Brendan Valdes, when asked if he is sharp, says he is sharp. Sharp, sharp. Sharp sharp.
What if it wasn’t looking at the bottom of the gulf?
He wouldn’t have cleared it.
“Of course, I don’t want to take a sponsor’s invitational position,” he said, “if I don’t feel I can compete.
“But, yeah, I mean, the expectations are just to go out and have fun. Of course, I’m still going to try to win. I’m never going to play an event that I don’t feel capable of.”
It tells you certain things, doesn’t it?
For one, yes, this week, Valdes play on the PGA Tour, at the inaugural Biltmore Asheville Championshipvia a sponsor exemption. But no, he says that the invitation should not be considered as some kind of philanthropy. Dude is a stick, after all. A year ago, he went 3 for 3 in cuts made in the big leagues, and that followed a senior year at Auburn where his game moved him to No. 2 in the college program of the Tour, earning the Korn Ferry Tour starts. Valdes was on his way. But if someone asks if Valdes is really strong, this implies that maybe he was not, and on New Year’s Day, he said that he was “blind”. He had said he had a lung infection – “just a regular ole illness” – and ironically, he’s glad he did.
Who knows, then, if anyone would have ever found the nine-centimeter tumor in the middle of her chest?
Things spiraled. There were low points, plural. Seeing her mother, Tammy, and boyfriend, Rachel Gourley, in the room when the diagnosis came. So go through everything. He said there are complications. At first, he had not received adequate treatment for the lung disease. “That turned into a collapsed lung, pneumonia and a hole in my lung, and that was while I was doing chemo,” he said. For a while, he also developed mouth sores that wouldn’t let him eat or drink; he went to the hospital for that. In a video shared by the PGA Tour’s social media team, Valdes also said he underwent six rounds of chemotherapy before being declared cancer-free.
“It came out of nowhere,” Valdes said. “I would say, yes, golf definitely became secondary at that point. Try and make sure you can get through it, try and make sure you can play golf again. As soon as I was able to do this and understand that I have to do it, then every now and then, if I feel good enough between treatments, I might be able to get up and sit for 30 minutes, 20 things like that.
“Yes, but golf was definitely secondary.”
“Were you expecting to come back this season?”
“No, not really.”
After discovering a tumor in his chest on January 1, Brendan Valdes thought he might not be able to compete again.
Through a journey that consisted of six months away from golf and six rounds of chemotherapy, it is… pic.twitter.com/n3NpbbjXbC
– PGA Tour (@PGATour) September 16, 2026
For about six months, he did not play a course.
When he returned, the process was slow.
He felt slow. His body. His swing. The thing is, JM Butler said, he’s the most positive guy I know. Butler is his best friend and a former Auburn teammate. In a video from the Korn Ferry Tour’s social media team, Butler said Valdes told her during the visits that he would get back, then continued to ask others. Here we go Valdes.
“Just being out walking 18 I didn’t feel much of anything. I’m a younger guy,” Valdes said. “When I came back, especially during the process, it was difficult for me to walk to the mailbox. It took a few months to get back to the point in time where I feel like I’m able to walk 18 holes and not be winded at all.
“So it was a lot of work to do that, a lot of going out and running a little bit, doing a lot of training. But I would say that the stamina process is the big part. And, I mean, in golf I personally believe that strength definitely helps, especially the strength of the wrist. I feel that it is quite big, especially in rough like this.
“But it’s more like speed and torque for me is another thing that I’ve lost; trying to get a lot of that mobility back. So, again, it’s been a lot of training the last few months just trying to get back to where I was.”
And there it was on Thursday.
They talk about him on the Golf Channel. He bogeyed the 10th hole. He made a par there. Bogeyed 11. Birdied 13.
Sharp.
“It’s been a long process and not a lot of fun,” Valdes said, “but now that I’m back, I feel like I’ve put in a little bit of work and a lot of time and effort to really try to get back to where I was.
“Now that I feel like I’m back and I see all the guys out there, I feel like I can go out there and compete. I mean, it was a lot of work, a lot of time and effort to try to get back what I lost for sure during the whole process.
“I feel like I’m ready to compete.”
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