SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — A collapsed lung, six broken ribs, a fractured leg: on Friday night at the 2018 Memorial, Bud Cauley’s PGA Tour career came to an abrupt halt.
Twenty-nine years old at the time, Cauley was lucky to survive as a passenger in a late-night single-car accident that occurred just minutes from Muirfield Village Golf Club. But his nightmare was only just beginning.
This week at the WM Phoenix Open, Cauley, 33, will return to the PGA Tour for the first time in three years, playing on a major medical extension. His last start on Tour was the 2020 Safeway Open. Before then, the University of Alabama product appeared to be cruising to a full recovery from the injuries he sustained after the accident, in which his friend’s BMW M6 flipped into the air and landed in a ditch.
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A former No. 1 junior in the world and one of just a few players to earn PGA Tour membership without going to Q-School, Cauley still had serious potential to rise in the professional ranks. In 2019, he even jumped into contention at the Memorial—one year after the life-threatening crash that transpired just down the road—ultimately finishing in the top 10. He plugged away for another year after that, until he started experiencing a piercing pain on his right side, the same side that was crushed two years prior.
“It felt like someone was stabbing me in the chest,” Cauley told Sports Illustrated.
Surgery was seemingly the only option. According to Cauley, doctors thought the pain might have been stemming from one of the plates that was initially installed in his chest after the crash. In April 2021, his surgeon went in to try to remove it, but Cauley’s bone had grown on top of the plate, making it impossible to extract. Some of Cauley’s scar tissue was removed instead, hoping that would do the trick.
Twelve days later, Cauley’s wife noticed that the incision from the surgery had ripped open.
“I was just standing in the house, and Kristi goes, ‘Your shirt is kind of wet.’ Take my shirt off, there’s just a hole in the side of my chest,” Cauley said.
The complications didn’t stop there. After a follow-up surgery, doctors installed what is known as a “wound VAC” because his wound was too wide to repair on the spot. Cauley described the mechanism as a suction device attached to his body, with a tube constantly draining the blood from his side. The next stage included replacing the dressing on his injury twice a day. A nurse would visit Cauley’s home to pack the side of his chest with gauze, once in the morning and once in the evening, for weeks on end. When the skin finally grew back together, Cauley went back in for a third surgery. The stitches got infected.
“Everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong,” Cauley said.
This is when Cauley started to seriously worry. Professional golf wasn’t exactly a priority anymore; the Jacksonville native was concerned about his quality of life. Even if Cauley could never take a full swing again, simple things like getting out of bed and sleeping through the night caused him immeasurable pain.
The motions of daily life eventually became manageable, but the golf still wasn’t there. Cauley’s optimism about a potential return was fading, and now he had something else to focus on: His family. In November 2022, his son Cooper was born.
“Kristi and I got married, we had Cooper and I thought, well, if I can just play golf and not professionally … I can just go play with him, and that would be great,” Cauley says.
Cauley floated conversations about alternate career paths. He thought about remaining in the golf industry but not as a professional golfer. It was difficult to fathom. So he kept trying. Soft tissue work, injections, alternate treatments—you name it, Cauley gave it a shot. The past three years of Cauley’s life have been spent in waiting rooms and doctor’s offices.
“The people that performed the surgeries were saying there was nothing they could do,” Cauley says. “I was trying to find a different route to feeling better. The thought of having another surgery was pretty scary for me.”
Finally, Cauley started seeing a doctor at the Jacksonville Mayo Clinic. A specialized injection and minimally invasive procedure called hydrodissection helped break up his scar tissue. It took more than two years to find, but Cauley had stumbled upon a pathway forward.
In September 2023, he started hitting balls again and gearing up for a return. Money games at home in Florida with Rickie Fowler, Patrick Cantlay and fellow Crimson Tide alum Justin Thomas helped Cauley test his game against the PGA Tour’s best. On Jan. 5, 2024, Cauley shared his progress with the world. He took to Instagram to post screenshots of his entry into two Korn Ferry Tour events, along with a long-awaited swing video.
“Well to make a very, very long story short … I’m coming back,” he wrote.
As Thomas aptly noted on Tuesday at his WM Phoenix Open press conference, Cauley’s T21 and T35 finishes in those Korn Ferry Tour events were nothing short of remarkable.
“If I have a month off competitive golf, the amount of rust I feel my first round, let alone, what, four years, multiple years? To come back and play that well and consistently I think speaks volumes to where he's at, but I'm also sure he has a totally different perspective out there while he's playing, with the accident and injuries and being a dad now,” Thomas said.
No matter the outcome of his return, Cauley has a lot to be thankful for this week in Phoenix in addition to his health. He has the unique opportunity to earn back his Tour card throughout his next 27 starts (he’ll need to earn 391 FedEx Cup points to maintain his card according to the PGA Tour’s medical extension policy). Cauley’s peers are ecstatic about his return. The likes of Gary Woodland, Rickie Fowler and U.S. Ryder Cup captain Zach Johnson went out of their way to greet him with a hug in the middle of this interview. But when Cauley thinks about it, the sometimes debilitating journey that he has endured over the past three years is the real source of his gratitude.
“I didn’t stop trying,” he said. “I said it to a lot of people: I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be stuck with another needle. I can’t go to another doctor’s office. I can’t sit through another MRI. My wife had to really encourage me to keep going. It’s almost scary to think that I could have just stopped, and then I wouldn’t be here this week.”
