PGA Hope: How Golf Is Helping Veterans Heal After Combat

For ten years, Randy Schack rarely left his house. He drank. He kept to himself. The retired Army veteran, who had manned the Gunner's position in a Humvee before a roadside bomb in Iraq in November 2007 left him with irreparable spinal cord damage and paralysis, had come home to a life that felt like it had no clear direction forward.

His story is not unusual. Many veterans returning from combat zones carry wounds—visible and otherwise—that civilian life is poorly equipped to address. PGA Hope, the flagship military program of the charitable organization PGA Reach, was built with exactly that reality in mind. The acronym stands for Helping Our Patriots Everywhere, and the program delivers on that in concrete terms: a 6-to-8-week structured golf curriculum that takes veterans from learning a proper grip all the way through playing a full round by graduation.

The therapeutic logic is straightforward. Golf demands singular focus. When a veteran is on the course, the immediate task—stance, swing, the next shot—occupies the mind in a way that interrupts the cycle of trauma. As one program leader put it, the goal is to get veterans thinking about something other than what they've been through and what they're still carrying.

For Schack, the draw was also practical. Golf, he noted, is one of the few sports where a person using a specialized cart can compete on genuinely equal footing. He spent nearly a year practicing in his garage—an hour a day—working his way from hitting a driver 75 yards to consistently reaching 100 yards from a seated position. The discipline mirrors what the Army taught him: adapt and overcome.

1995 U.S. Open champion Corey Pavin has been part of that effort, serving as a mentor to veterans entering the program with little to no golf background. Pavin has been candid about the limits of his own understanding—he acknowledges he cannot fully grasp what these men and women have experienced—but frames his involvement simply: giving veterans the opportunity to find some normalcy, some joy, and some hope.

The program has grown largely through word of mouth, with veterans reaching out to other veterans. Its partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs has given it formal recognition as a safe environment and a legitimate modality in the healing process. Program leaders are clear-eyed about what that means in a broader context: the VA alone cannot heal a veteran, the Department of Defense alone cannot do it, and no single organization can carry that weight. Healing, as one program voice put it, takes a nation.

Schack now serves as an ambassador for PGA Hope, driven by a specific memory—what it felt like to be confined, comfortable in isolation, and unwilling to engage with the world outside. He wants other veterans in that place to know there is a way out. The camaraderie he found on the course, among people who understood without needing an explanation, is what he describes as genuinely life-changing.

The thank-you, as Pavin sees it, doesn't need to be complicated. Veterans put their lives on the line. Showing up, giving time, being part of the process—that's the response. As simple as that.