Grayson Murray had accumulated $2.42 million according to the PGA Tour list in 2024. He had won the Sony Open in Hawaii in January, the second tournament of the year, with a 14-meter putt in the playoff; he had been tenth in the Wells Fargo last week. He was number 58 in the world and in two weeks, for the first time in his career, he was going to link three consecutive majors played with his participation in the US Open. He talked about how he was cured. But early Saturday morning he took his own life in a Texas hotel.
Murray had moved on the wire in recent years. He played golf and drank. “Why was I drunk? Because I’m a damn alcoholic who hates everything that has to do with life on the PGA Tour and that’s my escape route. They weren’t the ones who led me to drink, but in five “I haven’t received a single bit of help from them in years beyond ‘we’ll get back to you,'” he blurted out when the PGA Tour suspended him for unseemly conduct in 2021 after a drunken altercation in a bar in Hawaii.
I always saw myself as a failure. He thought he had a lot of talent, but he only knew how to waste it.
It was not the first warning. In 2017 he had received another fine for criticizing Bryson DeChambeau and other out of place comments. With that histrionic personality he had caused the circuit leaders to blush when, as motivation he said, he offered a playboy model to be his caddy in the par 3s of the Augusta Masters, a tournament to which he did not enter until 2024 when he already seemed to be cured. from this stormy past.
“He was a normal college student. He appeared at Arizona State from Wake Forest and he was there for a year. He played very well and off the field he did what the rest of the university students did,” says a person who met him on the Tempe campus to this newspaper. He lined up for the Devils with Jon Rahm in the 2014-15 season.
Grayson was a depressed, tormented guy. Suicide is often associated with a desperate situation in which frustrations of various kinds converge. But there is another inclination which is the temporary suicidal crisis. “There are days when I didn’t want to get out of bed,” he said in January. “I just thought he was a failure. I always saw myself as a failure. I thought he had a lot of talent, but he just knew how to waste it.” He wanted to inspire a lot of troubled people, the same way Jimmy Valvano, Michael Jordan’s coach at North Carolina, influenced Murray. He didn’t give her time.
It is difficult to find a similar case in sports, taking one’s life in a moment of success. Singer Kurt Cobain, designer Kate Spade…. They showed that money does not immunize people against internal struggles and mental health crises, even when that battle seems to be winning. “Was Grayson a loved one,” his parents Eric and Terry asked rhetorically in a statement. “It was. For his brother Cameron, for his sister Erica and for many other people,” while asking for privacy. “Life was not always easy for Grayson and, although he took his own life, we know that he now rests in peace.”
Surely, no one made a better diagnosis of him than the golfer who has left. “The best and worst thing that has happened to me in my life was winning my rookie year, but also feeling invincible,” he said about the victory he achieved at Barbasol in the 2017 season. He only lived 30 years, but he lived them very quickly . Too much.
