Eckroat
12:30 p.m.
Tyler Duncan, Patrick Rodgers, Tyler McCumber
12:40 p.m.
Vincent Norrman, Cameron Champ, Zach Johnson
12:50 p.m.
Luke List, Kurt Kitayama, Patton Kizzire
1 p.m.
K.H. Lee, J.J. Spaun, Chad Ramey
1:10 p.m.
Matt Wallace, Adam Svensson, Andrew Putnam
1:20 p.m.
Russell Henley, Billy Horschel, Ryan Brehm
1:30 p.m.
Lanto Griffin, Grayson Murray, Matti Schmid
1:40 p.m.
Joel Dahmen, Robert Streb, Peter Malnati
1:50 p.m.
Robert MacIntyre, Rico Hoey, Adrien Dumont de Chassart
StrackaLine offers a hole-by-hole course guide for the Sony Open in Hawaii and Waialae Country Club.
Waialae Country Club in Honolulu, site of the 2024 Sony Open in Hawaii, originally was designed by famed golden-era architect Seth Raynor and opened in 1927 alongside Kāhala Beach.
The private course has undergone multiple reconstructions, mostly in the 1960s as a hotel was added to the property. Architects Robert Trent Jones Sr., Desmond Muirhead and Rick Smith made changes to the course over the decades, and most recently Tom Doak has worked to restore some of Raynor’s original design concepts.
The layout, which first hosted the PGA Tour in 1965, will play to 7,044 yards with a par of 70 this year. Of note: The standard routing is altered for the Sony Open, with the nines reversed to better take advantage of the scenic sunsets. The nines are presented below in the order in which they are played during the Tour event.
Thanks to yardage books provided by StrackaLine – the maker of detailed yardage books for thousands of courses around the world – we can see exactly the challenges the pros face this week. Check out the maps of each hole below.
He started feeling some troubling symptoms: shaking, tremors in his hands, loss of appetite, chills, no energy.
HONOLULU, Hawaii – Gary Woodland never feared anything except the fear of failure. That is until he began being jolted awake with the fear of dying.
“I had gone four and a half months of every day really thinking I was going to die,” he said on Tuesday. “Every day it was a new way of dying, new way of death. The jolting in the middle of the night scared the heck out of me.”
It turned out he had a lesion on his brain, and on Sept. 18, Woodland underwent a craniotomy, slicing his head open all the way down to his ear and cutting about a baseball-sized hole in his skull to remove the majority of the tumor.
“Then put it back with plates and screws. So I’ve got a robotic head, I guess,” joked Woodland, who required 30 staples in his head.
“I had some people tell me this was a little optimistic to be here this week, but last week my family and I came over to Hawaii early,” he said. “Ramped up practice, ramped up the training and the body responded beautifully. Kept getting better and better.”
Woodland, 39, has won four times on the PGA Tour, with his biggest victory coming at the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach Golf Links. But in late April, shortly after the Masters, he started feeling some troubling symptoms at the Mexico Open at Vidanta: shaking, tremors in his hands, loss of appetite, chills, no energy. It became so bad that he called his longtime doctor on May 24 and begged for help to deal with his anxiety.
“You think you can overcome stuff. I couldn’t overcome this,” he said. “I was like, ‘Man, I need something to calm me down.’ ”
His doctor said he couldn’t prescribe any medication without Woodland undergoing an MRI. Woodland went to get an MRI that night and it revealed a lesion on his brain, which led to more testing and eventually an appointment with a specialist.
“The lesion in my brain sat on the part of my brain that controls fear and anxiety,” Woodland explained. “He’s 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 that he took twice daily but his fear of dying only got worse initially.
“It was Wednesday (May 31) or Thursday night (June 1) of the Memorial and I’m laying in bed at 1 (a.m.) grabbing the bed to tell myself I wasn’t falling from heights, I wasn’t dying, for an hour.”
Gary Woodland prepares to play his shot from the fourth tee during the 2022 Sanderson Farms Championship at The Country Club of Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi. (Photo by Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images)
When the mini-seizures continued, they upped the dosage. As the medicine started to increase, his brain slowed down and the seizures stopped.
