In June 2015, pro golfer Will Wilcox was standing on the green at the final hole of the Fed-Ex St. Jude Championship in Memphis, Tenn. Ahead of him was a snaking 40-foot putt.
Make it and there was a check for $114,000 waiting.
Cool as you like, Wilcox stepped up and drained it like it was a tap-in.
“Most players would look at that as a good week’s work and go home. But I didn’t. I just went straight to a heroin dealer’s house to score. Ended up having a knife pulled on me too,” he said, matter of factly.
“That’s drugs. They take you to some strange, dark places.”
As this week’s PGA Championship concludes at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Okla., and players chase the $2.16 million first prize, it’s worth remembering that not every professional golfer lives a life of luxury.
Will Wilcox certainly doesn’t — but he has his reasons.
The 35-year-old grew up in Pell City, Ala., a small town just east of the state’s second biggest city, Birmingham. His mother, Kim, was a talented golfer who once dreamt of playing the LPGA Tour but worked as the head professional at their local track, Pine Harbor Country Club.
When he got his first set of clubs aged five, Wilcox accompanied his mom to work, taking full advantage of the facilities and, over time, honing a game that marked him out as one of the state’s most talented young golfers.
But Pell City was no place to grow up.
In his teens, new temptations emerged. Aged 13, he socialized with older kids, who were drinking, smoking marijuana and popping pills — and he dived right in.
Of the eight people in Wilcox’s high school friendship group, one became a successful engineer, three went to prison for up to 10 years and three are now dead. “My home town and my high school were — and I’m really not kidding — like an open air drug market,” says Wilcox. “In that respect, I’m very much a product of my own environment.”
Wilcox’s teens and early 20s were peppered with petty crime and arrests as alcohol and drugs took him in the wrong direction. It culminated in him being thrown off the golf team at University of Alabama at Birmingham, where his mother was then coaching the women’s team. He was, he admits, his parents’ “worst nightmare.”
Kicked out by his parents, Wilcox moved in with his sister in Auburn, Ala. He took a job making pizzas for $5.50 an hour, working 45 hours a week, and paying his sister $100 monthly rent. Another job came at a paper mill where he earned $9 an hour.
Running out of options, he tried to join the Navy in 2006 — but even they didn’t want him, not with his rap sheet. With no money and no future, he took his golf clubs to a pawn shop but when they offered him just $50, he decided to keep them.
It was that rarest of things — a good decision at a time when Wilcox was making too many bad ones.
Then his luck changed. A friend of his father’s, Barry Harwell, was coach of Division II college Clayton State, outside Atlanta, Ga. He offered Wilcox a full ride. It was the break he needed — and he delivered in spades. A three-time All-American, Wilcox also won eight college events and the 2008 Alabama Amateur Championship.
There were blips. While at Clayton, Wilcox overdosed on cocaine and was hospitalized, his heart rate hitting 222 BPM. Not surprisingly, he never touched it again.
But very little else was off limits and, increasingly, he turned to opioids like Percocet, Xanax and Hydrocodone. He was even snorting heroin, though Wilcox knew people who had died doing it. “I have tons of regrets and that’s a big one,” he said.
Despite his addictions, he went on to go pro and make big money. From 2014-2018, Wilcox amassed around $4 million from winnings and sponsorships.
“And that, for me, was a license to party,” he said.
He was still on heroin when he waltzed onto the Nationwide Tour in 2011. “I started making good money there,” he recalled. “I must have made a couple of hundred grand but I’d lost it all by 2012 just because of the drugs.”
By 2013, Wilcox had relocated to St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands, to get himself clean. He began playing some of the best golf of his young life, including shooting the Holy Grail of the game, a sub-60 round at the Utah Championship.
‘My home town and my high school were — and I’m really not kidding — like an open air drug market.’
Will Wilcox
But as the checks kept coming, the cravings returned — and Wilcox began using again.
Back in Alabama, Wilcox’s family were largely oblivious to his off-course issues. With a healthy bank balance, he would often treat his parents, almost to throw them off the scent. “I would get their yard landscaped or pay for something they needed to be done to their house,” he said. “In their eyes, I was the golden boy.”
It’s only now that they know the extent of Wilcox’s struggles. “Back then, I might give them snippets of what I was doing but I would really bend the truth,” he said. “Besides, you don’t want to scare your family. You definitely need to sugar coat it some.”
Fortunately for Wilcox, drug testing in the game was relatively lax. “You’re tested maybe twice a year but you still have to be careful,” he explained. “You just have to watch what you take and stay hydrated.”
He wasn’t always successful. In 2013, aged 27, he won the South Georgia Classic and finished seventh on the Korn Ferry Tour money list, earning himself a ticket to the gold-paved streets of the PGA Tour.
