PL P L
On the Green
Photo courtesy of Getty Images
Worth the Wait by Helen Ross
M
ost PGA Tour fans probably know Joel Dahmen as the guy who wears that white bucket hat. If they know him at all, that is. You see, guys like Dahmen, who is midway through his fifth season on Tour, can get lost in the shuffle in a game where the spotlight shines so brightly on the Rory McIlroys and Dustin Johnsons and Bryson DeChambeaus of the world. And that’s a shame. Because there’s so many reasons to cheer for the affable 33-year-old from the Pacific Northwest who won his first PGA Tour event on the last Sunday in March at the Corales Puntacana Club & Resort Championship. Dahmen, who learned the game from his dad, Ed, wasn’t an All-American in college. In fact, he dropped out after a year at the University of Washington, in which he says he partied too much and skipped too many classes. Dahmen now admits to being a “pretty lost kid there for a couple of years.” The lack of direction was understandable, though. When he was 17, Dahmen lost his mother, Jolyn, whom he calls his best friend—the schoolteacher who drove him to Tournaments in the summer and sometimes caddied for him—to pancreatic cancer. And four years after their
54 ASOUTHERNSOPHISTICATION
mom died, his brother Zach was diagnosed with testicular cancer, although this time, the treatment was a success. Dahmen was 23 when he also found a lump in his scrotum—the same thing that had prompted his brother to go get checked. He says he was in denial for days but finally went to see the doctor two weeks later. Before the examination began, Dahmen told him that he had testicular cancer. The doctor “kind of laughed at me,” Dahmen recalls, but it turns out he was right. Adding to his anxiety, Dahmen had no health insurance, but a sponsor paid for the treatment that included surgery to remove his testicle and several weeks of chemotherapy. Dahmen came back more determined than ever to play golf. “It was important to get it removed to have the chemo and just get healthy again to where they said I was going to be OK,” Dahmen told me in 2019. “And I truly believe that. I think there’s two stories: There is ‘the doctor tells you,’ but then truly believing in yourself. “So, my motivation was to just get healthy and to play golf again for sure.” But Dahmen, who wears the MD Anderson strikethrough cancer logo on his trademark bucket hat and
