Snedeker postpones the retirement party

At 45, he overcame a bizarre injury to win his first PGA Tour event since August of 2018.

Snedeker with his trophy Sunday

The tributes were pouring in. Brandt Snedeker became captain of the U.S. Presidents Cup team, coming up this fall at Medinah. He won the Payne Stewart Award, for charity projects such as the Sneds Tour, a year-round golf opportunity for Tennessee kids, and for the Snedeker Foundation, which helped build a practice facility for students at the state School for The Blind. He won the AT&T Legacy Award at Pebble Beach for similar philanthropy, at a tournament he had won twice.

Everything was coming Snedeker’s way except the gold watch. Clearly the golf world had run out of reasons to celebrate his golf. He was 45, his game ravaged by weird injury and insufficient distance off the tee. If this was it, he deserved a big bravo. He had won nine PGA Tour events, shot a 59 in Greensboro in August of 2018, and was once ranked No. 4 in the world. But he hadn’t won since that Greensboro event, and he had gone through an operation that sounded like a Saw movie. It seemed he had more banquets in his future than birdies.

Then Snedeker came to Myrtle Beach for a Tour event. Most of the top players in the world were playing in a 72-man, no-cut, “signature” event at Quail Hollow in Charlotte. Those who tied for 10th place in Charlotte made a half-million. Those who tied for ninth at Myrtle Beach made $113,000. Snedeker still wasn’t a favorite, but he had made cuts in his past two events, and suddenly he was hitting good shots again. On Sunday morning he stood three strokes behind leader Mark Hubbard. His daughter Lily sent him a text: “Play fearless.”

That never has been a problem. Snedeker shot 66 on Sunday, without a “5” on the card through 17 holes. Beginning on the 12th, he birdied four of six. On 18, he blocked his drive and couldn’t save par, which dropped him a shot behind Hubbard. He went to the practice tee and hit some drivers and waited. Hubbard, who is looking for his first tour win at 36, bogeyed 16, then hit his drive on 18 in the same place Snedeker did and couldn’t save par.

Snedeker heard the result, realized he had won, and looked at the ground for a long time before he gave caddie Heath Holt a hug that must have felt like a frontal Heimlich maneuver. Eventually Snedeker would realize he had qualified for this week’s PGA Championship. That, and a two-year period of choosing his own schedule again, were the tangible rewards, but what he really wanted was to prove he still belonged on the PGA Tour, not a farewell tour.

“There’s been points over the last couple of years where I didn’t think I could do this,” Snedeker said. “I was, like, ‘what am I doing?’ My golf game wasn’t very good. My body didn’t feel very good. When you’re 45, there’s lots of scar tissue. It’s a little harder than when I was 25 and 26 and didn’t know what I was doing.

“There’s a lot of good shots to draw from and a lot of bad shots to draw from, too. In the end I did what I’ve always done. I got back to work.”

Of the 76 players who made the cut, Snedeker was 71st in driving distance. But he ranked second in his play around the greens, and fourth in putting, which is the template he’s used to win $38.8 million, 22nd on the career money list. But he hasn’t played in a major championship since the 2021 Open Championship at Royal St. Georges.

His game was already receding by then, and his chest had bothered him since he withdrew from the Open Championship in 2017. Doctors spotted a problem with the joint that separates the upper and lower parts of the sternum. Snedeker could function if he had time between shots, but an hour on the range brought too much pain and too much trouble breathing. Snedeker pursued stem cell treatments in South America and tried whatever he could to avoid surgery. No doctor had seen such an injury to an athlete in a sport without collisions.

But he couldn’t dodge it forever, and in December of 2022, Snedeker had manbrium joint stabiliziation surgery, administered by Dr. Burton Elrod in Nashville. Elrod had done the same operation on Steve McNair, the Titans’ quarterback using a bone he had grafted from McNair’s hip. He was so skeptical of the surgery, and so concerned about an infection so close to vital organs, that he took no notes and vowed never to do it again. According to Snedeker it had only been performed 12 times in 15 years worldwide.

“I don’t have a career without this,” Snedeker told Elrod, who relented. The short version is that Elrod cut across Snedeker’s sternum, put the bone in between the two sections of the sternum, and snapped it back into place. “Like Legos,” Snedeker said.

This would sound bizarre enough if the operation was routine, like a knee replacement has become. Instead, this was strictly experimental. Gulp. Play fearless.

Snedeker rested for 16 weeks before his next shot. “I learned two things: I’m way too young to retire, and I’m unemployable,” Snedeker said. He played at the Memorial in 2023, and the rest has been a linear exercise in frustration, until Sunday.

This uncompromising side of Snedeker isn’t the first one you see. He has a rat-a-tat speaking style and he was nicknamed “Opie” when he first got on tour, with his floppy blonde hair (he’s bald now). He was unguarded and funny. He said he understood that he had a strange surname and just hoped not many people would call him Snotlicker. He had grown up on public courses in Nashville. His dad was a lawyer, and the family bought a pawn shop in a tough part of town, and Snedeker often worked there, alongside his mother Candice. Not a day went by without a story worth retelling, and Steve Earle, the Hardcore Troubador, pawned his guitar there once. Candice and husband Larry both died in close proximity six years ago. She had a heart problem and wore a pacemaker, even when she caddied for Brandt at the Masters par-3 tournament. This win, of course, was on Mother’s Day.

Snedeker had a shot at winning the 2008 Masters but shot 77 in the final round. He was tied with Angel Cabrera after 54 holes in 2013 and said, “I’ve spent 32 years getting ready for this and I’m completely 100 percent sure I can handle it, whatever happens.” Then he shot 75 and finished fifth.

Snedeker won the Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup in 2012, which was an $11.8 million payday, but perhaps his finest hour came at Torrey Pines four years later. He shot 3-under-par 69 in merciless, chilly winds on Sunday. The average score for the field was 78. “I couldn’t do that again,” he said. Play was halted, then resumed on Monday, with no spectators allowed because of fears of falling palm fronds, in the wind. Snedeker could do nothing but watch and, as he suspected, leader Jimmy Walker faltered and gave Snedeker the win.

And there were good breaks, like the 2013 Canadian Open, when Hunter Mahan was leading by two strokes at the halfway point. Then his wife went into labor, and Mahan left the tournament, and Snedeker won by three.

So it’s been a colorful, dramatic career, one that was totally unforeseen by those outside the Snedeker clan.

Wonder what happens in the next one?