Mike Lorenzo-Vera: ‘I was screaming. I thought I was dying. I didn’t want to play.’

The DP World Tour has been missing one of its biggest personalities in recent times.

Mike Lorenzo-Vera, the sauve Frenchman with the warm smile, announced in August that he would be putting the clubs away for a while.

His last tournament was the Barracuda Championship a month earlier, but the darkness had set in for Lorenzo-Vera long before that missed cut in California.

“It all started in Ras Al-Khaimah two years ago,” Lorenzo-Vera tells bunkered. “I was talking to the doctor and I said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but when I fall asleep, a few seconds later I feel like I have adrenaline in my brain. I feel like I had a power nap and then I can’t sleep anymore for four-five hours.’ I looked at my screen time and started reading instead of looking at Instagram. It helped actually straight away, but things came back a few months after. I just couldn’t sleep.”

It soon became obvious that this wasn’t just insomnia blighting Lorenzo-Vera.

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“Things started to get worse,” the 39-year-old recalls. “I just didn’t believe it was my mental health. I thought it was pressure and frustration. Or food or alcohol. Because I’m a little bit stubborn I thought if you play better, things are going to be better. But no, you will play better if your mental health is better.”

A veteran pro of 19 years, Lorenzo-Vera has experienced just about every low you can imagine on tour. MCs are taken on the chin and top-tens can be gold dust. The intense pressure to hold onto his card year after year has kept him alert, but this was an out-of-body experience that was completely consuming.

“At the same time I started to fall asleep, I started to scream and feel like I was drowning,” he says. So he turned to the DP World Tour doctor. “I spoke to Andrew Murray in Dubai in January and he said, ‘Are you sure you want to talk about it before you play?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I don’t give a sh**.’ I started to speak about problems I had and, straight away, I got out of there and shot five-under really easily. I made a pretty good tournament the week after as well.”

The respite didn’t last long.

“But then it started again,” he explains. “At the beginning of the summer, when I was coming back from the Barracuda, I received a message from a friend saying my friend had died.

“At the same moment, we were very concerned about my daughter’s health. It was two really complicated weeks. I kept accumulating things. My wife lost someone from the family. I was just like, ‘F*** it!’ I was just screaming every night and couldn’t sleep and feeling like I was dying. I was having panic attacks at dinners.

“I thought, what am I going to do if I can’t play golf and provide for the family? Money goes fast. I’m not the type of person to cut on the expenses with physical coach, mental coach, I just want to keep pushing and keep my team around. 

“The financial part is scary and when you don’t really know what’s going on, you start to think the worst. ‘Is that a tumour in the brain?’ The feeling was really into the brain. When the experts explain, you relax and see that its just the amount of sh** you accumulate.

“We were like, ‘OK, we need a break.’ Golf was just a layer of the problems. I was happy to stop and just didn’t want to play. I spoke to the doctors from the tour and they were like, ‘Okay, yeah, that’s time to pull the brakes.’ Sometimes you need to push the ground to push back and go up again. I felt like I touched the worst of my mental health.”

Stepping off the hamster wheel for the first time in almost two decades has allowed Lorenzo-Vera to breathe again. Rather than his game, he has focused on his wellbeing. Doctors have prescribed him anti-depressants as part of a six-month treatment plan.

“The stress is still here,” he says. “But I live with it.

“It’s still too early to see proper great results. The first positive thing is that I fall asleep normally and I’m still very tired. Blood tests, perfect, the heart is perfect. It’s just the brain needs to rest.

“It was a really hard first few months, not knowing where I was going but its been two weeks now that I feel a bit better now.”

Lorenzo-Vera is keen to praise the DP World Tour’s benevolent medical department for their unwavering help and support through this dark period in his life.

“They have a 24-hour emergency line,” he explains. “You can call doctor Andrew Murray any time. They are very reactive and honestly I was so impressed by the reactivity. I sent one text and the guy called me straight away. Then, boom, I had a meeting with the psychologist a day after. He sent me a text yesterday about how I feel. The medical team is f***ing awesome.”

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It is not just the medical team either. The Tour has rallied around Lorenzo-Vera at his time of need. For that he feels eternally grateful.

“The guys on the tour are still keeping an eye on me and asking me every week how I feel and how is the treatment going,” he says. “Matthieu Pavon, Alex Levy, Gregory Havret, Raphael Jaquelin, Romain Langasque, they sent me nice messages asking me about how I feel. All the player relation guys have been really nice to me too.”

Mental health at golf’s elite level has been brought into focus in the most heartbreaking circumstances in 2024.  The tragic death of the PGA Tour player Grayson Murray sent a shivering reminder that above all, golfers are just people. Like any walk of life, there are troubled souls and those in need of some support.

Still in the midst of his own journey, it is a subject Lorenzo-Vera feels obliged to speak openly about.

“There’s no shame to have,” Lorenzo-Vera insists. “I know for the last two to three years mental health in sport has been considered very seriously. I wrote it straight away on Instagram to show people that struggle that there is no shame.

“It’s just like if you hurt your foot, you just hurt your brain. Brain is part of the body. It is not a weakness. I take it really positively now, at the beginning it was scary but now I see it as an opportunity to bounce back in the second part of my life.”

Lorenzo-Vera feels lucky that he now has his chance for a complete reset. He will spend more time with his young family and return to the game when he is ready and rested. That could well be the Dubai Desert Classic in January, or in Ras Al-Khaimah after that. He will see how he is feeling.

“I see my priorities better,” he says. “It’s not perfect, but the real hard part is gone.”

Ben Parsons is the Senior Writer at bunkered and is the man to come to for all of the latest news, across both the professional and amateur games. Formerly of The Mirror and Press Association, he is a member at Halifax Golf Club and is a long-suffering fan of both Manchester United and the Wales rugby team.