Gribble Keeps Grinding, Wherever His Golf Career Takes Him

Eight years after his breakthrough, former HP standout seeking a return to contention

During the first four months of this year, Cody Gribble played in golf tournaments in Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Colombia.

Despite that travel schedule, the life of a PGA Tour journeyman isn’t a tropical vacation. It’s a week-by-week battle to simply keep going.

Such is the case for Gribble, the former Highland Park standout who competed for just the second time all season on the American mainland at the CJ Cup Byron Nelson in early May in McKinney.

“As a kid, going out to Las Colinas, it was a dream to get out of school to go watch everyone play,” Gribble said. “Playing in the hometown tournament and having that support group behind me is great.”

Gribble, 33, is still trying to bounce back from a series of injuries that temporarily derailed his career. The left-hander posted his only Tour victory at the season-opening Sanderson Farms Championship in 2016, which gave him an exemption for the next three seasons.

The expiration of his automatic qualifying status coincided with the pandemic, followed by a pair of surgeries that essentially sidelined him for two full years.

Since returning to action in 2022, he’s managed to draw into a handful of Tour events based on ranking points. That included 23 starts in 2023, when he made 14 cuts and posted consecutive top-10 finishes in March.

However, the latter part of the year didn’t go well, and Gribble withdrew from the Tour’s qualifying school in December, leaving him in limbo again this season.

“The last two years I’ve been trying to figure out what tour I’m playing on,” he said. “Golf is a really hard game. Every shot counts. There’s no excuses to be made. I have to get back to the fundamentals.”

After an offseason knee surgery, he has toggled back-and-forth between the PGA Tour and the lower-level Korn Ferry Tour with mixed results as he searches for elusive consistency.

“It’s a constant struggle,” Gribble said. “All my surgeries have been great. I’m never going to be 100% like I was 10 years ago.”

Indeed, in the decade since he’s been on tour, Gribble’s perspective has changed from that of a wide-eyed rookie to an experienced veteran. He knows the key is taking advantage of opportunities.

“It takes one good swing and you feel like you’re about to win another Tour event, and then you go on a stretch of bad golf, and you feel like you need to go find a job,” he said. “Right now, it’s not where I want it, but I know what it takes and I’ve got the game to do it.”