Built for the long game: PGA Tour, Cleveland Clinic usher in new era of player health

Editor’s note: This is Part 1 in a three-part series from the PGA Tour and Cleveland Clinic offering a behind-the-scenes look at today’s modern approach to player health and performance. This series will explore what players can access inside the PGA Tour Performance Truck presented by Cleveland Clinic, how Cleveland Clinic experts use testing and insights to identify potential issues before they become injuries and how a comprehensive approach to health can help players stay competitive longer.

For PGA Tour players, time is one of the most valuable commodities.

Between practice, competition, travel, preparation and recovery, finding time to take care of their bodies can be a challenge in itself.

That’s why the PGA Tour Performance Truck presented by Cleveland Clinic is designed around a simple premise: Give players access to comprehensive medical and performance resources without taking them away from what they came to the tournament to do – play golf.

The partnership builds upon a player health and performance infrastructure the PGA Tour has developed over many years, with Cleveland Clinic bringing additional clinical expertise and resources to help advance that work. Together, the organizations are continuing the evolution from a model centered largely on treating injuries to one that increasingly emphasizes prevention, performance, recovery and career longevity.

The Performance Truck is one part of that broader collaboration, bringing this evolving approach to player health and performance directly to players where they compete.

One stop. Multiple needs.

Through this partnership, players can access an array of services, including comprehensive healthassessments, bloodwork, advanced cardiac screening and dermatology.

Michael Dakkak, D.O., a primary care and sports and exercise medicine physician with Cleveland Clinic, said the experience is designed to provide world-class care while fitting seamlessly into a Tour player's schedule.

“We've got a medical team from all around the country at our sites, top specialists in the world, and we have a plethora of services that we can offer them,” Dakkak explained, noting that available on-site testing goes beyond what a player might encounter during a traditional physical.

Bloodwork can include vitamin and nutritional levels, while cardiac screening can include EKGs to help detect advanced risk factors. Additionally, a dermatologist is available for general skin cancer screenings.

For golfers, that last service is particularly important. Players spend hours outside, often in the sun, and Dakkak said the team has identified precancerous lesions in golfers in their 20s.

It’s one example of the philosophy behind the partnership: Identify potential issues before they become problems.

That same philosophy extends to performance and recovery. Tom Hospel, the PGA Tour’s chief medical advisor, has watched the modern Tour athlete become increasingly deliberate about maintaining the body, not simply reacting when something goes wrong.

Infrared saunas, cold plunges, hydration, electrolytes, soft-tissue massage, physical therapy, athletic training and other recovery resources are now part of the modern Tour environment.

“I started likening it to a pit road on NASCAR where we're available to them, and as soon as they come walking in, we want to make sure that we are as efficient as possible, offering as many services that are available to them and so that they can take advantage of that. But we need to do it in an efficient manner.”

For Dakkak, efficiency is equally important on the medical side.

“If they complete all the stations, they’re in and out within 10 to 15 minutes,” Dakkak said. “It's quite an efficient team we have even though we're comprehensive. The seamless integration from station to station makes it easy.”

From treating problems to maintaining performance

That shift toward proactive care is also evident in the Tour’s therapy and recovery spaces.

Corey Hug, PGA Tour physical therapist, sees players seeking everything from dry needling and soft-tissue work to cold and heat therapies, electrical muscle stimulation, chiropractic manipulation and pneumatic compression.

But the objective isn't simply to make a player feel better in the moment. It’s to reset the body, support recovery and, when possible, address the underlying issue.

“All those things help reset muscles and get the muscles primed so they’re at their peak each day,” said Hug, who describes the bodies of today's players as powerful, highly tuned machines that require regular maintenance.

“The way golf is trending is there's a lot of strength and there's a lot of speed,” he added. “With that occurring and doing it on repetitive motion – you know, 500 swings a day – things are going to break down. These new guys come in like Ferraris, but if you take care of them, it's going to be fine."

For players competing week after week, that maintenance can be just as important as responding to an injury.

Paul M. Saluan, M.D., Director, Strategic Initiatives and Clinical Development, Cleveland Clinic Global Peak Performance Center, said he sees the same principle at work in the way Cleveland Clinic approaches its relationship with the Tour. Rather than arrive with a predetermined list of services, the medical team has worked to understand what players and the Tour actually need.

