“People think the hardest part of leaving professional sports is the goodbye. It’s not. It’s the silence that follows.” — Steve Wheatcroft, “Cocktails and Range Balls: One’s Too Many, Ten’s Not Enough”
Steve Wheatcroft did not exactly make a lot of noise during his professional golf career. You had to be listening closely.
There were two Korn Ferry Tour wins. (Louder, please.) He set a Korn Ferry Tour record for margin of victory when he won the 2011 Melwood Prince George’s County Open by a stunning 12 shots. (Amazing, but a little louder, please.) And he won four times each on the now defunct Golden Bear and Gateway Tours. (C’mon, you can turn up the volume higher than that.)
Wheatcroft, a native of Indiana, Pennsylvania, earned his PGA Tour card seven times and successfully retained it just once; reached a high of 234th in the Official World Golf Ranking; finished 63rd in the 2010 U.S. Open — his only major championship appearance; and once led the John Deere Classic with an opening-round 62. His best FedEx Cup points finish was 114th. He’s even got a Wikipedia page devoted to him.
After turning pro in 2001 following a career at Indiana University, the man simply known as “Wheatie” by his fellow players earned $1.1 million on the Korn Ferry Tour and $2.9 million on the PGA Tour over two decades.
That’s $4 million. By any measure, Wheatcroft was a success.
Is that loud enough for you?
It should be. Wheatcroft, 48, retired from pro golf in 2019 even though he still had full Korn Ferry Tour status. He cited burnout, travel and a desire to spend more time at home with his wife and two kids.
“The $1.5 million sounds incredible but then you have to take expenses and taxes out,” Wheatcroft told “The Golf Show 2.0” podcast last week. “You’ve got to pay the caddie. I don’t think I played out there a year when I didn’t spend $125,000 or $150,000 on expenses for flights, hotels, caddie fees and all the stuff. It adds up.
“Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great job. I loved being out there every minute of it. I wouldn’t have traded it for the world, but it’s definitely not as glamorous as you think.”
Half a dozen outstanding golf books have already been published in 2026, including “Rory,” “All Carry,” “Aren’t You That Golf Guy?” and “Tiger v. Jack,” to name a few.
None of them are as short as Wheatcroft’s 137-page “Cocktails and Range Balls: One’s Too Many, Ten’s Not Enough” (“I’m not a big reader so I kept it short,” he jokes). Or as important, especially in the wake of golfers who struggled with mental health or other issues such as Gary Woodland, Grayson Murray and Tiger Woods.
Yes, Wheatcroft’s breezy stories recall his grinding successes and his flaming failures in golf. And there are plenty of tour anecdotes, such as one about The Pooping Bandit, who has a less classy nickname in reality. The Korn Ferry player would leave unsavorily pungent messages for unpopular players who broke unspoken Tour etiquette, such as playing slowly or stepping in another player’s putting line. The Bandit expressed his displeasure by adeptly delivering his feces inside the box of a dozen balls routinely left in a player’s locker.
The important part of the book is Wheatcroft’s post-golf descent into alcohol dependency and how he spiraled down. Wheatcroft bravely spills his guts, tells his innermost thoughts and relives his lowest lows in this gut-wrenching account.
Post-golf, he worked at a financial institution in a pretty good job. Eventually, he began to feel unhappy, even empty, and didn’t understand why.
“When I competed in golf, if you kicked me or knocked me down, I’d get right back up and keep fighting,” he says. “But at work, I went through a month where I woke up every day and as soon as my feet hit the floor, I felt this black cloud was waiting for me.”
He didn’t know he was suffering from depression, a symptom likely caused by the silence of his post-golf life. Then came the straw that buckled the camel like a torn ACL. He had a big financial deal that was about to go through, which meant a much-needed commission for his family. Then he got a text from the client informing him that the deal was on hold for at least a year.
“It shouldn’t have shocked me, but I just snapped that morning,” Wheatcroft says. “I kind of had a mini-panic attack. My heart started racing, my hands started sweating, my face got hot. My wife was already out of the house, my kids were at school.
“It was 7:15 in the morning, I walked over and poured a big glass of vodka, put a little orange juice on top, sat down, turned on “SportsCenter” and realized after 20 minutes how relaxed I was and how I didn’t care about anything,” he says. “I got up, poured another one and that was the start of a very bad road. It numbed me enough to where I didn’t care about anything. And I loved that. I describe it as a warm blanket that would comfort me so I didn’t have to feel stress, joy — anything.”
Wheatcroft staggered through the next two and a half years as a functional drunk. His wife had no idea he was drinking, neither did friends at his workplace. He put on weight and was in and out of hospitals, admittedly in bad shape. They didn’t recognize the lie he was living.
“I was going to be dead within a year,” Wheatcroft said. “My liver was failing. All my organs were starting to fail.”
He finally checked into a treatment center, where he spent 35 days and learned a sobering truth, no pun intended. “I knew very quickly that alcohol wasn’t the problem,” he says. “It was just what I was using to mask the problem. I had to dig in and figure out why I hated myself and why I had to lean on alcohol.”
The answer came slowly. Without golf, he didn’t know who he was. The silence that follows.
