‘It was brutal’: How a bizarre illness derailed Myrtle Beach golfer’s career — until now
Patrick Lundy wanted to tell people why his body had changed, why he kept withdrawing from tournaments, and why his golf game had regressed.
But he couldn’t. He didn’t know.
The Myrtle Beach touring professional only knew he was sick, and he was unable to get answers or a reliable diagnosis as to why.
For about three years into last summer, Lundy battled a bizarre illness that derailed his golf career and life.
He gained 60 pounds on his svelte 6-foot frame, his body was bloated, he was continually nauseous, and his blood pressure spiked.
“It was a hell of an experience for sure,” Lundy said. “It was so difficult because I had so much trouble explaining to anybody what was wrong, and you have doctors looking at you going, ‘We know something’s wrong but we can’t figure it out.’ It was brutal.”
Though Lundy still has not received a definitive diagnosis with supporting test results for what has ailed him, and still has to monitor his health, he has identified the source of his sickness as perplexing food allergies that he has been able to control with a strict diet.
He has recovered physically and mentally over the past year and is about to resume a promising career with a golf game he believes is better than it has ever been – with some scores to support his conviction.
In his 12th year as a pro at the age of 30, and with the help of some financial backers, Lundy feels this may not only be his best opportunity to succeed and reach the highest levels of pro golf, there’s also an urgency to his comeback.
“I would say this is my last opportunity,” Lundy said. “. . . I’m already 30 years old. Not that that’s any sort of pressure, but it seems like it’s time to do it now or find something else to do. I feel super positive about it. This is the only thing I want to do in life, but you can only have so many chances at something because this is an expensive thing to do.”
The illness
When Lundy left to play on the Asian Development Tour in 2016 before his health issues surfaced, he weighed 165 pounds. By last summer, he weighed 225. Even his glove size had changed from a medium to a large.
“I put on 60 pounds in three or four years and hadn’t changed anything,” said Lundy, who now weights 180. “I was puffy in the face, I looked like somebody that was on steroids. I was puffy, I was tired, I was lethargic. I felt awful.”
Over the course of a year, Lundy said he withdrew from eight or nine events, and the only excuse he could offer tournament directors was he was sick.
“I would be extremely nauseous at times. Sometimes it would be throwing up and sick at night,” he said. “. . . I would feel okay at 7 o’clock in the morning, I would go to the golf tournament and be alright then I would break out in sweats, I’d break out in cold sweats, I’d be nauseous.
“Nausea is brutal. When it’s bad it’s hard to compete, it’s hard to live. It really sucks to even get out of bed.”
Without an explanation, Lundy and others began to question the physical validity of his illness.
“For about a year and a half or a two-year stretch, I was more convinced by other people that it was just mental – it was anxiety, it was stress from being on the road, it was stress from playing golf, it was stress from maybe not being as successful as I wanted to be, you know just average life stuff,” Lundy said. “But I knew there was something extra there.”
Lundy’s blood pressure rose at times to as high as 160/100, which was an indication his body was being shocked.
“It’s when my blood pressure started shooting up through the roof is when they started saying, ‘There’s something really wrong with this guy, we have to figure out what it is,’ ” Lundy said.
Lundy went to multiple doctors in an attempt to identify the illness. Preliminary diagnosis’ included diverticulitis and other intestinal issues. He was prepared to go to the Johns Hopkins Hospital and biomedical research facility for testing.
“Finally I started going to some dieticians and nutritionists and started figuring out I was allergic to a lot of foods. We found out that I was allergic to just about everything I was eating,” he said.
One dietician told Lundy the allergies may have always been in his system and eventually came to the forefront, and another believes they developed because of the unhealthiness of today’s food – with chemicals and additives often impacting them – combined with the relative susceptibility of his immune system.
Lundy was a sickly child who was stricken by random illnesses including strep throat and pneumonia, and was often on medication. “Which might have contributed to things down the road from being on different antibiotics when I was younger,” he said.