“The meds I was on were working for the seizures but were horrible for me as a person,” he said. “I had horrible side effects.”
One of those side effects was short-term memory loss. “I would be standing over a club and forget which club I’m hitting. I would be lining up putts and think, this is taking too long. I’m just going to hit it,” he said. “Didn’t have the focus or the energy.”
Woodland kept playing because physically his game felt fine and competing provided a short respite from the fear and anxiety he dealt with, but after he failed to make the FedEx Cup Playoffs, his caddie pulled him aside and said, “You can’t play this way. You’ve got to go get help. You’ve got to get fixed.”
A biopsy showed that the tumor, which was diagnosed as benign, was up against his optic tract on the brain and it was too risky to remove all of it.
“They removed as much as they could,” Woodland said, noting there had been the risk of losing his vision or even control of the left side of his body, “and believe they cut off the blood circulation to what’s left.”
Woodland spent two days in the ICU. When he was released from the hospital, they brought a wheelchair to the ICU room but Woodland declined using it. “I said, I’m sorry, I walked in this place and I’m walking out,” he recalled. “I got out of bed and I walked straight to my car and got home, and it was amazing seeing my (three) kids. They didn’t come while I was in the hospital. We didn’t want to bring them to see me like that.”
Woodland immediately began plotting his comeback. Full Swing Simulators installed PuttView, its indoor putting green, into the dining room at his house and he began putting two days after surgery. He was cleared to hit golf balls four weeks later but waited an extra week. Woodland played so badly during his first nine holes that he phoned his teacher, Butch Harmon, and asked if he could come see him in Las Vegas. Within 30 minutes, the rust started to come off.
“G-Dub, you’re right where you’re supposed to be,” Harmon said.
This journey has been very hard but I’m extremely thankful to be progressing and for the unconditional love and support from everyone. You’ve all made this process a little easier for me and my family. Thank you to everyone and I look forward seeing you all next year. pic.twitter.com/ON16PuDUck
More than anything, Woodland is grateful for the love and support he’s received from his golf family as well as people he doesn’t even know who have been moved by his story.
“I realize there is a lot of good in this world,” Woodland said. “Even being back this week, seeing the guys, haven’t seen many guys. It’s been overwhelming how good it’s been.”
The question remains: Is he ready for seven days of mental focus and stress? Woodland said it is standard protocol to be on medication for at least six months, and he got a good report after an MRI a week and a half ago. He’s ready to prove that he can get back to being one of the best players in the world.
“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,” he said. “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.”
Add Zalatoris to the list of converts that have adopted a broomstick putter to their arsenal. He’s using the same L.A.B. putter popularized by Adam Scott and Lucas Glover, the Mezz.1 MAX.
“If I had known about this thing 10 years ago, I would have gone to it (then),” he said on Tuesday ahead of the Sony Open in Hawaii.
Zalatoris had a college teammate who used one and tinkered with his from time to time but never understood how to use it. But after being sidelined to repair his back he had several months to figure out the right weight, loft and shaft.
“I love it,” Zalatoris said. “You rock your shoulders and that’s it. It takes the hands out of it completely. I’ve always been very linear. It feels way more straight back-straight through as opposed to trying to work on an arc. It’s just the best way.”
Zalatoris said that putting wizard Brad Faxon suggested he try it as did a friend he plays with frequently at home in Dallas. So, he ordered an arm-lock model online and paid for it like a regular customer. Someone at L.A.B. recognized the name on the order, comped him, and sent him a couple broomsticks too. Even before he could start hitting shots again after his surgery, he would go out and watch the guys at his club play and used the broomstick putter on the greens.
“Shoot, dude, you need to putt with this,” they told him.
Will Zalatoris of the United States putts with a broomstick putter on the third green during the first round of the Hero World Challenge at Albany Golf Course on November 30, 2023, in Nassau, Bahamas. (Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)
Zalatoris ranked No. 103 in Strokes Gained: Putting in 2021-22, his last full season before his injury, good enough for him to climb to No. 8 in the world (he’s No. 43 now) and notch his first Tour title at the 2022 FedEx St. Jude Invitational, but he’s had some struggles on the greens, especially with short putts, switching to the arm-lock style before he made his way on Tour.
