In November 2016 — after five years of symptoms and twenty-five different doctors — I was told I had facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy. Incurable. Progressive. There was nothing, they said, that modern medicine could do.
The long road to a name
I turned pro after a strong college career and joined the PGA Tour in 2013. On the outside, life was a dream. On the inside, I was quietly trying to figure out why my right arm was slowly getting weaker. For years I searched — specialists, labs, imaging, blood panels. No one could tell me what was happening. By the time a doctor finally put a name on it, the disease had taken enough of my body that I knew I couldn't keep competing on tour at the level I wanted to.
A decision, with Chelsea
Chelsea and I met at Doral in March of 2015. By late 2016, we were deep in the wilderness of specialists and second opinions together. When I finally told her the diagnosis, we didn't have a plan. We had a question: what if the conventional answers aren't the only answers?
In December 2017, I wrote about all of it in “So Damn Lucky” for The Players' Tribune — partly to share my own story, partly to begin what became this foundation. I proposed to Chelsea on a boat in the Bahamas not long after, and we were married in November 2018.
The search
We travelled — Nepal, Costa Rica, Canada — sat with practitioners, healers, monks, farmers and doctors. We tried a lot. We committed to a mostly plant-based and raw-fruit diet. We added hyperbaric oxygen therapy. We did a grape cleanse — at one point I was eating 800 grapes a day. We learned to breathe. We spent more time in cold water and sunlight than in waiting rooms.
Some of it felt radical. Some of it felt obvious in retrospect — how could I not have been paying this much attention to my food, my breath, my stress? Each experience introduced us to a teacher, a practice, or a community. Over time, those teachers and practices became a kind of library.
“We became our own research lab. And the experiment, slowly, became about how to share it.”
A foundation, a family
We started the Morgan Hoffmann Foundation in 2017, while we were still in the middle of our own journey. In the first two years we raised over two million dollars. In 2020 the PGA TOUR honored the work with its Courage Award. Chelsea now leads much of the programming, I write and teach, and our family grows alongside the foundation.
What began as our personal search has turned into four living initiatives — raised garden beds in schools, wellness grants for families facing chronic illness, retreats in the forests of Northern Michigan, and an annual gathering at Ohoopee Match Club that funds it all.
Why we do this
Because I know, in my body, what it feels like to be told there is nothing more to try. And I know, in my life, that there almost always is. This foundation exists so that nobody who comes after us has to search alone.
— Morgan & Chelsea Hoffmann