Few golf injuries are crueler than a bad wrist, because it hurts on every swing and heals slowly. In 2018, Brooks Koepka, the reigning US Open champion, learned that when a partially torn tendon in his left wrist kept him from touching a club for 91 days and forced him out of the Masters. “I can’t play 80 percent,” he said. Eight years later, 19-year-old Kai Trump is on a similar road, with the same wrist injury twice in ten months. Now she is back in rehab, with a return to golf still some way off. Her latest update offers a glimpse of just how difficult the recovery has been.
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In a Day in the Life video from the University of Miami, Trump said: “And like I’m going through wrist rehab. Show you guys my what we’re looking like right now. Still not allowed to do anything yet, but … So that’s the scar again, same scar that I had before and then I have a two scars right here. Can’t really feel this still. It’s a little numbment wise. … I can’t go this way yet. I’m not allowed to. But we’re working. … we’re moving ahead.”
Trump first hurt the wrist in November 2025 and tried conservative treatment for about two months. She then had left-wrist surgery in early January to repair the stabilizing tissues of her ECU tendon and damage to her triangular fibrocartilage complex, with Dr. Thomas Graham operating at the Lehigh Valley Orthopedic Institute.
The setback came in her collegiate debut at the Golfweek Fall Challenge in September. Kai Trump hit the ground next to a cart path, then hit a driver on the tenth hole. “I felt like I tore it again,” she said. She had a second operation, announced October 14, at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery under hand surgeon Dr. Michelle Carlson.
“For now, it’s all about healing, and trusting the process,” she wrote at the time.
She has given no return date, and the injury is expected to keep her out of competition for several months. Miami started its season strongly without her.
Koepka’s story offers hope, but it also carries a warning. He missed about 15 weeks and returned at the Zurich Classic. Then, a few weeks later, he nearly re-injured the wrist when a golf cart cut in front of him on the practice range at the Players. He went on to win the US Open at Shinnecock Hills, the first back-to-back winner since Curtis Strange in 1989, and then the PGA Championship at Bellerive. “My ECU tendon was barely hanging on,” he said afterward.
Michelle Wie West’s story is the cautionary one. She broke three bones in her left wrist in 2007, at 17, and played through pain for years. She later developed arthritis in both wrists and had surgery on her right hand in October 2018. She came back in 2019 at the KPMG Women’s PGA, shot 84-82, and missed the cut by 17. She retired after the 2023 US Women’s Open. Reflecting on how little time she gave the wrist to heal, she has called it “one of my biggest regrets.”
Trump is trying to stay in the game in other ways. “I’ve actually been putting and chipping with one hand, which [is] my right hand. And I’ve actually enjoyed it a lot.”
Medical literature says ECU injuries most often hit a golfer’s lead wrist, which is the left wrist for a right-handed player.
Her life outside golf is harder than the highlights suggest. She says her Whoop band has shown red for three weeks, and she has strep again. She also plans to post more content and to be open about days that aren’t perfect.
Kai Trump has told Fox News Digital she “100%” wants to turn pro after Miami. Koepka’s story shows a wrist can come back, and Wie West’s shows how it can go wrong. Which road Trump takes may depend on how patiently she rehabs.