A full 18 months passed between Daniel Berger missing the cut at the US Open and him hitting his next competitive shot on the PGA Tour. To put that in context, Tiger Woods played four tournaments during Berger’s time on the sideline.
He’d entered the year ranked in the top-20 in the world, now a four-time PGA Tour winner having won the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am the previous year, and posted back-to-back top-10 finishes at the final two majors of 2021.
And he looked poised for an assault on the top-10 in the Official World Golf Rankings as he took a five-stroke lead into the final round of the Honda Classic. It was a tournament that he had unfinished business having finished runner-up to Padraig Harrington as a PGA Tour rookie in 2015, losing out in a playoff, and finishing a close fourth in 2020.
Having grown up less than an hour from the course, it’s a place he knows well, a course he thrives at, and for three rounds in 2022, he’d barely put a foot wrong. But it wasn’t to be, and though he continued to play well over the next three months, a nagging back issue was causing him trouble, so much so that when the pain increased during the US Open, he decided to take time off to heal.
“Yeah, it’s been a two-year ordeal,” he said in his pre-tournament press conference at the rebranded Cognizant Classic, the event where he made his first big splash on Tour. “That was essentially the start of when I started feeling the stuff in my back, and kind of the last half of the portion that I played in 2022 leading up to the U.S. Open where I stopped playing, I never felt great.
“When you play a professional sport it’s not like you always feel great, but I was in pain all the time, and then I got to a point where I was just like, this is just not worth playing. My everyday life sucks, and I’m just struggling to play a golf tournament.
“You can’t win a golf tournament when you can only do 25 percent of what you’re used to doing. That’s where I really made the decision to step back.
“Even when I played here in 2022 I was at 50 percent, and that’s not a level that you can compete at day in and day out. That’s where the decision was made to kind of step back and get healthy.”
What he’d expected to be a few weeks on the sideline turned into more than 18 months as his back issues turned out to be a bulging disk and deep bone sensitivity and the weeks turned into months, the months into years.
“No, I did not think it would be that long,” he replied when asked about his expected recovery time. “I think the thing was I was chasing like the quick fix, like what’s going to fix me tomorrow, and the reality is that’s not how it works.
“It was kind of like what was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We don’t really know, but you have to adjust and make changes.
“Once I figured out what works for me, you just stick to your process, and you do those things, and eventually you get better.
“It just took me a longer time. I didn’t want to be one of those guys that came back too early and was hurt three months later. I wanted to feel 100 percent and be able to do everything I wanted to do, and that’s where I feel now.”
As much as people enjoy having time off work, having time off being injured is a very different story and rehabilitation work is not only painstakingly slow, but often extremely painful in itself.
“I’ve been asked that a lot,” he said when asked about how he’d spent the time. “They said, did you go on your boat? What did you do? And it was a lot of nothing, to be honest, which was probably the worst part because if you know me you know I’m an active person and don’t like to sit around a lot.
“That was the toughest part was sitting around and literally doing nothing for eight months before I got back to being a little bit more like myself and feeling comfortable like walking.
“Like I would walk for 15 minutes and I’d be in pain, and then I would stop, and then the next day it would be 18 minutes, 20 minutes. It was kind of just building up until I felt comfortable to be normal again.”
Many elite golfers choose to completely disassociate themselves from what their counterparts are doing while they’re laid up, and Berger was no different. But there was one event that even he couldn’t resist tuning in for, and that turned out to be a painful watch as well as his former teammates crashed and burned at Marco Simone Golf Club in Rome.
“That was the one golf tournament I did watch. I did watch the Ryder Cup,” he admitted. “I mean, it was exciting. Anytime you get 12 of the best players in the world playing against 12 of the best players, it’s fun to watch. But tough not to be there, having played in the one a couple years before that.
“It’s always a great tournament to watch on TV.”
He now says he’s 100 percent healthy, and though it’s taking a little time to shake off the rust, he’s made two cuts in three starts and now he’s back on home turf, seeking to re-establish himself as one of the top players in the game.
And he still has unfinished business at PGA National.
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