For Grayson Murray, the golf was not the hardest part

A prodigy who fought depression and alcoholism passes away, at 30, after he withdrew from Colonial.

As a movie, it would have ended in Honolulu five months ago. Grayson Murray birdied the 18th hole at Waialae Country Club to tie Ben An and Keegan Bradley, and then he birdied it again with a 38-foot putt, and he won the Sony Open and found PGA Tour security through 2026, and the days of morning cocktails and crackling Twitter duels and yearly struggles to remain in the big leagues all faded away.

The sequel arrived Saturday, or at least its news did. It reached the Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth during the third round, and it shook a group of athletes who are taught by their sports psychologists to restrain emotion at all costs.

Grayson Murray probably wasn’t going to make the cut on Friday at Colonial. He bogeyed the 14th, 15th and 16th holes and was five-over for the day, three-over for the tournament. He walked off the course, citing illness.

The next day, everyone learned he was dead, at age 30. Tour colleague Peter Malnati volunteered to speak about Murray, on CBS, and couldn’t stop crying.

“You see someone like Grayson and you see he’s struggled in the past but he’s been visibly open about it,” Malnati said. “And he was playing great. We’re so competitive out here and today we lost one of our family, and it’s terrible.”

On Sunday morning, Murray’s family acknowledged that he had taken his own life. It requested that his competitors wear red and black ribbons on Sunday, because Murray wore those colors on his Sunday rounds, as a fan of the Carolina Hurricanes.

It was clear, even when he was an elementary school student in his hometown of Raleigh, N.C., that Murray had a staggering talent. He also suffered social anxiety and depression, was a recovering alcoholic, had a bike accident that caused a concussion and brain damage and had another wreck, on a scooter, that cut up his face and nearly killed him. He had lost his filter many years ago, if he’d ever used one, and he regularly violated the sacred decorum of the tour, because he took on colleagues.

When Kevin Na, renowned for slow play, observed on Twitter that “walking in a putt never gets old,” Murray retorted that “watching you spend three minutes over a putt is getting old.” Na then said it was getting old watching Murray “miss cuts,” which Murray was doing regularly. The two had a shouting match on the practice tee later, and Murray said he would “dropped” Na if he thought he could do it without getting suspended. Later, when Na left for the LIV Tour, Murray specifically told him he wouldn’t be missed.

At a heated players’ meeting during the LIV-PGA Tour conflict of last year, Murray challenged Rory McIlroy to explain why the new schedule, with all its closed, no-cut “signature” events, would be good for the average pro. “Play better,” advised McIlroy.

Were it only that simple.

Tiger Woods won three Junior World Championships at Torrey Pines. So did Murray. When he was 12 he won his first World Junior title by four strokes. The 7th-place finisher was Byron DeChambeau. Two years later he won his third consecutive, with DeChambeau third and Wyndham Clark 16th.

Also at 12, Murray attended a camp at Wake Forest. He piped up: “What would I have to do to win one of those Arnold Palmer scholarships?” Four years later he would make the cut at an event in Raleigh, sponsored by what is now the Korn Ferry Tour.

He got that Palmer scholarship. His coach, Jerry Haas, had coached his nephew Bill, along with Webb Simpson, Will Zalatoris and Cameron Young, and would later say Murray had more talent any of them. Haas coached that talent for only three tournaments. Murray felt uncomfortable with what he called the “preppy” aspects of the school, and transferred to East Carolina, where he ran afoul of his coach, and then UNC-Greensboro and then Arizona State, where he would have played with Jon Rahm if he’d hung in there.

Instead he had the bike accident in Tempe that damaged his vision and affected the part of his brain that dealt with social aplomb. After he recovered during long weeks at his parents’ home, he rallied to qualify for Korn Ferry, then did well enough to make the PGA Tour, then won the Barbasol Championship.

Murray had a chance to become an established foot soldier for a long time, like all the rest with their logo caps and pastel pants. An overwhelming number of those pros are married, not only to their wives but their support groups and to a numbing daily routine. Show up five hours before tee time, go to the fitness trailer, go hit balls, go make a few putts or work on your sand game, play the round, have dinner with the boys, and sleep early. Murray wasn’t married to anyone or anything, but he developed a tight bond with alcohol. In Mexico he played volleyball the night before his round, saw the sunrise, and shot 80. That led to a four-week anxiety attack.

Murray began working with a counselor named Tony Blauer in San Diego. He had lost his PGA Tour card but then won it back on Korn Ferry. The first PGA Tour event of this calendar year was the Tournament of Champions at Kapalua, and Chris Kirk won it. Kirk, too, is trying to put his alcoholism behind. The next week belonged to Murray, as he focused on acronyms like SOP — Succeed On Purpose — that Blauer had suggested. And he had a fiance, Christina Ritchie, who was there when Murray twice conquered the 18th.

Murray didn’t contend seriously again, but he didn’t disappear either. He made the cut at the Masters and finished 10th at Charlotte two weeks ago, good for a $501,000 check. He was 48th on the 2024 money list, with $2.4 million official bucks in the bank, and he was 58th in the Official World Golf Ranking.

A triumphant life awaited him. All the rest of it was behind him. But it never disappeared, never stopped chasing. “It’s something I battle every day,” Murray said in 2017. “It will never go away but there are ways to control it.”

The movie is thus interrupted, until we learn whether Murray was betrayed by unforeseen events, or the myth of control. Or maybe, in the most bitter of ironies, he really was too large for his own life.