Super Bowl running back Danny Woodhead’s new call: the U.S. Amateur 4-ball at Chambers Bay
There are as many former NFL running backs who have caught a touchdown pass from Tom Brady in a Super Bowl competing in this U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship at Chambers Bay as there are Chambers Bay golf courses in the world.
“No, there aren’t many,” Danny Woodhead deadpanned.
Then he smacked another white ball noticeably straight and far down Chambers Bay’s practice range.
“You know what? Not a lot of running backs, period, play golf,” he said Friday. “I’ve never run into any running backs that do play. I just haven’t. I don’t know what the reason is. I guess, I don’t know, maybe it’s not the position.”
Woodhead and his playing partner Mike Wilhelm, a financial consultant and fellow Nebraskan, are one of 128 teams competing this weekend in stroke play to make the 32-side cut for Monday’s match-play elimination round of the sixth U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship.
It’s the United States Golf Association’s return with a national event to Chambers Bay for the first time since it and Pierce County hosted the 2015 U.S. Open.
It’s also a continuation of Woodhead’s second career in a competitive sport.
Yet most of his fellow golfers in amateur events across his native Midwest and the country want to talk about his other, previous career.
“Oh, people ask about football, for sure,” he said. “I have no problem answering those questions.”
Of course fellow golfers on and off the course ask him most about Brady.
Whitehead played three seasons as one of Brady’s running backs and third-down receivers on the NFL’s New England Patriots.
“Yeah, I think that’s kind of the standard question,” Woodhead said, before smacking another ball down the middle of the practice range.
“Honestly, it’s part of who I am. It’s part of what I’ve done,” the 36-year-old retired running back said. “It’s part of, just, my life.
“Not at all.”
Thwack!
The News Tribune talked with Woodhead as he walked off the 18th green at Chambers Bay, then while he was thwacking balls down its driving range following his practice round before Saturday’s start to the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball.
Whitehead played for the Patriots from 2010 through ‘12. Ten days after his 27th birthday, Woodhead caught a 4-yard touchdown pass from Brady to rally New England from 9-0 down early into their first lead of Super Bowl 46 over the New York Giants.
He caught four passes for 42 yards and caught one of Brady’s two touchdown passes that championship day. He also rushed seven times for 18 yards. But the Giants rallied late to hand Brady the second of his three Super Bowl losses with the Patriots.
So of course Woodhead gets asked about Brady on the golf course. Off the golf course. All the time.
He hasn’t remained in touch with the most championed quarterback in NFL history.
“Not with Tom,” he said. “I was a different point in my career. I was just trying to survive when I was with New England.”
Woodhead played one more season with Brady and the Patriots following that Super Bowl in 2012. He signed a two-year, $3.5 million contract with a $1 million signing bonus to join the San Diego Chargers and quarterback Philip Rivers. He played four seasons with the Chargers, 2013-16, earning another two-year deal and $5.5 million from them. He had eight total touchdowns in each the 2013 and ‘15 seasons with San Diego.
“Phil, I still keep in touch with,” Woodhead said of the QB who just retired following his only season in 2020 with the Indianapolis Colts. “He’s a good buddy of mine, really good friend of mine.”
THWACK!
Asked if he intends to get Rivers on the competitive golf circuit with him, Woodhead looked up from his iron and laughed.
“I don’t know about that,” Woodhead said.
“He’s a little busy—with his nine kids.”
Thankful for his new career
How many golfers in this U.S. Amateur Four-Ball have played through a torn hamstring?
That’s what Woodhead did in 2017. The former back from Chadron State in his native Nebraska got a grade-three tear of his hamstring in his first game with the Baltimore Ravens that season. He returned from injured reserve for week 11 and played the final seven games of that 2017 season.
They were the last games of his career. He announced his retirement in March 2018.
Woodhead’s career ended amid heightened awareness in and around the NFL — around every level of football — about the damaging affects playing the sport often has on a man’s quality of life following his final game. Scientists have found links between football, concussions and the brain-disease CTE. The league reached a controversial settlement with former players with diagnosed head injuries. Critics and player advocates say the settlement does not do nearly enough for affected former players.
Middle-aged and still relatively younger men often report carry-over effects from years of taking pain medication to play. Many ex-NFL players report trouble sleeping, getting out of bed or playing with their kids.
Woodhead? At age 36 he’s a fit 5-foot-9. He looks at or near his NFL playing weight of 200 pounds. On Friday during his practice round at Chambers Bay he looked hip in his goatee, mustache and sunglasses. His biceps stretching through his light-blue golf shirt suggested he’d play more than just golf before. He had his fitted, navy-blue slacks pegged above the ankles. He wore ultra-short foot socks that gave the appearance he wasn’t wearing socks over bare ankles and his gray-and-red golf shoes.
Before starting on the practice range he smoothly and easily squatted, bent and stretched.
The veteran of nine NFL season played on after the torn hamstring. Through a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee in 2016. A broken fibula ended his 2014 season. He had a sprained ankle in 2011. A sprained knee cost him his entire rookie season of 2008.
Yet he spent six hours Friday walking all 7,475 yards up and down the hills and dunes of the sprawling course set at Chambers Bay for the Amateur Four-Ball. Chambers is playing 91 yards longer than it played during the U.S. Open six years ago.
These are the most thankful yards of Woodhead’s sporting life.
