In Gary Woodland’s corner, an ex-fighter pilot has been lending support  

Lt. Col. Dan Rooney calls the cockpit of a fighter jet an “emotionally intense place.” He would know. Rooney served three combat tours in Iraq behind the stick of an F-16 Viper before transitioning into a recruiting and training role with the Oklahoma Air Guard. Combat brings an obvious emotional charge but so, too, Rooney will tell you, does instructing young pilots. Really, any extended periods flying at Mach 2 inside a roughly 70-inch-by-50-inch bubble canopy, regardless of your mission, is going to leave you feeling some things when you come back to earth.

“You don’t realize all the stuff you’re processing until you start to kind of come down off of that,” Rooney told me in a phone interview Monday.

The condition is called post-traumatic stress disorder, which the Mayo Clinic says is caused by “an extremely stressful or terrifying event — either being part of it or witnessing it.” Symptoms include, but are not limited to, nightmares, severe anxiety and dark, uncontrollable thoughts. Rooney’s PTSD, he said, manifested itself in claustrophobia, discomfort in crowds and a propensity for being startled by loud noises.

“Trigger mechanisms,” he said. “But I never had anything as intense as what Gary is going through.”

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That would be Gary Woodland, the 41-year-old Tour pro who picked up his fifth PGA Tour title at the Texas Children’s Houston Open Sunday. That Woodland was playing at all at Memorial Park was a triumph of the human spirit. That he won the tournament going away was one of the greatest-ever feats of perseverance and overcoming by a Tour pro.

Even if you follow the game only casually, you’re probably aware of Woodland’s travails. About three years ago, Woodland began experiencing a terrifying slew of symptoms, including shakiness, loss of appetite, uncontrollable jolting at night and a persistent fear of death — all of which, he soon learned, was caused by a tumor pressing on the part of the brain that controls fear and anxiety. In September 2023, doctors opened Woodland’s skull and removed most, but not all, of the mass, in a high-risk surgery that could have cost Woodland his eyesight among other functions. The procedure was deemed a success, and Woodland was soon feeling better, so much so that in January 2025 he returned to the PGA Tour, at the Sony Open.

“It’s ‘What can I handle?’” Woodland said at the time. “Next week will be four months from surgery. That’s probably the date where they said after four months I should be pretty good. We’ll see.”

Woodland missed the cut, and six more cuts in his next 10 starts. By season’s end he had showed signs of more consistency but still finished a lowly 155th in the FedEx Cup standings. In 2025, Woodland improved, finishing 72nd in the points race, but with just one top-10 finish in 22 starts he was still a long way from the player who won the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. Then came 2026, and what looked like a regression of form, with three missed cuts in his first five starts.

What most observers didn’t know, however, was that Woodland was still fighting — not swing demons so much as the kind that can burrow into your head. Week after week, as fans, Tour staff and volunteers, and even Woodland’s fellow players willed him on, Woodland had been quietly suffering. That was until the Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass earlier this month when Woodland finally broke that debilitating silence and opened up about his continued struggles, in a gut-wrenching interview with Golf Channel reporter Rex Hoggard.

Woodland revealed that he had been diagnosed with PTSD roughly a year earlier and was battling, often mid-round, with such symptoms as anxiety and hypervigilance. Woodland described a round in Napa when he was startled by a walking scorer. He was so unnerved that for the rest of the round, Woodland said, he found himself ducking into bathrooms to cry. “There are days when it’s tough — crying in the scoring trailer, running to my car just to hide it,” he told Hoggard. “I don’t want to live that way anymore.”   

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Woodland started his collegiate sports career as a basketball player at Washburn University in his birthplace of Topeka, Kans., before transferring to the University of Kansas to play golf. During Woodland’s UK stint, his now-late college coach, Ross Randall, introduced Woodland to a former UK golfer-turned-fighter pilot named Dan Rooney, who was in town for a Jayhawks football game. This was in 2006.

Woodland and Rooney hit it off — literally. They played a round of golf together and it didn’t take Rooney long to realize that Woodland was a rare talent. “He hit it harder and faster than anybody I’d ever seen,” Rooney said. “I’m like this guy is like Superman.”

