Three-Time PGA Tour Winner Details Recent Cancer Diagnosis

After the PGA Tour Champions’ James Hardie Pro Football Hall of Fame Invitational, the first week of March, Scott McCarron had a scratchy throat. So he looked inside his mouth with a flashlight to see what it was.

The three-time PGA Tour winner found a little white spot about the size of an eraser and decided to call his doctor.

He went in the next day to get it checked out, and his doctor would send him to an ear, nose and throat specialist, where McCarron, 60, underwent a biopsy.

Still, McCarron didn’t think much of it, believing it might be a bacterial infection. He left to play the Cologuard Classic, where he finished T15. However, on the way to his next event, he received a harrowing call.

“[The doctor] called me and said, ‘You have cancer,’” McCarron told the PGA Tour Champions this week. “So, at that point, he didn’t know exactly what kind. And then on Tuesday, he said it was B-cell lymphoma and kind of a fast-acting, so he wanted me to come home immediately, get me with the oncologist.”

"It's serious ... if I would've waited six months it would not have been a good outcome for me."@ScottMcCarron details recent cancer diagnosis and his positive outlook moving forward 🫶 pic.twitter.com/1h2iqz2ca2
— PGA TOUR Champions (@ChampionsTour) April 23, 2026

A few days later, he was diagnosed with a stage two form of the cancer, and went through roughly two weeks of blood work, PET scans and an abundance of doctors' appointments.

This all caught McCarron, an 11-time winner on the senior tour, off guard.

“When you look at someone like myself who stays in shape, eats right, gets sleep, but does everything you’re supposed to be doing, doesn’t drink too much and all of a sudden gets a diagnosis of cancer, it's kind of shocking,” he said. “So, you start thinking, ‘How? Why me?’ Those types of things, and then, then trying to put a team together to find out, ‘How can we beat this? Is it curable?’

“Those are the things that are really going through your head and then after you do that PET scan, you don't know if it's spread throughout your whole body and that was probably the scariest thing.”

This week, he began chemotherapy, doing six-hour treatments. And he felt good enough to play this week’s Mitsubishi Electric Classic (he’s T65 after the opening round).

“I’m looking forward to being a little distracted on the golf course and thinking about golf instead of thinking about [the cancer],” McCarron said.

Thankfully, he decided to act quickly after discovering the little white spot in his throat.

“If I would have waited six months, it would not have been a good outcome for me, from what my doctors say,” McCarron said. “So, early detection is the key for any of the cancers.”

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