But a positive test for marijuana at the Boise Open in Idaho before his rookie season started landed him a six-month suspension. “Of all the things I’d taken, it was weed that got me,” he laughed. “You can take opiates like hydrocodone and that’s OK. Go ahead, take that stuff that turns your organs to concrete. Have at it. Eat a big bowl of ’em for breakfast!”
When he finally took his place on the PGA Tour in 2014, Wilcox couldn’t believe he had made it. “I remember looking for my locker. They’re all lined up alphabetically so I get to mine and whose is it right next to it? Tiger Woods! F—–g crazy!”
He played rounds with many top players, including Brooks Koepka, former world No. 1 Jason Day and the 2009 US Open champion Lucas Glover. “He’s one of my favorite players and the first time I played with him I shot 65 and he shot 77,” he said. “I couldn’t believe I’d beaten a US Open champion by 12 shots over 18 holes. I was like ‘what the f–k!’”
Everything seemed to be going to plan, even if he was suffering from withdrawal symptoms most weeks.
Golf fans were rooting for him. “I’m a small-town kid from Alabama — ain’t no silver spoon here. I didn’t grow up playing elite clubs like Riviera or frickin’ Shinnecock,” he said. “Maybe people liked that? I was kind of an underdog out there, an everyman I guess.”
Like the prodigal son, Wilcox returned to Pell City in December 2014 but on Christmas Day he found himself not at home with his family, but in a run-down hotel room scoring heroin from a dealer. “It’s what happens when you’re addicted,” he reflects. “And then I had to go home for the family dinner. Let’s say I was very inebriated.”
Having qualified for the lucrative end of season FedEx Cup playoffs in 2015, Wilcox was unable to play in the second event of the PGA Tour, the Deutsche Bank Championship in Boston, having spent the week before smoking weed and popping pills. A positive drug test was a risk he couldn’t afford so he withdrew, blaming it on a minor injury.
Wilcox returned to action the following season, and even made a hole-in-one at the most famous par-three hole in golf — the 17th at Sawgrass — during the Players’ Championship in 2016. It was the first ace there in 14 years and Wilcox remains just one of seven players to do it. His family were there in the gallery to see it too.
It was a rare highlight in a year that saw his form and health deteriorate. By 2017, his 73-event run on the PGA Tour was over. Publicly, his decline was blamed on a wrist injury but only Wilcox knew the real reason.
‘I’m lucky that I’ve come out the other side and I haven’t destroyed my organs and my body.’
Will Wilcox
By the end of 2021, he had even lost his card for the second-string Korn Ferry Tour and, disillusioned, decided to retire from golf, aged just 35.
But, without the day-to-day distraction of playing, Wilcox was at a crossroads. He could carry on using and end up as another statistic or seek help. “I was withering away, mentally and physically, which was becoming more and more clear to my loved ones — so they intervened,” he said.
His friends and family rallied around, finding him a treatment center. In February, he attended the clinic of Dr Krishna Donaparthi in Atlanta, Ga., a specialist who uses electro-shocking of the brain to reduce the symptoms of withdrawal by up to 70%. “It cost as much as a Honda Civic,” said Wilcox. “But I credit Dr. Krishna for saving my life, I really do.”
A few months later, Wilcox is back in the groove. “Now I have clarity in my mind,” he said. “I feel like a kid again.”
In April, he won his first event without his “birdie pills,” cantering to a seven-stroke win at an Emerald Coast Golf Tour event at the Holiday Golf Club in Panama City, Fla. It was the first time he had won a tournament clean.
“Just holding a big check again means the world,” he said after his victory, “and getting it sober means even more.”
On Thursday May 5, Wilcox and 84 other players took part in local qualifying for this year’s US Open, to be played at The Country Club, Brookline, Mass., from June 16-19. With just five places available for the next and final stage of qualifying, Wilcox shot 66 at RTJ Golf Trail at Silver Lakes in Gadsden, Ala., and comfortably made it through.
Next up is Final Qualifying at Woodmont Country Club in Rockland, Md., on June 6 where Wilcox will attempt to go one better and make it through to the starting field.
Next, he will attempt to regain his PGA Tour card. “I’m lucky that I’ve come out the other side and I haven’t destroyed my organs and my body. I can still swing the club pretty well,” said Wilcox, who is single and has no children.
And if the golf doesn’t work out then the 35-year-old, now living in Moody, Ala., is happy to help spread the word about the dangers of drug abuse. “I just want to raise some awareness about what kind of wild s–t that’s going on with kids these days,” he said. “The number one cause of death for 18-40 year-old males in America is overdose and that’s a big deal.
“I should have died many times in my life but if I can stop anybody from going down that path then that’s what I want to do.”
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