Rooney has his own superhero-like qualities. In 2007, between Iraq combat tours, he founded Folds of Honor, a non-profit that funds scholarships for the spouses and children of fallen or disabled military service members and first responders; since its inception, the foundation has provided nearly 73,000 scholarships totaling north of $340 million. Rooney also founded the Patriot Golf Club in Tulsa, Okla., where Folds of Honor is headquartered, and American Dunes in Grand Haven, Mich., from which all proceeds go back to Rooney’s foundation.

Woodland, who had grandparents who served in the military, was drawn to Rooney and his causes. Rooney said the day Woodland earned his PGA Tour card, in 2008, he called Rooney and said he wanted to put the Folds of Honor emblem on his bag. Woodland has since become one of the foundation’s most visible ambassadors.

But Rooney and Woodland’s relationship extends far beyond charity golf outings. In 2011, Rooney flew to Tampa to celebrate Woodland’s first PGA Tour with him (and, Rooney jokes now, talked Woodland’s then-girlfriend Gabby Granado out of going to law school so she could travel the PGA Tour with Gary). In 2016, when Gary and Gabby tied the knot, Rooney officiated. In 2019, when Woodland broke through for his major win, he was wearing the logo of Volition America, an apparel brand Rooney started to help fund and drive awareness to Folds of Honor. “We went from nothing to owning this patriotic space,” Rooney said.

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Rooney and Woodland share at least one more thing in common: their Christian faith. Rooney describes himself as Team Woodland’s “prayer warrior,” adding, “Every time there’s been something really hard in the Woodland family, I think that’s kind of where I fit in with the phone calls to me like, ‘Hey, we gotta pray.’”

One of those occasions came in September 2023 when doctors drilled a fist-sized hole into Woodland’s cranium and removed most of the lesion that was pressing on his amygdala, an almond-shaped structure within the temporal lobe that initiates fear and produces anxiety. Rooney said it’s hard to overstate the gravity of the surgery. “It’s just unfathomable where this tumor was, and how disruptive this surgery was,” Rooney said. The tumor was benign but “they still don’t fully understand what it was,” Rooney said. “They know what it wasn’t.”

Rooney knew the surgery, while effective, wasn’t a fix all. He knew his friend was still suffering. And scared. And that he might have returned to the Tour sooner than he should have. But Rooney said it wasn’t until the last couple of months that he became fully aware of “what the world knows now.”

Rooney knows many military veterans in addition to himself who have struggled from PTSD. They have described to him the sensation of getting trapped in their own heads — in “emotional ditches” — and, in the worst cases, have said taking their own lives feels like the only way out. “That’s the piece that I think people have a real hard time understanding,” Rooney said.

Rooney knew Woodland was experiencing overwhelming feelings of hypervigilance, which made it difficult for him to be around crowds. So, when Woodland accepted a vice-captaincy on Keegan Bradley’s U.S. Ryder Cup team last year, Rooney was concerned. “I’m like, ‘How in the world are you gonna go into the Ryder Cup feeling this way and dealing with this stuff?’” Rooney said. But the week proved to be a respite for Woodland. In his Golf Channel interview at the Players, Woodland said being around teammates and close Tour pals put him at ease. “I didn’t have to hide it,” he said. “I could be myself.”

Good days and bad days. That’s how Woodland has described his journey. One of the bad days came just last week, on the Friday of the Houston Open. When Woodland arrived on the 9th tee, where fans were pressed up against the rope line, he said his hypervigilance kicked in. Tour security assisted Woodland but he said, “I was a wreck the last 10 holes of that day.” After the round, when he visited scoring to sign for a five-under 65 that would give him the 54-hole lead by one, Woodland said he “bawled.”

But then came something Woodland had not been able to do in past months: a mental reset. He calmed his mind and took care of his business, knowing that one of the biggest rounds of his career was ahead of him. “I’m in a fight,” he said. “[But] with the love and support I have around me, I have hope.”

On Sunday, Woodland coolly shot 67 and won by five. As he walked down the 18th fairway, the crowds chanted his name — “Ga-ry! Ga-ry!” — stoked on by one of Woodland’s own playing partners, Min Woo Lee. After Woodland holed the winning putt, Gabby joined him on the 18th green and Gary fell into her arms and wept. If you didn’t have goosebumps, you didn’t have a pulse.

Rooney wasn’t there to celebrate with his friend, but, on what was Palm Sunday, he texted Woodland from afar. The thrust of the message: “This isn’t about you. You’re the parable. You’re the vessel that God is working through to give everybody hope.”

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