Mental health at the forefront of golf’s mind following the tragic death of a player

Editor’s Note: Help is available if you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health matters.
If you’re in the US: Call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Globally: The International Association for Suicide Prevention and Befrienders Worldwide have contact information for crisis centers around the world.

Picture the scene: One of the world’s top golfers has just finished a terrible round on the course at the Dubai Desert Classic and moments later he’s swapped his putter for a crayon, busily working on a coloring book.

It might sound odd, but such a scenario is now likely at this pioneering event, which is leading the way in protecting player mental health and well-being.

Just behind the practice putting green, a number of softly lit suites offer a portal to tranquility, sleep pods, mindfulness exercises, a virtual reality otherworld escape through a headset and trained psychologists who can troubleshoot potential problems.

Dr Phil Hopley is one of the leading experts in the field of mental health and performance, a former professional rugby player who’s more recently helped the McLaren Formula One team to the Constructor’s Championship. He told CNN Sport that golfers can be particularly vulnerable to mental health issues.

“Ultimately, your performance is what you deliver on your own,” Hopley explained. “And it can be a very lonely place out on the course. Those of us who are not professional golfers know what it’s like to be struggling, but when you’re under the scrutiny of the media and large crowds watching, that really dials up significantly.”

Dr Hopley says the facilities in Dubai are a “brilliant development” and he expects many more tournaments will follow suit. Following the death by suicide of American player Grayson Murray last year, such help can’t come soon enough.

The 30-year-old Murray was seemingly having a successful year having won the PGA Tour’s Sony Open in Hawaii in January. But at the Charles Schwaab Challenge in Texas in May, he withdrew from the tournament during the second round, walking off the course and citing an illness. The next day, he was found dead at his home in Florida. The golfing community was stunned.

New Zealand player Ryan Fox told CNN that he’d played with Murray in a tournament the week before and never would have known that anything was wrong. “He was always known for being a little hot-headed at times,” Fox recalled. “But I really enjoyed talking to him, he was in good spirits. Having been in a pretty dark place, he seemed like he was in a reasonable space.”

“There are certain things that make you take a step back, and that was a shock,” Australian Adam Scott told CNN. “No matter how you were feeling, it didn’t really mean so much to know that one of our brothers was really battling and couldn’t figure it out. Hopefully, this doesn’t creep up on anyone else in our field.”

When Jeff Maness got the call that Murray had died, he says it dropped him to his knees. He was a longtime family friend who had watched Murray rise from a talented youngster at the Raleigh Country Club to a winner of six professional tournaments.

“Golf was his happy place,” Maness stressed to CNN. “Grayson felt very comfortable playing the game of golf. He loved the game, and he loved the PGA Tour as well.”

Murray was diagnosed with social anxiety as a teenager, and he battled his demons for the rest of his life. Now Maness, along with Murray’s parents, have launched a foundation in the late golfer’s name, hoping to raise awareness and support those who are facing mental health and addiction challenges. The foundation has only just been launched, but its goal is to collaborate with the PGA Tour and other pro tours in order to make the lives of other professional athletes better.

Maness said that they have heard from many golfers who have shared their love of Grayson and also shared their experiences of anxiety or other associated afflictions. “Grayson’s life has always been a beacon for others to feel more comfortable,” he explained.

At the Dubai Desert Classic, the players really can escape from it all. This writer slipped on the VR headset and was transported to a lush, mountainous woodland under an aurora borealis. Delicate flakes of snow drifted down from the night sky as a calming female voice encouraged me to declutter my mind. As I focused on my breathing, I witnessed a stream of orange particles dancing away from my lips.

Fox told CNN that this is a much more preferable experience to driving back to the hotel to ruminate on a bad day at the office.

“It can be all consuming,” he explained. “I think of some of the bad spots in my career, you feel like you can’t get away from it. (Now), if I’m a bit angry or frustrated, I can sit down and relax in a controlled, nice space. That’s huge! I think it’s going to be something that a lot of tournaments will probably take on, I definitely see those as a really, really good thing for us.”

In sport, as in life, not everybody will be able to recognize that they are struggling, and even then, admitting it could be difficult. But Dr Hopley thinks that golfers and athletes should be particularly receptive to help and treatment.

“Mental health and performance are opposite sides of the same coin,” he said. “That’s usually when you get (athletes) paying attention. We’d love to move towards a situation where people think about this proactively, see it as a part of their regular routine, like going to the gym, rather than waiting for things to become a problem.”

Dr Hopley anticipates that society is now moving in a direction where mental health is becoming much less taboo. “The young generation went through education systems where this was almost on the curriculum,” he said.

Dr Hopley explained that if any player needs his help during a tournament, then he would listen very intently, not saying much initially. He would help them to analyze what was really causing their distress because it may not even be their game.

“Think long and hard about things that are in your control,” he explained. “The more time we spend paying attention to things in our control, the more progress we can make. The less time we spend thinking about things outside our control, the less anxious and stress we feel.”

As for Scott, he observed how golf is “unfair at the best of times” and noted that results can be difficult to come to terms with.

“Great shots often don’t get rewarded, and you can be playing better than some people who get results,” he said. “Golf, more than other sports I’ve seen, is a lot like life. It has these ups and downs that are somehow unexplainable, sometimes through no fault of your own.

“I’m certainly guilty of internalizing a lot of things, I think I’ve slowly gotten better at finding support. Sometimes, we just need to vent a little bit.”

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