The last time Kevin Stadler teed it up at a PGA Tour event, Brooks Koepka was ranked No. 22 in the world, Francesco Molinari was No. 42 and Justin Thomas No. 99.
This week, when Stadler plays in the Sanderson Farms Championship that starts on Thursday in Jackson, Miss., Koepka is No. 1 in the world, Thomas is fourth and Molinari sixth.
Yes, it’s been that long.
Stadler — a part-time Denver resident who won a state high school title while at Kent Denver, notched victories in two CGA Match Plays and captured the Colorado Open championship in his pro debut in 2002 — this week will be competing on the PGA Tour for the first time since missing the cut in the John Deere Classic in July 2015. The last time Stadler has made a cut on the world’s top tour was over four years ago, at the Shiners Hospitals for Children Open.
“There’s no reason to stay away now (from the PGA Tour),” Stadler said in an interview with ColoradoGolf.org after missing the cut in the CoBank Colorado Open in late July.
Stadler won the 2014 Waste Management Phoenix Open for his first victory on the PGA Tour, finished eighth at the Masters that spring and placed 36th on the Tour money list that season with more than $2.3 million in earnings. That’s in addition to being runner-up in the 2014 European Tour’s Alstom Open de France at the course that hosted the 2018 Ryder Cup.
But just as Stadler was becoming one of the better players on the PGA Tour, things went awry in a hurry. In November 2014 while competing in China, he began experiencing major pain in his left hand.
“It literally felt like I had a firecracker going off in my palm every time I’d practice,” he said in 2016. “It was a nightmare.”
It turns out Stadler had a broken hamate bone and nerve damage. But it took a l-o-n-g time for the doctors to come to that conclusion — years, in fact. In August 2017, he finally had the surgery that alleviated the pain.
“It’s 100 percent (healed),” Stadler said regarding the hand in late July. “They couldn’t diagnose it for the longest time. It was the same bone they were fixated on the whole time. But for the previous 18 months I kept being told it was fully healed. It was actually broken and kept getting worse, but I kept being told it was fine. Because I didn’t know what was wrong, I kept trying to play and dealing with the pain, which caused a lot of funky things to pop up in my golf swing. A lot of different hand motion and stuff that instinctively happened to lessen the pain. It still hurt like hell, but it was less.
“It feels fine now, but the motor skills have taken over that I’ve got to unwind. That’s what I’m working on right now.”
Stadler will compete in the 2018-19 PGA Tour wraparound season on a major medical extension. He will have 26 tournaments to earn at least $717,890 in order to keep his exempt status.
Stadler has certainly competed since initially getting injured in November 2014 — just not on the PGA Tour. There were three events in 2015 — the Hyundai Tournament of Champions, the Masters and the aforementioned John Deere Classic. Between 2017 and ’18, there have been four tournaments on the Web.com Tour, where Stadler won four times more than a decade ago. And he finished 41st in the 2016 Colorado Open and missed the cut at that same event this year. In every case, he was either still injured or trying to knock the considerable rust off his game.
“I developed a lot of really ugly habits in my golf swing that I have to unwind,” he said at the Colorado Open almost three months ago. “It’s great coming out and seeing what it is in competition.
“The whole thing (regarding damage in the hand) was a mess. I was told it was a stress fracture. A year later I was told it was fully healed, but it kept getting worse. I stopped after having about 6-8 MRIs on it. They told me it was healed for nine months in a row and I was still having pain. They couldn’t find the answer for it. The pain finally got back to day 1 excruciating last summer (in 2017). I was told it was 75 percent broken. I’d seen six different hand surgeons — and they’re all in major league baseball. I had two out of maybe six or seven guys tell me I needed surgery initially and the other guys said not to.
“But it’s doing great now. I just need to figure out how to get the game back in working order.”
Stadler has competed in 264 PGA Tour events over his career, winning about $9.7 million. And now he’s looking forward to a full-schedule season for the first time since 2013-14, when he played in 26 events.
“I can just play like a normal season,” the 38-year-old said. “Ideally I’d just make the playoffs next year and get my (card) that way and don’t have to worry about starts or anything. But worse-case scenario, if I play say 21-22 events, then I have four more for the following season to try to get whatever I may need.”
During the Colorado Open, Stadler appeared to have dropped some weight.
“I’m just trying to get rid of what I found in the last few years off,” he said. “I needed to drop some. Being away from marching on a golf course 25 times a year, five days a week, it snuck up on me and stacked them on. So starting to get rid of a few.”
Also in the Sanderson Farms field this week are several other competitors with strong Colorado ties: Jim Knous and Wyndham Clark, who like Stadler grew up in Colorado; former Fort Collins resident Sam Saunders; and former Colorado State University golfer Martin Laird.
