Will Zalatoris might be well positioned to make himself a top comeback player during the 2026 PGA Tour season.
During Tuesday’s media availability in advance of The American Express in La Quinta, Calif., he confirmed that could be a possibility.
“I want to try to play my way into some Signature Events,” Zalatoris, coming back from multiple back surgeries, said. “I feel like I’m very capable of it.”
A hot breakout candidate following his first PGA victory at the 2022 FedEx St. Jude Championship, Zalatoris instead fell victim to several back issues, limiting his tournament appearances and leading to multiple surgeries.
Most notably, he underwent a microdiscectomy in the spring of 2023 and had a more recent procedure last May, a disk replacement, which ended his 2025 season prematurely.
For a player who had peaked at No. 7 in the world before suffering a tumble down the rankings, those surgeries called into question Zalatoris’ future.
“Any time you have to go through three surgeries in basically a three-and-a-half-year span you kind of question, ‘Am I able to continue to do this?'” Zalatoris said.
His commitment never wavered, even during periods when he had to skip weeks of competition and even downplay the severity of the pain he was enduring.
“At the U.S. Open at Brookline (in 2022), I remember getting out of the car, being in the final two groups, the second your car pulls in you have a camera right there once you get out,” he said. “And I remember trying to hide kind of my limp heading into the last round. Just because of how stiff I was and how locked up my back was.”
Incredibly, Zalatoris finished in a tie for second at that event, but after enduring major surgery — without disk replacement — in 2023, he soon determined that the technology and medicine had advanced enough to justify making the move in ‘25.
“Any time that you hear a disk replacement, I think, or any sort of replacement, people kind of start getting a little edgy and go, ‘Oh my goodness, I can’t believe you went through that,'” Zalatoris said.
“We’ve got the technology. We’ve been putting it in long drive guys. We’ve been putting it in hockey players. It’s been saving guys’ careers.”
The procedure required a period of rest afterward, but Zalatoris noticed a difference immediately after he was able to start hitting balls again. He’s been able to press himself into some 36-hole days. And now he’s ready to make his 2026 debut at a course he’s had some success at, most recently finishing in a tie for 12th a year ago.
“I feel like everything’s in a much simpler place,” he added. “I’m not at home hitting a million golf balls, trying to figure out my golf swing, when in reality I had a compromised back. I’m now going out and playing golf for a dollar or two with friends. That’s stuff that I haven’t been able to do.”
–Field Level Media
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