“I would do some really, really weird things for Bud to win today,” said Justin Thomas, expressing his hopes on Bud Cauley’s victory. Not the words you hear from a competitor right before the final day of one of the most important events of your life. But that’s where Justin Thomas stands out. He has seen Bud Cauley go through all difficult circumstances in golf and life. And he knew that more than anyone else that a PLAYERS Championship title would have been the best reward for a man who refused to give up.

Cauley and Thomas’s friendship started in college. Cauley, Thomas’s senior at the University of Alabama, was a very polished amateur golfer. They did not start as friends, but navigating the challenges of being a collegiate golfer, along with other young golfers at the time, brought them closer, and they ended up being roommates as well. “For sure. Yeah, we lived together for, I don’t know what it was, four, five years, something like that. Three or four. I don’t know. Something like that,” shared JT recently at the PLAYERS 2025 at the post-round press conference.

So, when Bud Cauley got in an accident in 2018 after the second round of the Memorial Tournament, Thomas was shocked and devastated. He just could not play the Saturday round. “It calmed me a lot after seeing him,” Thomas said on Saturday at the time. “I couldn’t hit a shot, couldn’t play a hole, without thinking about him.”  Cauley was in the passenger seat of the car in Dublin, Ohio, and ended up with six broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and a broken leg. The injuries could have been career-ending, but Cauley refused to give up.

He fought back to play in the PGA Tour, and despite complications from the injury forcing him out for three more years, he fought back again. JT tried his best to be there for Cauley when he was recovering. “Yeah, we’ve both been down in Jupiter and yeah, when he was going through everything, just trying to be a friend, just like I would to anybody, let alone just a peer out here. Yeah, we just tried to keep his spirits up as much as possible because it’s pretty hard to do that,” shared the 2022 PGA Championship winner.

Thomas recalled the accident and how he was anxious to go see him at the hospital, and shared, “Yeah, it was a lot. It all happened very fast. It just was — it was a lot. Yeah, I wanted to be there to see how my friend was doing, but, you know, it just, it was a wild, crazy, bizarre, terrible night. I wanted to go be there to see him.”

Thomas has spoken very highly of their bond, clearly. He says that you could put them in any situation, and they’d have fun. Both are passionate Alabama fans, and they often visit Tuscaloosa for football games. Even Cauley spoke fondly of their relationship. “Yeah, it’s been great. J.T. and I are close friends and play a lot together at home. Our families hang out a lot now. It’s been great. He’s had an amazing career, and I try to pick his brain sometimes when I can if we’re out playing. But even more than that, it’s not even golf-specific. It’s just we talk more about life and stuff like that than we do about golf,” he said.

Do you know that despite their strong friendship and good chemistry, they were unable to translate that bond into success in the 2017 Zurich Classic and missed the cut? Well, after the accident, Cauley made a quick return to the PGA Tour, only three months after the accident. But was it a fruitful one?

Bud Cauley’s return to the PGA Tour

Upon his return, Cauley finished T46 at the 2018 Safeway Open. But despite that, he would be sidelined due to complications arising from the accident in 2020. His last tournament was the 2020 Safeway Open, where he finished an impressive T14.

More than three years later, Cauley, free from the aftermath of the accident, made his return at the 2024 Phoenix Open. “It’s hard to put into words how much you kind of miss something when you grow up doing it every day and you play golf every day, and when it gets taken away, it does change your perspective on just how fortunate we are to be able to play golf and even to get to do the thing that you enjoy doing. The last couple days even have been a lot of fun to see a lot of familiar faces and guys I haven’t seen in a while,” Cauley remarked ahead of the 2024 WM Phoenix Open.

He made the cut at 10 of the 17 events on the 2024 PGA Tour, with a T5 finish at the Sanderson Farms Championship being his highest finish. At the 2025 PGA Tour, he made the cut in 3 of the four events he participated in, only missing out on the weekend at the Puerto Rico Open.

Cauley did not win the PLAYERS title like Justin Thomas wanted, but he did finish T6 with an impressive score of 9 under par, just two strokes shy of competing in the playoffs. Justin Thomas, meanwhile, finished T33 with a score of 2 under par.  This should be a huge boost for Cauley in his professional golf journey, and this result should be something he builds on with more events coming in.