He used the broomstick for all four rounds at the Hero World Challenge, his first foray back inside the ropes at the December unofficial event. He finished last in the field of 20, including an opening-round 81, comparing playing in the Bahamas to cramming for a test the night before an exam compared to feeling prepared for his new season to get underway on Thursday. It wasn’t his putting that held him back in the Bahamas.
“I knew it was going to be a lot of trial and error,” he said. “But it was really good to get one competitive rep under my belt.”
Oahu is known as the “gathering place” for good reason – it’s the home of the state government, the financial and business center and nearly three-quarters of the state population – and it’s where the PGA Tour gathers this week for the Sony Open at Waialae Country Club.
As Hawaii’s capital and largest city, Honolulu is the point of entry for most visits to the islands. The city alternates as a beach resort, urban center, commercial hub, international port and living landmark of Hawaiian history.
Waikiki, the southeastern quarter of the city, is one of the most famous tourist destinations of the world, a magical mile of beachfront hotels, shops, restaurants, and endless entertainment, especially at the modern International Market Place and bustling Kalakaua Avenue. It is also one of the city’s busiest areas.
Waikiki Beach is the general name that refers to any and all of the beaches on the south shore of Oahu, beginning on the Waikiki side of the Hilton Lagoon in the west and stretching all the way to the fringes of Diamond Head Crater. During the day the beaches are awash in aquatic activities as surfers paddle between catamarans, canoes paddle around snorkelers and swimmers jostle into each other. It’s also prime people-watching territory. Here’s some of the places to see, stay and things to eat.
The view from a room at the Royal Hawaiian out to Waikiki Beach. (Adam Schupak/Golfweek)
Waialae could be the perfect fit for Matt Fitzpatrick.
After a fantastic 2024 opener at The Sentry, the PGA Tour heads to Honolulu for the Sony Open in Hawaii at Waialae Country Club. While it’s not a signature event, this year’s field boasts plenty of star power.
Defending champion Si Woo Kim is joined by Matt Fitzpatrick, Ludvig Aberg, Tyrrell Hatton, Sahith Theegala, Brian Harman and Justin Rose. After a final-round 7-under 66 in Maui, Kim tied for 25th at The Sentry.
Will Zalatoris is also in the field and will be making his first official Tour start since withdrawing prior to the 2023 Masters. He did tee it up at Tiger Woods’ Hero World Challenge in December, finishing last in the 20-man field.
The Sentry winner Chris Kirk will be a name to watch this week. In ’23, Kirk finished solo third, and in ’21 he grabbed a share of second. Overall, Kirk has five top-10 finishes — four of which are top-5s — at the Sony.
Woodland will be among the 144 golfers competing in the first full-field event of the new season.
Less than four months after surgery to remove tumors on his brain, Gary Woodland is set to return to action on the PGA Tour. Golf Channel’s Todd Lewis was first to report the news.
During a live report from the 2024 season opener, The Sentry, on Maui on Friday, Lewis said Woodland is entered in the Sony Open field in Honolulu, Jan. 11-14.
Woodland played in the 2023 Sony Open and missed the cut, but this time around will be a much bigger deal for the four-time Tour winner. Woodland last competed in the Wyndham Championship last August, where he tied for 27th.
Woodland, 39, posted on social media he had been trying to treat symptoms with medication but after consulting with specialists and his family he elected to have surgery.
Shortly after his surgery, the University of Kansas, where Woodland played college golf, renamed its facilities after him.
In November, he posted a video hitting practice balls, ending his message with “I look forward to seeing you all next year.”
Next year is here, and Woodland will be among the 144 golfers competing in the first full-field event of the new season.
Zalatoris also entered in Sony
On Friday afternoon, the PGA Tour released the full-field list, which also features Will Zalatoris. He finished last in the 20-man field at the Hero World Challenge a month ago. He missed most of last season after having back surgery in April, just days after withdrawing from the Masters ahead of the first round.
Here’s a look at the field for the 2024 Sony Open.
The Sony Open in Hawaii (January 11-14) is the second tournament of the 2024 PGA TOUR Season and first Full-Field Event.
