PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — After four holes at the Honda Classic, Sam Saunders was even par. Two holes later, he was four over. For a player not known for his patience who was battling gusty winds and dark thoughts blown in by five consecutive missed cuts, Saunders’s bolt into black numbers forecast a disaster.
This was Saunders’s moment of reckoning. In September, he spent two nights in the hospital in the intensive care unit with a “brain bleed” after fainting while riding a hoverboard in the streets of his Colorado neighborhood. Five months later, Saunders’s skull was healed, but his head was not right.