Tom Lehman Reveals Cancer Scare From Decades Ago

Tom Lehman recently admitted that he dealt with a big colon cancer scare decades ago. However, it was pure luck as the diagnosis only occurred after he took Advil for three straight days for various aches and pains. That led to some bleeding which then led to a call to the Mayo Clinic. 

GolfDigest.com’s Sam Weinman has the details.

The diagnosis was 23 years ago.

Why had he never said anything?

“It really didn’t seem to me it was worth discussing,” he said this week.

The cancer didn’t stand in his way of his enjoying a career season in which he topped the PGA Tour money list and won his lone major at the 1996 Open Championship, and he has been healthy since. But it also says something about Lehman, who has enough perspective to recognize when an experience is deserving of sympathy and when it is not.

“I never had to deal with Stage 4 cancer or go through chemo or any of those awful things,” Lehman said. “Mine was early Stage 1 cancer, so why should I make a big deal out of it?”

Here’s the fortunate rub of the diagnosis.

After a promising run-up to the ‘95 Masters, Lehman was contending with an assortment of aches and pains at Augusta when he resorted to taking Advil—something he rarely did—three days in a row. He began to bleed internally, which led Lehman to place a call to the Mayo Clinic. Ahlquist and his team discovered some polyps in Lehman’s colon that proved to be malignant. Throughout all of this, Lehman played in his third Masters and finished 40th.

“For me the scary part is when you think about the percentages,” Lehman said. “When they catch the cancer in an early stage, like I had it, the survival rate is 98 percent. When it gets beyond the colon, it goes down to something like 2 percent. What if I didn’t take that Advil that led to the bleeding? At the time I was 36, and I never would have gone to get a colonoscopy. It would have just grown and grown and grown … Even when you have good health you realize you need some good breaks in life.”