“I’m very glad, the time that I got out, you know?” he said. “I mean, I had injuries. I had ... I had stuff. Definitely. So I’m not acting like I didn’t.”
He chuckled, ruefully.
“But my last year was the year Ryan Shazier got hurt,” he said.
The Pittsburgh Steelers’ two-time Pro Bowl linebacker sustained a severe spinal cord injury on a head-first tackle during a nationally televised Monday night game against the Cincinnati Bengals in December 2017. Shazier initially was unable to walk. He had spinal stablization surgery. He didn’t regain movement in his legs for months.
Now 28, eight years younger than Woodhead, Shazier has never played another game. Walking, albeit slowly, has been his major accomplishment.
“I remember him leaving the hospital in a wheelchair holding his kid, his kid’s hand,” Woodhead said.
“I still remember looking at my wife (Stacia, his high-school sweetheart from their freshman year at North Platte High School in Nebraska). I go, ‘That will never be me.’
“So, stuff like that definitely comes into effect, you know what I mean?”
He looked out across Chambers Bay’s course toward Puget Sound glistening in the afternoon sun.
“So, no, I feel super-fortunate,” he said. “I feel very fortunate, too, that I am playing a game that I love. That’s the biggest thing.”
‘A busy guy’
THWACK!
The Woodheads’ children, Gia, Will, Maisy and Hope, are 9, 7, 5 and 3 years old.
“Oh, gosh. I’m a busy guy,” Woodhead said.
His caddie this week at Chambers Bay is his good friend Jack Riggins, another fellow Nebraskan and weekly golf partner. Riggins is a retired commander and a 20-year veteran of U.S. Navy SEAL and Special Operations units worldwide. Riggins co-founded Performance Mountain, a consulting firm that optimizes leadership and culture within teams and groups.
Riggins asked Woodhead to join Performance Mountain, to share the ex-NFL player’s leadership lessons and experiences. They’ve worked with the football and basketball teams at Riggins’ alma mater, the University of Nebraska, with the basketball and soccer programs at Creighton University in nearby Omaha, plus businesses and other organizations.
Woodhead is a star across the state of Nebraska for being an undersized running back who crafted his successful NFL career from Division-II Chadron State, the only four-year college in the western half of Nebraska.
“All I have to do is say, ‘Danny Woodhead’s talking’ and people listen,” Riggins said.
Between his work with Riggins’ firm, his and his wife’s four kids all under 10 and traveling nationally to play high-level amateur golf, Woodhead says: “I’m definitely busy.”
Many of the younger golfers at this U.S. Amateur Four-Ball, particularly the ones in, recently graduated from or entering college, list becoming a pro on the PGA tour as a primary goal.
Not Woodhead. He has no aspirations to become a late-blooming professional golfer in his second competitive sport. He earned $15 million in his NFL career, so it’s not like he needs the pro-golf money.
“No, I don’t, man,” he said. “I try to get as good as I can, play all the amateur stuff that I can—and have fun. That’s kind of the whole deal.”
It’s clear he’s here for the competition of it.
That’s why Woodhead said his wife doesn’t mind him being at Chambers Bay for what he hopes is most of this coming week, through the final match-play round for the Four-Ball championship on Wednesday, while she’s back in Nebraska with their four kids. She understands her supposedly retired husband and high-school sweetheart needs golf much like he needed football for all those years, from North Platte High School through the 2017 Baltimore Ravens.
“The thing is, she knows this is something I kind of need. In some ways it’s—I don’t want to say medicine—but I mean, just competition,” he said.
“That’s why I think some guys, they struggle with (life after football). They don’t really know what to do, you know? I’ve been fortunate to jump right in.
“And I don’t miss anything about football. I gave everything that I had. I just don’t miss it. I’ve found a passion that—man, I enjoy this as much as I enjoyed playing football.
“It’s kind of my football now, you know?”
Loving Tiger
THUD!
Woodhead finally scuffs and tops a ball with his iron. It skids down the practice range like a bad miss from the common weekend hacker.
“Time for a break,” Riggins calls out to his buddy from behind Woodhead and Wilhelm on their practice tees.
On a USGA player-profile questionnaire Woodhead wrote of him and Wilhelm, his playing partner he met at their golf club three years ago: “Well, we are just a couple guys who love golf and are passionate about it. Pretty fun just competing.
“Probably unique because I’m finished with the sport I was actually decent at in football and I’m now just chasing a sport in golf that I’m not as talented at and probably am not expected to be any good.”
Yet ask him his goal for this week at spectacularly beautiful, sound-side Chambers Bay, and the NFL-level competitor in Woodhead comes right out.
“We want to play very good,” he said. “We are obviously out here to compete. We are not out here to just enjoy the views.
“I mean, we want to go shoot as low as we can, make the cut, and see what happens.”
It’s what Brady’s former Super Bowl running back is getting from his second sport, one he grew up loving as a kid in Nebraska but never playing as much as football.
“I’ve always loved it. I was of the age when Tiger was TIGER, you know, when he first kind of burst on the scene,” Woodhead said of Tiger Woods from the late ‘90s and early 2000s. “So I loved it. Loved Tiger. He was obviously my favorite golfer—just like everybody else.”
Woodhead has never met Woods. Asked if that was a goal of his, Woodhead took a glance up from his iron lining up behind another ball and squinted.
“Uh, probably not,” he said.
“He probably wouldn’t want to meet some random, washed-up football player.”
This story was originally published May 22, 2021 at 10:49 AM.
