ELON, N.C. – Bronson Myers was ready and raring to go. His sophomore season was on the horizon. The severity of the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to dwindle, allowing for more golfing activities. He'd just shot a red-hot 62 at a summer tournament and was beginning to feel like an integral part of the Phoenix.
Then the scissors slipped.
Myers was cutting zip ties, attempting to free a bike lock from its packaging, when he felt tension in his forearm. A shallow cut into a knuckle in his left index finger severed his flexor tendon, causing a rubber-band-like reaction all the way up beyond his wrist.
"You see a lot about athletes and identity crises when they leave their sport," Myers said. "Everyone was confused [during COVID] but this injury really made me question whether golf was what I wanted."
The injury was significant enough that it required surgery, and it sidelined Myers for months. In the fall of 2020, COVID was still serious enough that his classes were on Zoom and his routines were the main thing keeping him on track. The injury disrupted even that.
"With the injury, I was just sitting in my room, I couldn't use my left arm or my left hand," Myers said. "And I was like, 'What the hell am I going to do?'"
Myers wasn't ready to give up. He'd never given up on anything in his life, save for a high school golf tournament where his parents forced him off the course due to a triple-digit fever.
"'You're going to shoot a 98,' they said," Myers laughed.
But he did allow his mind to wander. Between the pandemic and his injury, he craved freedom. What new paths might allow him the independence for which he yearned? Maybe he'd get his pilot's license, or maybe he'd try out a position on a farm as a ranch hand.
"I really liked being in control of my life, and I thought being a pilot would give me independence, I thought being a ranch hand would give me a little bit of freedom in terms of getting to work outside, work with animals and that kind of thing," Myers chuckled.
"I went through like 15 different careers and things that I thought I might want, and after pursuing and looking into a couple of different things, I was just like, 'This sucks. I'm really good at golf. I'm going to go play golf again.'"
Growing up, golf was Myers' special thing. He was an only child, and his parents weren't golfers, so the decision to take up golf was solely his. It was where he spent his time alone, practicing whenever he felt like it and playing with whoever was at the course.
Though adjusting from high school to Division I athletics as a teenager was intimidating, Myers' perseverance growing up readied him for the experience.
"You're constantly with people, you're constantly practicing on someone else's time, you're practicing with guys who are better than you or are playing better than you," Myers said. "But you may not feel like they're better than you, or you may feel like, 'I want to take out the older competition.'"
Myers' freshman year wasn't up to his standards. He shot a six-under 66 in his first collegiate round but didn't match that score the rest of the season. His best finish was T21 at the Pinehurst Intercollegiate where he shot 16 over par.
He finally started to feel like he was a full member of the team in the spring as the Phoenix prepared for a trip to East Carolina University.
"I stepped in and I think I started every tournament except for one or two," Myers said. "I was beating some of the guys out and – I'm not going to say that was hard for them to handle, I don't want to speak for them – but you can imagine getting beat out by the younger guy. It's tough. It's not fun."
Then the pandemic hit, and it stripped collegiate golf from the Phoenix, the Pirates of ECU and every other team worldwide. The story has been told many times before: it began when a tournament was postponed, then it was canceled and then suddenly, the entire season disappeared.
Myers found time to hit golf balls whenever he could over the summer and competed in a couple of tournaments when the viral climate allowed. He felt prepared for his second season of golf, ready to claim his place among the Phoenix when he poked the scissors into his finger.
What followed was a complete and total restructuring of what the game of golf meant to him. Instead of dreading his 20+ hours a week of nose-to-grindstone, he decided to re-discover his love for the sport Mark Twain once referred to as "a good walk spoiled."
"I just started practicing, and I used it as an escape, as relaxation to get away from everything," Myers said. "I went back to trying to enjoy it more than it being a job."
Once Myers was back to competition, relaxation was out of his mind. The spark had been reignited, and during his redshirt sophomore season, he finally began to shoot the scores he knew he was capable of. Of his 26 rounds, 17 were strong enough to count toward the Phoenix's score, and he finished top-five once, top-15 thrice and top-25 five times.
"That's how I found my love for it again. I realized that ultimately, there's nothing in the world that I love more than competing. Competition and the heat of the moment and pressure and nerves and adrenaline, nothing compares at all," Myers said, his excitement evident. "There's nothing I'd rather do than play golf, and I mean that."