“I lost track of my faith, my family, my friendships, my hobbies,” he says. “I let everything go by the wayside because I was so focused on being Steve the golfer and that’s all I knew I was, since I was 4 years old, and now I wasn’t. Steve the financial advisor wasn’t a bad thing but it just wasn’t the same.”
One setback during his treatment stay was when he was watching the telecast of the PGA Tour event at Colonial Country Club. Wheatcroft would commandeer the facility’s TV to watch golf on weekends.
“I’m watching Colonial and all of a sudden, Grayson Murray’s face was on the screen,” Wheatcroft recalls. “They had the year when he was born and the year when he died — now — and I just lost it because he was my ‘beacon of hope.’ He was the one who had beaten depression and beaten alcohol — not that you beat it, but you manage it. He’d won the Sony Open a few months earlier, $3.5 million, he was engaged to be married and everything seemed so perfect.”
It was three weeks into Wheatcroft’s stay and suddenly, he felt a reckoning. Wheatcroft believed he was in a good place and was almost fine to leave and then, Grayson …
“He looked like he had it all put together and here I am, still sitting in the treatment center trying to figure it out,” he says. “It made me take a hard look at my own recovery. We all watched the Grayson Murray story and we couldn’t relate, we couldn’t understand. In one of the recovery meetings, somebody told me, ‘It’s like the devil might not be here in the room with you but he’s outside in the parking lot doing push-ups, waiting for you. I’ll never forget that line. Just know that he’s always waiting for you.”
At this point, “Cocktails and Range Balls: One’s Too Many, Ten’s Not Enough” may sound like a downer. But in fact, it’s a tale of hope.
Wheatcroft improved, returned to his family and regular life in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, where he now resides. His next chapter is already in progress. He created The Mulligan Foundation, a nonprofit institution to help athletes with mental issues or substance abuse issues.
The PGA Tour has programs to help Tour players but Wheatcroft didn’t feel comfortable going through its system and meeting with strangers about what he was going through. A couple of former Tour players had made it known that they struggled with similar problems and were available to talk with anyone who needs help. Wheatcroft did call another Tour player, he didn’t want to say which one, and that started him on the road to getting help. As a result, Wheatcroft wants to be that guy who can provide help for the next person who needs it.
Wheatcroft’s story has already been out there for a few years. When he decided he wanted to be a resource for help, he wrote a letter he was going to send to 200 or so PGA Tour players. The message was something like, “Hey, most of you guys know me and those who don’t, here’s my story and what I’ve been battling for the last two years.”
At the last minute, Wheatcroft decided to post the letter on Twitter instead. “What could go wrong there?” Wheatcroft jokes. “Only four million people reading your life’s darkest secrets.”
It promptly went viral. He took his dog for a walk after posting, came home an hour later and his wife, Sarah, said, “You’re going to want to pick up your phone.”
Why, Steve asked? Has it been ringing?
“It hasn’t stopped since you left,” Sarah answered.
The post racked up nearly 100,000 views while he was out with the dog. The last time he checked, it had more than four million views. “And there wasn’t one piece of negative feedback, which is shocking for social media,” he says.
The recent publication of his book (available at Amazon.com; $23.99) revived interest in his journey. He also has news about the nonprofit Mulligan Foundation, which will officially kick off in May.
The Mulligan Foundation has given Wheatcroft a new mission and a new role. The Foundation’s mission is to provide education and resources to support mental health and wellness in athletes through programs and services, including counseling, support groups and workshops.
How important is mental health? Every case is different, but Gary Woodland underwent brain surgery a few years ago, was struggling with the aftereffects of it and an unseen mental pressure. He went public with his troubles and trauma, and within a few weeks won the Texas Children’s Houston Open in stunning fashion. It can’t be a coincidence that after the pressure of keeping his burden secret was lessened, he found success.
Wheatcroft is hopeful that Tiger Woods can succeed in getting the right kind of help for his problem, allegedly a reliance on painkillers. According to data, more than 5 million Americans suffer from a prescription opioid-use disorder.
“When you’ve experienced it yourself, you know the look,” Wheatcroft says. “Every time I’ve seen Tiger on TV in TGL, he looks high. I can tell by the way he talks, the way his face looks, the way he sweats. I just hope he has the right people around him that get him the right help because I believe he is in a bad place.
“But everybody has kept putting car keys in his hand and saying, ‘Here you go, man, you’re fine.’ I just know he needs help. He’s probably in a great deal of pain every day from what his body has been through. He’s a huge individual. He’s got a lot of muscle but you can see that he’s got a lot of stuff in his body that he shouldn’t have in his body, too. I hope he can find some peace and find a better path.”
He’s Tiger Woods, he certainly has the financial wherewithal to get the best medical help available. After his latest car accident, he wisely turned down the Ryder Cup captaincy and stepped away from golf to get himself right. He got approval to go out of the country to get help, wherever that takes him.
But, like Wheatcroft and others, he has a devil to face. You know, the one who’s out in the parking. The one doing the push-ups.
And he will eventually have to face what Wheatcroft and other athletes have faced, for better or for worse: The sounds of silence.
