Former golfer shares story of recovery from elbow injury

Dakota Dunes, SD (KTIV) – From youth sports to high school sports, from collegiate sports to the pros, Siouxland athletes face any number of injuries.

For the local golf pro, simply picking up a club was simply not an option. So, he knew he needed to see a doctor. That call kept him “on course.”

From the moment Josh Wendling started playing golf at age 16, he knew he wanted to be a professional golfer. “Not the guys who need to make 10-foot putts on the 18th hole to win the Masters or the U.S. Open,” Josh Wendling said. “I mean, we all dream about it, but I wanted to be a club professional and help people play golf and manage golf courses and manage, you know, country clubs.”

But time spent on golf courses in high school, college and as a club pro took its toll. “One day I was just doing regular curls, you know, and I felt pain in my elbow,” Wendling said.

And it got even worse. “And then the weeks went by and I couldn’t pick up golf clubs anymore, I literally couldn’t hold a golf club in my hand without taking medication,” Wendling said.

So Wendling turned to his friend, CNOS orthopedic surgeon Dr. Ryan Mace, who diagnosed the scratch golfer with tennis elbow. “Tennis elbow, or we call it lateral epicondylitis, begins to occur when people reach age 30 or 40,” said Dr. Ryan Mace, CNOS. “And initially it may only be a very minor nuisance and it may stay at that level, but sometimes it reaches a point where it almost becomes an ability that you can’t grasp. We kind of looked into his performance and found that he actually had not only a minor injury to his elbow, but the muscle had started to completely pull away from its attachment,” Mace said.

Mace called Wendling with the bad news. “He asks, ‘Which hand are you holding the phone in?’” Wendling said. “Please switch it to your other hand, otherwise it will completely rip and you won’t be able to hold anything with that elbow.”

So Mace ordered surgery. “And so we make a small incision and insert some anchors into the bone, some anchors made of material that will be absorbed by the body with strong sutures attached to it, and pull that tissue back to the bone where it is. should be attached,” Mace said.

After the surgery, in January 2019, Mace told Wendling that returning to competitive golf could take five to six months. Four months later, Wendling played a tournament. “I have no pain,” Wendling said. “This is amazing.”

Wendling had surgery on his right elbow in 2019 and then had similar surgery on his left elbow in 2021.