Myers admitted that when coming back from his forearm injury, he probably "didn't do the rehab that [he] should have." Scar tissue built up and muscle atrophied. When he was ready to swing a club again, he couldn't even grip it the way he had always known how to.
Standard golf grips fall into one of two categories: interlocking or overlapping. The terms derive from how the pinky of the bottom hand interacts with the first finger of the top hand; the two either interlock or the pinky rests on top of the top hand. The hands' connection to each other provides strength and stability to a golf swing.
What's not so common? Nine fingers on the shaft, effectively fist to fist, as if gripping a baseball bat. Not dissimilar, in fact, to the grip that Philadelphia Phillies star shortstop Trea Turner adopted to end his cold streak last season, a loose grasp with an index finger raised, separated from the grip.
"It looks really dumb, not going to lie. Like, really stupid," Myers laughed.
Armed with a funky grip and renewed confidence, Myers' first tournament back was a rained-out Battle at Briars Creek in September 2021. Although he only played 16 holes before the event was called for weather, he remembers it as if it were yesterday.
"It was cool to go out there and play golf for fun for the first time and to be competing when I really felt like I had only been competing prior to that," Myers said. "I remember it being just the worst weather and I was having a blast. I was having so much fun."
Despite months of uncertainty coupled with intense training to get back in competitive shape, once Myers had a club back in his nine-fingered grip, he remembered his love for the game.
"I knew all it takes is one good swing. All it takes is one good score. All it takes is one good round to prove to yourself that you can still do it," Myers said. "That's why I didn't give up after I came back to it. I saw what I was able to do with the ball and saw what I was able to do with the club and I was like, 'Why would I give this up when there's still something here?'"
Fast-forward a couple of years, from fall 2021 to spring 2024. Myers is competing as a redshirt junior, the oldest player on a Phoenix squad in which he once felt minuscule and out of place. It's his fifth year at Elon.
"When I go to a college tournament, it's not like it's my fourth tournament ever. It's probably my fortieth. So I know what time we're getting up," Myers explained. "We're getting up at 5:30, eating breakfast at 6:00, I know the routine. So I'm very comfortable in college tournaments just based on my experience."
The Phoenix only has one tournament left this season – the CAA Championship in Dataw Island, S.C. – but Myers isn't planning to let his final season of eligibility go to waste. He's coming back for a final year as a Phoenix in 2024 with the goal of playing the best golf he's played in the maroon and gold.
"Words don't really do justice for how badly we want to be a top-30 program, for how badly we want to contend," Myers said. "Not just to go to, but to contend at regionals. We want to be talked about."
"We're on the cusp of that, and a lot of us realize that. I think that's what makes it so fun to be a part of this team," he added.
Myers said the build-up started before or around when he came to Elon, and he's gotten to be an integral part of it. Now, the Phoenix will take on the 2024-2025 season with seven upperclassmen, a similar roster construction to when bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Myers joined the pre-pandemic Phoenix.
"Our whole team is really, really bought in, and I like being older on the team now and helping some of the younger guys see it," Myers said. "It's cool to be able to dictate where the culture is going to go and be a part of that after coming in so long ago – five years ago."
It'll be another test in a string of unique challenges for the super senior: leading a Phoenix team that's been painfully close this season with four runner-ups to one team victory. Yet, Elon is on the precipice of national noteworthiness. It earned invitations to Auburn, Napa and Puerto Rico, among other destination tournaments, and more than held its own at each.
Myers isn't upset by the close calls this season, though. Rather, he's inspired to keep pushing next year, for the team's sake and his own, drawing on his remarkable comeback.
"At the end of the day, you're not going to be overly successful at everything you do. But if you can look back and say, 'I never gave up,' that's something to be really proud of," Myers concluded. "That's how I've gone about my little journey."
'Rising Phoenix' is a new student-led initiative to cover Elon Athletics. Through innovative content creation and storytelling, Elon University students will have the opportunity to highlight the moments, people and events that make an impact, leveraging the athletic department's various web and social media platforms for distribution. Follow Rising Phoenix on Twitter (@EURisingPhoenix) and Instagram (@elonrisingphoenix). Interested in joining this initiative as a content creator (video, graphics, writing, storytelling, or more)? Contact Jacob Kisamore at jkisamore@elon.edu.
--ELON--
