For as long as Clay Merchent slogged through injury – patching his golf game together with physical therapy and ice baths while searching for a meaningful diagnosis – his painstaking comeback from a left rib surgery reached a landmark point in a most mundane location. The Merchents, from Noblesville, Indiana, were at a family wedding in Colorado earlier this summer when a golf simulator bar caught the eye of Clay and his dad Mike.
Clay’s career, temporarily shelved 21 months earlier, had played out on the biggest stages. He was a Drive, Chip and Putt National Finalist, won AJGA events, contended at the Sage Valley Junior Invitational and Western Junior and arrived at Indiana University in the fall of 2020 as a top in-state recruit.
But Clay, named Big Ten Freshman of the Year in 2021, has not been seen in a college golf event since Sept. 27, 2022. After his breakout freshman season, a nagging injury became debilitating. Months went by before a doctor could not only connect the persistent pain he was feeling in his back and shoulder with a problem in his ribs but also repair it.
That day in the simulator, eight months post-op, Clay, now 22, hit more full golf shots than he had since undergoing the procedure – dozens of them, pain-free, for hours. A once-uncertain comeback materialized before him.
“It was a eureka moment. It was like OK, it’s ready, let’s go do this thing,” Clay said. “I played my first nine holes that very next day when we got back home.”
He finished T-6 at the Golfweek Hoosier Amateur and T-4 at the Indianapolis City Amateur in preparation for the fall college season.
Ethan Chelf, Clay’s teammate at Indiana, knows something of his slog, having gone through it himself. The 21-year-old has also been sidelined from competition for much of the past two years. He can trace his back pain to a single event that began an equally drawn-out road to the right diagnosis.
Ethan suffered many of the same symptoms as Clay but found a solution at the West Virginia University Medicine Heart and Vascular Institute when he met thoracic surgeon Dr. Adam Hansen, a leading expert in Slipping Rib Syndrome. Hansen performed surgery on both men to treat the condition, likening the procedure to Tommy John surgery for baseball players.
Their ribs repaired, Clay and Ethan enter a redshirt junior season at Indiana with a story that might spark a lightbulb moment for anyone experiencing similar pain.
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