To improve his health last year, Lundy essentially detoxed for 90 days and didn’t drink alcohol, didn’t drink or eat anything acidic, didn’t drink or eat dairy, and didn’t eat red meat.
“I had to reboot my system completely by having nothing go in my system, and that’s what I did,” said Lundy, who ate a lot of grilled chicken and organic vegetables for three months, and saw his body fat drop to about 3 percent. “Since I went through that reboot, and we figured out my blood pressure issue, I haven’t gotten super ill. But I can still feel I get a little sensitive every now and then.
“There is a chance it could always flare up again and I will have to go through that system reboot once again.”
Lundy doesn’t want to stick exclusively to his cleansing diet, however, because it lacks energy.
“I just do not have that much energy to be able to compete throughout a whole day eating on that reboot process,” Lundy said. “So I feel like I do need some protein and I do need some red meat every now and then, I just have to keep everything very moderate.”
From SwingThought and GPro to PGA Tour?
Over the past few weeks, Lundy has carded a pair of 60s and a 62 at the par-72 Surf Golf and Beach Club, where he’s a member, and this past weekend he carded a 9-under 63 at the Grande Dunes Resort Course.
He believes his game is better than ever. “Not only do I feel like it, it’s easy to show on paper. My scores are pretty low,” Lundy said.
He was playing well prior to the pro golf shutdown because of COVID-19 early this year, and finished second at 12-under over two rounds to longtime PGA Tour member Chris Kirk on a Florida Professional Golf Tour event.
His play has enticed a few members of the Surf Club in North Myrtle Beach to become investors. They are financing his play for the remainder of 2020 and will reassess for 2021. The club has adopted and supported Lundy.
“I feel like that’s why I’m playing a lot better,” said Lundy, who has lived on the Grand Strand for two decades. He moved to Little River from Durham, N.C., at the age of 11 and was homeschooled. “The people who are members here are really supportive of me and it’s a positive atmosphere to be in, and the golf course is fun to play. Even the pro shop guys and [staff] are supportive.
“It really does seem like I’m representing this place.”
Opportunities to play on tours domestically have diminished over the past several years, and Lundy plans to play in events on the Grand Strand-headquartered SwingThought Tour and North Carolina-based GPro Tour, while also competing in qualifiers for PGA and Korn Ferry tour events.
He intends to enter the Korn Ferry Tour Qualifying Tournament for the 2021 season, and if he doesn’t qualify he plans to attempt to qualify for PGA Tour subsidiary tours in Canada, China and Latin America.
Lundy has nine professional wins, including one on what was a highly competitive NGA Hooters Tour, and was the leading money winner on the NGA Tour’s Carolina Series when he recorded three wins in one season.
He has come close to competing on the world’s top tours.
He reached the finals of PGA Tour Q-School prior to 2013 when it became the Korn Ferry Q-School (formerly the Web.com Tour), and has reached the second of three stages of that Q-School three times.
His best opportunity to reach the Korn Ferry Q-School finals – which guarantees at least conditional status on the PGA Tour’s primary feeder circuit featuring tournament purses of at least $600,000 – came in 2016.
There were 18 spots and ties available to reach the final stage from his second stage site and he was in the top five entering the final round at 7 under despite playing through a fever and flu, which had him vomiting the morning of the final round.
He shot a 7-over 78 in the final round and plummeted into a tie for 36th.
“I pretty much choked,” Lundy recalls. “I was ill, but I couldn’t really honestly blame it on that. I was nervous. It was a chance to take my career from here to there, and I kind of folded under the pressure.”
He has twice missed qualifying for the U.S. Open in sectional qualifiers by one shot.
He had to make one previous career comeback, after shoulder surgery in early 2013 to repair a torn labrum and correct a genetic condition that had a tendon growing over a bone in the wrong direction. That caused him to miss the first several months of the 2013 season.
This comeback may be his best, and could be his last, one way or another.
This story was originally published September 29, 2020 at 10:24 AM.
