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Zalatoris to have spinal fusion and miss the 2027 season
Will Zalatoris will play the Austin Championship next month, then have a third major back operation in Dallas. He hopes to return in 2028 through the Challenger Series.
“I’ve been through four years of hell so it’s good to have something that will hopefully correct it,” Will Zalatoris said in Austin on Wednesday, after announcing that he will have spinal-fusion surgery in Dallas at the end of November. He expects to miss the whole of the 2027 PGA TOUR season.
He made the announcement at the media day for the Austin Championship, which he will play at Omni Barton Creek Resort from 12 to 15 November. It will be his first start since early April, when he finished T67 at the Valero Texas Open, the last of his four events in 2026, and hurt his back again. A torn right hip labrum kept him out for the rest of the season, Golf Channel reports.
The fusion will be his third major back operation, after a microdiscectomy in 2023 and an artificial disc replacement in 2025. Zalatoris said three PGA TOUR physiotherapists had told him the operation was needed.
He was seventh in the world in September 2022, a month after beating Sepp Straka in a play-off for the FedEx St. Jude Championship, still his only PGA TOUR win. By then he had finished second at the 2021 Masters, lost a play-off to Justin Thomas at the 2022 PGA Championship and tied for second at the 2022 US Open. He is now 610th in the world, and he has played 12 events or fewer in three of the past four years.
“I can’t promise anybody anything because of what I’ve been through,” he said. If his recovery goes to plan, he expects to return in 2028 on the Challenger Series, the PGA TOUR’s second tier.
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