Ryder Cup star reveals anxiety and fear that left him being unable to face golf anymore

Daily Record

22-05-2025

Former Ryder Cup star Chris Wood is finding form again after taking a break to his with struggles
Candid Chris Wood has opened up on the struggles which forced him out of golf and his fight back from the anxiety which meant he simply couldn't face the game.
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The popular English star won the BMW PGA Championship nine years ago and also made a Ryder Cup debut at Hazeltine. But Wood started having doubts about his game and that led him to step away from the sport two years ago.
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The 37-year-old has come back and returned to the Top 10 spots for the first time in almost seven years at the recent Turkish Airlines Open. Wood started this week's Soudal Open in Belgium with one-under par round of 70 to maintain his positive path and gave an insight into his troubles in a stunningly-honest DP World Tour Player Blog.
He wrote: 'I started to feel my swing not becoming my swing towards the end of 2016. I had a year of playing the best golf of my career but I just felt it started to drift.
'In 2019 I was working with my coach and I started to develop some severely wide shots, particularly with my driver, to the point where I didn't carry a driver in the bag at Wentworth at the BMW PGA Championship in 2019, just three years after I'd won it, that's how quickly it got from one point to another.
'From then, I was just riddled with anxiety and fear and tension from the moment I left home for a tournament. It was 24/7 during tournament weeks, I was extremely anxious and not sleeping and it becomes a vicious cycle.
'You're constantly draining energy, but at that point, I was hitting balls like I needed to do it more to make my swing better. There's a saying with golfers: the secret's in the dirt, golf is practice until your hands bleed. But I was in a point where I was not really connected to myself in my swing. I was rightly trusting my coaches, but I wasn't questioning them.
'I hardly played during Covid, I couldn't face it. With the Tour freezing the categories, I didn't have to play and I was starting to recognise those feelings that I was getting in 2019: the anxiety, the fear, the tension and we weren't directly affected at home so we had a really good time.
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'At home my wife Bethany and I had two young children, we've got four now, Jonah, Lottie, Toby and Kasper, but we had two at the time and every day when we'd go for our hour walk which we were allowed to do. Bethany would be the one who was the listener every single day. That was probably the first time I was really talking about how I was feeling about things which was obviously extremely hard for her to listen to and to hear. For someone who has always encouraged me to be playing and then for me to turn around and say I'm not going to be playing, I don't want to be playing and these are the reasons why, my wife has always been someone I tell everything so she has been in the picture the entire time.
'I can remember those walks incredibly well based on the strength of those conversations. I'd then do two hours of practice every afternoon and it was a good balance. But I was not really improving. I should have stopped there but I didn't realise what I was dealing with at that point.
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'I kept going until I lost my card in 2022. But about six weeks before the end of the season, I sat down with DP World Tour doctor Tim Swan and just opened up and revealed I'd been struggling. From there the Tour medical team have been great, they put me in touch with the right people but then I played in South Africa on the HotelPlanner Tour in January 2023 and I just broke down while speaking to my parents on the phone and they just both said 'come home'.
'That was the point where I knew I could not face it any more and I knew I needed to step away and deal with it correctly. I then spent a lot of time working on the burnout I had suffered because of the cycle I had put myself in and then I started to deal with the anxiety. There was never once a part of me that thought that I was done, that the break that I took from the game in 2023 would be permanent.
'You have days where you're feeling severely down, there's no other word for it but depression. But the fire in my belly has never gone away. I've always believed that I've got the ability to play. I'm now starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel both mentally and with my game. My daughter wants a trophy party so she can wear a party dress. My children have not seen me win a tournament, so that's a huge motivator for me.
'I want to get my card back, that's my goal. The result in Turkey has obviously given me a nice few points. I've got a long way to go to be able to do it but that's the aim. Anything beyond that would be a bonus. I've been starting to talk a bit more about my struggles I've been through the last few years. I'm absolutely delighted to be able to feel like that because a few years ago being able to talk about my struggles felt a long way off. I now feel really comfortable with what's happened."