DiCesare: Idled by surgery, Hart planning another comeback
Published: August 02, 2009, 12:30 am
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Golf’s a fickle game. Sometimes it’s difficult to discern why a pro who played wonderfully one season suddenly finds himself struggling the next. Could it be fleeting confidence, a sudden swing glitch, a physical ailment? Whatever the reason there was no doubt about it. The Dudley Hart of 2009 was far from the same player who won PGA Tour Comeback Player of the Year honors in 2008, when he scored six top-10 finishes in 22 starts and set a personal best with more than $2.2 million in season earnings.
What Hart didn’t let on is that his back was a mess. Or was it his hip? The lone certainty is that he was spending almost as much time in rehabilitation as he was on the course, hoping exercise and desire would eliminate or at least mitigate the pain.
“It was bugging me most of the year, pretty much all the year, bugging me at different levels,” Hart said Friday from his home in Clarence. “In the good times it would be just a real stiffness in my back. As it turns out, my muscles were just trying to protect the area, so much that I felt I had a real hard time turning on it. That was when it was at its best. When it got bad, my leg would go numb, my hip would be real painful. I really thought I had messed my hip up at first. I tried to fight through it.”
Come late May, his frustration building, Hart pulled out of the Players Championship after one round. “I had to come home and figure out what was going on,” he said. “I could do everything but swing a golf club, which is obviously a problem when you swing a golf club for a living. Anything with a 9-iron down I had a chance. Like at Colonial, it’s not a long course. Otherwise, I was hitting 4- irons from 175, 180 yards. I was completely dinking it.”
A magnetic resonance imaging test revealed the problem. Hart herniated a disk nine years ago, when he prepped for the British Open by playing practice rounds in Ireland with his dad, former Wanakah pro Chuck Hart, fellow PGA Tour pro Jeff Sluman, and close friend and Buffalo Sabres coach Lindy Ruff. The MRI showed a different affliction in the same area.
“I found out my hip was fine, but basically my L5-S1 disk was gone,” Hart said. “It was bone on bone.”
He had surgery five weeks ago, the L5 and S1 disks of the lower back fused to eliminate the grinding, bone spurs that rubbed the nerve removed.
“The doctors feel once I heal it should buy me a good 15, 20 years of playing competitive golf,” said Hart, who turns 41 on Tuesday. “The doctor said an aggressive timeline would be six months until I’m practicing full bore. He said six to nine months. The way I’m feeling right now, not that I’m feeling I could hit balls, but I’m five weeks post-surgery and I’m feeling pretty good. I walk about 45 minutes to an hour on the treadmill and that’s the extent of my activity.”
Hart received a medical exemption in 2007, when his wife, Suzanne, was found to have a lung tumor. He’s been granted another medical exemption for this season, guaranteeing him entry into at least 15 tournaments next year, making it possible he’ll win Comeback Player of the Year for the second time in three seasons (There’s precedent. Steve Stricker won the award in consecutive years, 2006-07).
“When I won it I said I hope I’m never up for that award again,” Hart said. “But now that I’m in this position, I hope I’m up for it next season.”
The idleness is boring him to tears. He’s spending more time with the 8- year-old triplets, Ryan, Rachel and Abigail, but with strict limitations.
“Granted, I can hang around with the family but I can’t really do a lot of activities with them,” he said. “I can’t go out and throw the ball around, I can’t shoot pucks with my son in the backyard. It’s frustrating from that standpoint, not even being able to go outside and putt when you’re used to being active. Not even rehab. Even rehab would be great. . . . because then you’re working toward something instead of just waiting for bones to grow.”
There’s one benefit to Hart’s idleness. He’s a rabid Sabres fan, and he figures he’ll be able to catch every game through December. Although one might conclude, based on two straight nonplayoff seasons, that his frustration might continue to mount.
“I think like a lot of other people, as a fan, that although the season hasn’t started yet I was hoping maybe they’d make a couple moves just to kind of get a little bit different look,” Hart said. “But I think they got a chance to be good if everybody stays healthy, if you can get a couple of players playing a little bit better than they did last year, they could be a good team. You get into the playoffs in hockey and anything can happen, and I think they should have a great chance of making the playoffs. And I wouldn’t be surprised if something happens between now and the season where someone’s signed or traded or something like that.”
Sounds like inside information?
“If I did have inside info trust me, I wouldn’t risk my friendship [with Ruff],” he said. “It’s just a feeling. Everybody in the organization knows that there’s a lot of heat on everybody this year and I’d be surprised if there isn’t a small change. I don’t think they have the money to make any big kind of move, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see another veteran guy or something like that added for that locker room presence. That’s a complete guess.”
Once the seasons commence, the Bills and the Sabres will be his diversion until he receives the go-ahead to begin working on his short game, his putting, before progressing to the full game and playing without restriction, and hopefully without the pain that’s been his constant companion for almost a decade. Even when he shot in the 60s the final three rounds in his final tournament, at Colonial, he knew he’d hit the wall.
“Every shot was painful. I pretty much looked at myself and said, ‘You know what. This was about as good as I could do under the circumstances.’ I don’t know what I finished, middle of the pack. I knew if I went to the U. S. Open trying to play that golf course the way I was playing, I wouldn’t have broken 75 or 76, no way.”
bdicesare@buffnews.com
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