Four years ago, Trey Mullinax finally had the kind of Sunday every professional golfer spends a lifetime chasing. A closing 66 at the Barbasol Championship turned years of grinding on the Korn Ferry Tour into his first PGA Tour title, a winner’s trophy, and the kind of career security every golfer spends years chasing.
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That feeling didn’t last. Instead of building on the biggest win of his career, Mullinax spent the next few seasons fighting just to stay on Tour. A torn labrum in his right hip eventually forced him into surgery after the October 2024 Sanderson Farms Championship, and even the Major Medical Extension that followed couldn’t stop the slide. He returned at the American Express in January 2025 but made only nine cuts in 23 starts that year, finishing 150th in the FedEx Cup standings, enough to leave him playing on conditional status heading into 2026. And just when another comeback seemed to be waiting for its next opportunity…
“I take full responsibility for what happened,” Mullinax said in a statement after the PGA Tour suspended him for six months for violating its anti-doping policy.
On Wednesday, the Tour confirmed that Mullinax tested positive for a substance prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
The substance itself hasn’t been named; the Tour, consistent with how it has handled every prior case, declined to specify what showed up in the test, and Mullinax has not identified it either. What he has said is that it traces back to a medication for a condition first diagnosed in college, one he kept treating without ever filing for a Therapeutic Use Exemption, the advance paperwork that would have cleared the same drug under Tour rules.
That omission, not the medication itself, is technically what triggered the suspension: under the Tour’s anti-doping policy, players carry full responsibility for anything found in their system, intent aside. Get it wrong, and a mandatory six-month suspension follows automatically. Mullinax was candid about where the fault sat.
“My lack of knowledge is not an excuse,” he said. “It was my responsibility to know the rules before taking any medication and I failed to do so.” He was firmer, though, on the one distinction he wanted to draw: “I have never taken any substance with the intention of gaining a competitive advantage.”
That distinction, inattention rather than intent, is the same one that ran through the case the Tour’s own program has leaned on as precedent. In October 2023, Byeong Hun An was suspended three months after testing positive for a substance contained in an over-the-counter Korean cough remedy. Strict liability made no distinction between the two cases despite the gap in circumstance: it is the design principle anti-doping enforcement is built on, and it treated An and Mullinax identically.
Mullinax is believed to be only the ninth golfer suspended since the PGA Tour’s WADA-aligned testing program began in 2008, a program administered weekly through the National Center for Drug Free Sport, with samples processed at WADA-accredited labs. The first was Doug Barron, banned for a year in 2009, the inaugural case under the newly launched program. Bhavik Patel followed in January 2015, suspended a full year for a performance-enhancing substance. An’s 2023 case came next, and now Mullinax’s.
Golf’s other major venture has produced its own recent example: LIV Golf suspended Graeme McDowell for a single event in August 2024 and fined him $125,000 after a nasal decongestant he used ahead of LIV Nashville turned out to contain a banned stimulant, a case McDowell himself called an oversight he “deeply regret[s],” even while accepting the penalty in full.
Mullinax is eligible to return January 16, 2027, a week before the new season opens, and long after whatever remained of this one has expired. The timing lands in the middle of a season in which the Tour has otherwise been busy rewriting its own map: a multi-year strategic alliance with the DP World Tour and Asian Tour, formalized in July, reshaped how world-ranking points move across the sport’s global circuits. None of that restructuring changes what Mullinax is walking back into, a conditional card, a rationed number of starts, and a five-month gap since he last played competitively.
This spring produced three starts, one of them a Korn Ferry Tour event, and missed cuts in both of the PGA Tour events he entered. His last appearance came April 27 at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans. Until then, whether the eligibility date translates into an actual foothold on Tour is the part no announcement can answer for him.
“I accept the consequences of my actions and will use this experience as a lesson,” Mullinax said. “Golf has given me so much, and I never want one mistake to define the respect I have for the game or for the people who support me.”