Aaron Wise fights for more than just the golf course
BLAINE, Minn.— Aaron Wise thinks hard before answering questions. You really want to the answer to them, because he wants you to understand, because he has spent years trying to make sense of it. His press conference at the 3M Open on Wednesday was long and vulnerable and thoughtful. He had a lot to say. But maybe because Aaron Wise has been through a lot.
“It’s a daily battle here,” Wise said.
Over the years, Wise was one of the brightest stars on the PGA Tour. He was the 2016 NCAA champion, and as a 21-year-old rookie he broke Byron Nelson’s 2018 scoring record and won the PGA Tour Rookie of the Year. Then five years later, he withdrew just days before the 2023 Masters to focus on his mental health.
“This hurts,” she wrote on her Instagram at the time. “But it’s necessary. See you soon.”
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Wise, now 30, is playing this week – he has a local team time of 12:44 pm on Thursday alongside Aldrich Potgieter and Kevin Yu – but there have been times over the past few years when he never thought that would happen.
“It’s been a tough year and a half at home,” Wise said Wednesday, speaking in depth about his mental struggles and his time away from the game. “Maybe the first six months after I graduate, the next year I’m in school trying to get to a point where I can control my mind enough to do the things I wanted to do, hit good golf shots to be here.
Wise entered the field with his win in 2018, but his performance was average over the next few years – eleven top 10s, 37 missed cuts – although he still managed to enter the 2022 Tour Championship, the top feather in all the pros.
But he didn’t expect what would happen next.
“It was a very quick descent,” Wise said. “I felt like the Fall Series after that year when I got to East Lake, I knew something was off but I didn’t really know what it was.”
As the offseason progressed, he brushed those thoughts aside and headed back to start the year in Hawaii, but his mind never seemed to be in the right place. He says it snowed there, and in the WGC Match Play – despite playing well – he felt miserable. He remembers his now wife’s mother visiting for dinner and he had no desire to go out with them.
“I wasn’t really in a good place,” she said. “I like to recommend that a lot of golf is stressful, a lot of it is maybe I’m not playing as well as I wanted to, and I don’t feel like I really know anything about mental health or what’s going on so I just keep trying to keep up with the old saying. I will get through it, I will try harder, I will continue to work hard at it,” Wise said.
After withdrawing from the Masters, Wise returned to Byron Nelson, the only place to win on the PGA Tour, and tied for 50. He missed the cut in his next three games and didn’t shoot in the 60s once. The last of those three tournaments was the 2023 US Open. Between that week and the Myrtle Beach Classic in May 2025, Wise played just one tournament — a cut at the 2024 Puerto Rico Open — in a 22-month span.
He put down his crutches. While playing he tried to focus on feeling like himself on the golf course. Finally he met Dr. Izzy Justice, a sports neurologist, helped him understand what was happening. They made a plan to attack it.
“He explained to me that what you’re hearing didn’t just happen, it’s a result of what you do outside the course, things that happened in your life, what happened in the course,” said Wise. “This is kind of where your brain is and that’s why you feel the way you feel and that’s why you have the thoughts you have. You were the first person to make all of that easy and make sense to me. … My head was busy with a lot of thoughts, things you wouldn’t even think were involved, whether it was like a messy house or things out of place or all kinds of things that your brain has to process every day. That was a big part of cleaning that up. “
Wise said they even do a mobile EEG scan – or electroencephalogram – that measures “what’s going on in your head and what thoughts are going on and how many hertz your brain is working at.”
A hertz measures the frequency of electrical activity produced by the brain. Speaking to the media on Wednesday, Wise explained that he may be at 25 or 30 hertz. Anything from 32-100 represents higher intelligence, problem-solving functions and mental processing. Wise says it used to be 70 or 80 hertz.
“My mind has half of the things going on in its head that you’ve had and that you seem to translate into your daily life,” he said. “Obviously speaking like the pressure of being out there, that’s going to raise your hertz, and it’s my job to try to keep my brain frequency as low as possible as the weeks go on and that’s how I’m going to play my best golf.”
All this time he was out, he wanted to come back. That’s the easiest part about this – he loves golf so much that he wants it play it. But he needed to play better golf to make it on the PGA Tour, and for the most part he wasn’t sure it would happen.
He could play golf well at home – better than 99 percent of the people in the world – but as soon as other people joined him or watched or other pressures appeared in his day, his game would drop. One time he came back and tried to play in a pro-am, he said it “wasted” and he withdrew.
It was all a Catch-22. While he was able to come back and earn some tournament reps — he’s playing under a major medical extension — he didn’t play well enough to make the cut, meaning he didn’t get enough competitive rounds to see if things improved or rekindled that important feeling of playing high-pressure weekend rounds.
“I feel like I’m still working on it, but I’m about to get to the point where the noise like Tour life and Tour events and media and cameras, whatever it is, I still feel like they’re not there in a weird way when that sounds,” he said. “That’s very recent and really cool.”
Wise made just 12 appearances last season — seven on the PGA Tour, five on the Korn Ferry Tour and eight missed cuts — but those starts alone were steps in the right direction.
The 3M Open is his 10th event of the season, and July has been his best month in years.
He missed a dip in his first six seasons, but tied for 39th at the John Deere Classic, tied for third at the ISCO Championship – including playing his way through the final round – and tied for 15th at the Puntacana Championship played opposite last week’s Open Championship.
Wise hasn’t said much publicly about his struggles, but at John Deere he told CBS reporter Amanda Balionis that it was often “dangerous” for him to play outside. Now he’s cool, and he’s enjoying it, and he’s got tools to help him get through it. His wife is one of them – she is his lover.
The 3M Open is his fourth consecutive start; he plans to play six games in a row.
“Although there is pressure, it is necessary like for being out here,” Wise said Wednesday. “We started playing golf because we love the game. Keeping that starts even when, hey, you might hit a bad shot during a great depression, but it’s not the end of the world, you know?
You can reach the author at joshua.berhow@golf.com.
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