Kiwi tour pro Michael Hendry is using his cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment regime as inspiration to fuel a return to professional golf.
In the days before his third cycle of chemotherapy in mid-July, Michael Hendry played Te Arai Links, north of Auckland, for the very first time. It was the first time he had played golf since receiving the shock diagnosis of Acute Myeloid Leukaemia in April and spent six straight weeks in hospital to bring his blood count back to a level where the medical staff could identify exactly what they were dealing with.
When he and wife Tara arrived at Te Arai Links, Hendry was 13 kilograms lighter, had a PICC line still inserted in his left arm and on a drizzly, windy North Island day, wondered why on earth he was even considering teeing it up.
“It’s a beautiful place up there, right on the beach,” Hendry recalls. “Beautiful restaurant, there was an All Blacks Test on and I was like, Why am I even thinking about going outside? My wife convinced me to come down because she was hitting balls and when I got down there, my bag was on a trundler waiting for me next to a few balls on the range.”
The 43-year-old chipped a few drivers 180 metres, decided to play a few holes, found himself even-par through five playing off the tips and suddenly morphed back into a professional golfer.
“I hadn’t played golf in two-and-a-half months. I’ve been through the loss of 13 kilograms of muscle mass and bone density and fluid, basically been poisoned twice and nearly died once, and there I am going, Why the f–k aren’t I under par?” Hendry adds. “It’s just completely unrealistic goals, but there I am after five holes going, Yeah, I can do this, I’m going to shoot under par today.”
As he fights for his life, his family and his career, that type of fierce determination is serving Hendry well.
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I had some funny things going on with my skin, which was odd. It’s an odd skin tag that started as ingrown hairs, or whatever. You just pluck them out, no drama, but one on my jawline, in particular, blew up. It became just a big giant welt. I was like, There’s something weird going on here.
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I played a run of events – New Zealand Open, New Zealand PGA, New South Wales Open, Hong Kong Open – and then the first event in Japan. From NSW Open week on, I felt like I might have had a cold coming on. At the course we played in Japan, every tee is kind of elevated. As I got to each tee, I’d be blowing like crazy. I said to my caddie, “Man, I’m getting so unfit, I’ve got to start doing some more cardio.”
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When I got back to Auckland, I got really crook. All I could do was go from the bed to the couch. I thought I might have got a decent case of COVID, but when I went to the doctor, he thought I might’ve had a pulmonary embolism. He sent me to the hospital to get some tests and that’s when they found it. I didn’t go home that day and then never left the hospital for six weeks.
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The diagnosis came and I thought, S–t, I know how bad this is, but my concern wasn’t so much for me. Obviously, you want to live as long as you can, but I’ve been pretty fortunate. I’ve lived a pretty cool life and I’ve achieved a lot of things that I never thought I would. At times I’d look back and go OK, if this does take me out, I’m happy with what I’ve done personally. But the thing for me was always thinking about my daughters (Maddison, 8, and Harper, 5) being so young. It’s not fair on them. That was the hardest thing, just not knowing what the future held for them in terms of whether I was going to be around. It was difficult, it was scary, so many things happening at once. It was all a bit of a blur at times as well.
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It’s a cliché, but you see your life flash in front of your eyes a bit and then you also see what you think you might be going to miss out on flash in front of your eyes. It wasn’t easy, but I managed to get through it.
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Every piece of news I’ve received since my initial diagnosis – once we knew exactly the specific type of leukaemia it was – has been good. I coped with the chemotherapy well, even though I felt it knocked me around a bit. I lost a heap of weight and it fatigued me like crazy. Some days I could hardly keep my eyes open, but I wasn’t vomiting all day and I wasn’t getting rashes and shakes that you can get from it.
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The one thing that really annoyed me is that it messes with your taste buds. People were making beautiful homemade lasagnas and sending in these different food packages, and I’d take one mouthful and I’d be like, Oh, I can’t eat it, because everything tasted like medication. It was like tasting a pill all the time, it was just horrible. I just had no appetite whatsoever.
