Will Zalatoris will miss the remainder of the year after back surgery
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Will Zalatoris will miss the remainder of the year after having back surgery, he announced Monday on social media.
Zalatoris said he had a microdiscectomy, a surgical procedure to relieve the pain caused when a herniated disc in the spine presses on an adjacent nerve. Tiger Woods is among the PGA TOUR players who have undergone the procedure.
Zalatoris said in his post that the decision to have surgery was made after “careful consideration” and seeking multiple opinions.
“As much as I hate not being able to play the rest of this season, I am happy that I am already seeing the benefits of the procedure,” he wrote. “Playing and living in pain is not fun.”
Zalatoris suffered two herniated discs last August, the week after earning his first PGA TOUR victory at the FedEx St. Jude Championship. Zalatoris, the FedExCup leader after his win in Memphis, withdrew from the BMW Championship and was out for the remainder of the year, missing the TOUR Championship and Presidents Cup. He had mixed results when he returned to action this year, finishing T11 at the Sentry Tournament of Champions and fourth at The Genesis Invitational. But he had finished outside the top 50 in his three starts preceding the Masters, where he withdrew without hitting a shot. That included a T59 finish at the World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play, where he also withdrew after losing his first two matches.
Zalatoris, the 2021 PGA TOUR Rookie of the Year, may be best known for his high finishes in major championships. He has six top-10s in majors since 2020, including three runners-up. Two of those second-place finishes in majors came last year. He lost a playoff to Justin Thomas at the PGA Championship and finished one shot back of Matt Fitzpatrick at the U.S. Open.
Zalatoris, the No. 8 player in the world, also was a strong candidate to play his first Ryder Cup this year. He currently ranks fourth in the U.S. Team’s points standings. Known as one of the most accurate iron players on TOUR, Zalatoris said earlier this year that the injuries forced him to make changes to his golf swing.
“We spent a lot of time understanding the pressures on my golf swing and understanding how I push off my right side,” Zalatoris said in January at the Sentry Tournament of Champions. “I do it later than a lot of guys, so what that does for someone with a lot of side bend is that gets my right hip high and my spine is tilted back, and so as Dr. (Greg) Rose said, ‘Duh, no wonder I had a back issue.’”