“It's important from our standpoint to not necessarily try and plug what we think belongs with each of these entities but rather look to them for what their medical needs are, what the necessities are, what their performance needs are,” Saluan explained.

That means the program can continue to evolve as the needs of the athlete and the broader Tour community evolve. That evolution is already underway. As the partnership continues, the Tour and Cleveland Clinic plan to expand and optimize the program based on the needs of the Tour community. Beginning next year, caddies will also have access to services offered through the Performance Truck, while players and their families can access Cleveland Clinic care across its locations.

“If I’m doing a test onsite and that leads to them saying, ‘Hey, I do want to see you in clinic,’ or ‘I do want to create a multidisciplinary team of my own,’ that’s fantastic. We can certainly provide that,” said Tamanna Singh, M.D., a sports cardiologist and Director of the Sports Cardiology Center and Stress ECG Lab and Co-Founder/Co-Director of WISER (Women’s Integrated Sports, Exercise, & Research) at Cleveland Clinic. “That is one of the highlights of the Cleveland Clinic partnership with the PGA Tour.”

Making the data matter

The expansion of player health and performance resources has also brought increasingly sophisticated testing into the Tour environment.

Beyond cardiology, dermatology, exercise physiology and functional movement screens, the Performance Truck can provide laboratory testing and other measurements designed to give players a better understanding of their bodies. One example is the recent addition of force-plate analysis, which can provide information about how an athlete generates power and how that relates to performance.

For Saluan, however, collecting more information is only useful if the information can be translated into something meaningful for the player.

“Adding force-plate analysis only took a short amount of time to do,” he said. “As we add certain performance metrics onto the system, we have to be cognizant of time. We have to be intentional about how this data is going to be used and make it a longitudinal approach where we're not just going to be trying things hit or miss, but rather everything we're employing is very scientifically driven.”

The goal isn't simply to collect more data. Over time, the opportunity is to connect those insights across health and performance, creating a more complete picture of the athlete and helping players make more informed decisions about their health, recovery and performance.

That emphasis on connecting information to action is a common thread across the medical and performance teams: A cardiac screening isn't simply a test. A movement assessment isn't simply a measurement. Recovery isn't simply a collection of treatments.

Each is another piece of a larger picture of the athlete, translating test insights into meaningful action.

Seeing the whole athlete

That may ultimately be the defining feature of the Cleveland Clinic partnership: the ability to bring multiple disciplines together around the same player, connecting health and performance rather than treating each in isolation.

Dr. Singh points to her work with Tour players as a prime example. While her expertise may be cardiology, the partnership between Cleveland Clinic and the Tour is designed to keep that work from existing in isolation. A player can have access to cardiology, dermatology, sports medicine, physical therapy and athletic training specialists who can view different aspects of an athlete as connected rather than isolated. Singh sees that integration as the real strength of the partnership.

“That is the beauty of this multi-institute relationship that we have here,” Singh said. “When do you see the cardiologist with the dermatologist, with the sports medicine doc, right? And the physical therapist, and an athletic trainer. When do you see everybody in that one room?

“We're not a thousand different pieces that are just floating in space. We are interconnected, just as ourselves, and certainly with our surrounding humans.”

“It's like the butterfly effect. If something is off in your body, it's going to lead to a whole cascade of reactions.

“We work very well because when one of us identifies something, the rest of the team, which has the capacity of having so much knowledge in one space, is able to connect that to this, this to this, ultimately really creating a holistic approach for that one individual, that not only optimizes their performance and their performance mindset, but it optimizes their physicality and their ability to do what they want to do.”

That interconnectedness mirrors the broader evolution of player care on the PGA Tour.

Hospel’s “pit road” analogy, Hug’s comparison of modern players to Ferraris and Saluan’s emphasis on scientifically driven, longitudinal data all point toward the same philosophy: The modern professional golfer is an athlete whose health and performance cannot be separated into neat categories.

For the player walking through the Performance Truck, that interconnectedness can feel remarkably simple: Walk in, get what you need, learn something about your body and get back to competing.

Behind the scenes, however, it represents a much larger shared objective between the PGA Tour and Cleveland Clinic: Keep the player healthy. Keep the player performing. And, ultimately, help the player stay on the course for years to come.