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To find out that I was in complete remission after my first round of chemotherapy was surprising to me and my doctor. She’s not a very gleeful person – she’s a very straight shooter – but she had a sense of glee in her voice that said to me that this was a really good result at that stage. That was exciting news to receive, obviously, and that’s where you’re like, Yes, we’re going to get on top of this. We’re going to beat this.
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After my third round of chemo, the doctors did a PCR test to see if the leukaemic cells had been eliminated completely. The first test is called a FISH test. It’s very surface-level and it goes to one-in-a-hundred cells. They’re looking at how many cells out of 100 do you have that are leukaemic cancer cells and they couldn’t find any at that level. The next test takes it to one-in-a-million, which is very, very deep, obviously. That test result came back and there were still leukaemic cells at that level. I was hoping for the all-clear, which was probably an unrealistic expectation on my part. If I do get clear at that level, I won’t need a stem cell transplant, which is what I’m really hoping for. My future doesn’t necessarily get any worse if I have to go through a transplant, it’s just a longer, far more toxic process that they want to avoid having me go through. My doctor is more confident that I won’t need a transplant after seeing that test than she was prior.
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I made my diagnosis public by posting my player’s badge for The Open at Royal Liverpool. I’d only just come home out of hospital and I saw it sitting there. Even though I’d qualified, I knew I wasn’t going to get to Liverpool, and I thought people were going to ask why I wasn’t playing. What better way to announce that I’m sick by saying that I won’t be able to play The Open because of it? I thought that was a good way of going about it.
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I never knew so many people cared. Initially, a few close friends knew. It got around the closer golf community pretty quickly because obviously I’ve got mates in the golf world, and I wanted them to find out from me rather than through an Instagram post or a newspaper article.
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I let my close friends know and they let a few other friends know and three days later I was getting an e-mail from Steve Williams saying, “Me and Scotty are thinking of you,” and he was in America playing tournaments. I was getting messages from people I hadn’t talked to or seen in years. Frank Nobilo sent me a message. This was all happening within the first week or 10 days of receiving the diagnosis. I have messages from the other side of the world. Once I put the post out there, it went crazy all over again. My phone was going berserk, getting messages from far and wide again. It was pretty awesome, actually. Very overwhelming. I just had no idea that so many people cared.
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I met Jarrod [Lyle] when I was about 21. We were all still amateurs at that stage. We were playing the New Zealand Amateur Championship and me and a good friend of mine were playing the Foursomes Championship. We got paired with Jarrod and Michael Sim, so we spent a couple of days together playing golf and all got on pretty well.
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I know when Jarrod died… it wasn’t like we weren’t expecting it because we knew for a while that he was not going to make it. I still remember shedding a few tears, but it was not so much the fact that a friend of mine had died, it was thinking about his kids and his family. That was the emotional part of it. I think that’s where people’s empathy comes out.
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Playing the Australian Open in December is a very realistic goal, to be honest. It’s a realistic goal because I know what my situation is at the moment. After my fourth and final cycle of chemo in August, it’s going to take me six weeks to two months of hard work in the gym pretty much every day to get back to a physical place where I’m even going to be happy to consider playing. I’ve been trying to keep myself as fit as possible in between rounds of chemotherapy, so that the road back isn’t as long as it potentially could be. I’ve got a goal in mind of getting back into playing tournament golf in October and then if I’m comfortable with the way everything is going, my target is the middle of November. There’s a couple of tournaments in Japan that I’d quite like to play before the season ends up there, and then the Aussie Open.
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My goal, to be perfectly honest, is to come back better than I was. That might be difficult to do, but that’s my goal and I figure I might as well because there’s no point in coming back as good as I was, I want to be better than I was. That keeps me motivated and, to be honest, pretty upbeat about the whole situation.
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I never once thought about not playing golf again. I never once thought about giving it up. I want to be the guy that beat it. I want to be the guy that had this hurdle come up in a period of his career and got over it and came back.
Images: Getty Images
