The improvised explosive device, set off remotely by the Taliban, had detonated directly under his Humvee, killing four fellow marines. Williamson survived thanks to the heroism of Staff Sergeant Joseph Fraley, who dragged him out of the wreckage. The blast fractured three vertebrae, shattered his femur, and crushed everything from the middle of his shins down. After more than 40 surgeries, one leg had to be amputated. Eventually, he lost his other leg, too. At 21, the former football and baseball player was a double amputee.

Damaged by PTSD, he struggled to connect with anything. “We never really talked about that stuff when we were in the U.S. Marine Corps,” he says. And he didn’t undergo any psychotherapy during his physical recovery. “When I got out, I wasn’t doing anything productive,” he says. “Nothing was enjoyable. I was just numb.” Months on prescription pain meds also got him hooked on opiates, and he relied on marijuana and alcohol to endure.

The bottom came when he went missing for several days. “My parents thought I was dead,” he says. “They had the whole town looking for me. I was off in Seattle just hanging out by myself. I just didn’t want to talk to anybody.”

He moved to San Diego in 2013 and was able to avoid using for a time. And fitted with prosthetics, he resumed his motocross career with success: “I raced the Baja 1000 twice, the first-ever double amputee to do it.” Eventually, however, the trauma caught up with him. In 2015, he entered a rehab facility in San Diego for PTSD sufferers.

He underwent cognitive behavioral therapy and cognitive process therapy, both of which helped him face the trauma of that day in Afghanistan. He was guided step by step through everything that happened, a painful process that required him to relive the worst day of his life and also confront his survivor’s guilt.

Equally important to his recovery, he says, was the day a friend told him that he’d been going to the Golf Academy of America in Carlsbad, California. The game, the friend said, had helped him recover. Golf was never a sport Williamson gave much thought to. But it was helping his buddy. He’d heard there was something about the game—something meditative and challenging. Frustrating, too, but what the hell, why not? “After that one day, we went every freaking day for a few months,” Williamson says. “Just playing new courses and meeting new people.” He joined his friend at the Golf Academy and then transferred to the Professional Golfers Career College in Temecula, California.

Beyond the camaraderie and time outdoors in beautiful settings, what really appealed to him were the particular challenges—mental and physical—of the game. “That you’re not focused on anything else but that golf ball,” he says. “Not on the past, not the future, just staying present. You think it’s so easy, but it’s not.” You learn, for instance, that “there’s 13 different in-swing principles. I thought I was pretty good, but looking back at my pictures, my form’s all messed up,” he says, laughing.

Eventually, he did get pretty good. He joined the On Course Foundation, an organization that uses golf to help veterans and injured service members transition to civilian life. He earned a spot on Team USA, playing in the Simpson Cup in 2019, a Ryder Cup–style tournament between U.S. and U.K. teams, and almost every year since then.

And golf gave him something even more important. Three years ago, while playing in and speaking at a benefit tournament, he met Stephanie Patino. She had also known loss. Her older brother was killed in a firefight in Afghanistan in 2010. After she heard Williamson’s remarks, he recalls, she approached him and asked, “Can I buy you a drink?” Williamson’s reply? “Hell, yeah.” They were married two months later.

These days, Williamson enjoys sharing that story and other tales of how a sport he once found boring saved his life—and how thoughts of soaring come not from recalling the turret of his Humvee and the long, hard journey that followed, but from the sight of a little white ball against a blue sky, carving a perfect arc to exactly where he dreamed it could land.

This story appears in the January-February 2025 issue of Men’s Health.

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