Charting a new course

Editor’s note: This story includes discussion of opioid use and thoughts of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, please call the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Matt Stenhouse remembers turning the key in the ignition of his Toyota Tacoma pickup truck just after 5:50 the morning of Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2023. He remembers sliding his coffee mug into the cupholder. He remembers switching on the heated seat. He remembers the first three miles of his 22-mile drive into Waverley Country Club in Portland, Oregon, 35 minutes every morning before finally spotting the Willamette River, and an hour back home every afternoon.

He does not, however, remember the Volkswagen Golf driving on the wrong side of Oregon Route 224. He doesn’t remember the Golf’s engine colliding with the lower left corner of his cab at 5:56. He doesn’t remember slicing his right eyebrow, severing his right ear, breaking his left heel and nearly every bone across the top of his right foot, or fracturing three vertebrae in his back. He doesn’t remember his Tacoma spinning across the narrow two-lane road and winding up in a ditch. He doesn’t remember emergency personnel removing him from the cab, or loading him into a Life Flight helicopter, or ferrying him over the City of Roses to Legacy Emanuel Medical Center. He doesn’t remember his first week in a hospital bed.

He has read about all those things. He has made sense of most of them. He can discuss them all at length. But his memories of them are as vacant now as they were nearly three years ago.

What is certain for Stenhouse, after so much reflection, so much reading, so many conversations — after so much pain — is that the morning he can’t remember changed the rest of his life.

PORTLAND IS FAMOUSLY weird, but weird eluded the dividing line between Mount Scott and Happy Valley in the city’s southeast corner where Stenhouse grew up. His father, Rich, retired in 2016 after 30 years with Portland Fire & Rescue. His mother, Patty, encouraged him and his two older sisters, Emily and Brittany, to pursue their passions. Golf grabbed him early and never let go.

The summer he was 13, Stenhouse landed a volunteer position at nearby Glendoveer Golf Course, picking up golf balls in exchange for comped rounds. “My parents would drive me to the golf course and hand me $10 for food,” he says. “I would spend all day there.” Free golf. Free range balls. “I thought I was being sneaky, but everybody was giving me the nod. I was the little kid running around. Everyone knew my name and took care of me.”

The day he turned 15, the general manager called to tell Stenhouse he had been added to the payroll. Stop by the shop for your work schedule. He worked there for the next three years, parking golf cars and cleaning bathrooms before being allowed to putt and chip “and do all the things you shouldn’t be doing while you’re getting paid,” he says. “I’m living the dream.”

The dream shifted slightly after a new management company took over and Stenhouse transferred to the maintenance department. He learned about irrigation. He helped dig ditches and run pipe from one pumphouse to the next.

He played golf briefly at Warner Pacific University in Portland — during his short stint of higher education, he wrote a paper titled “Coffee and Diesel” — before deciding “college isn’t for me,” he says. “I don’t want to do this. I want to go down this golf course maintenance road and see where this can take me.”

That led to two years at Sah-Hah-Lee Golf Course in Clackamas, learning under owners Bud and Steve Lisac, who also designed the course, and superintendent Justin Hall, who had worked for a decade and a half under Bill Webster at Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club in Portland.

“‘I want you to understand, Matt, you’re not going to make any money for a long time,’” Bud told him one day. “‘I don’t care,’” Stenhouse replied. “‘Put me to work. That’s all I need.’”

The Lisacs steered him to Persimmon Country Club in Gresham, where he worked under superintendent Mark Miller and learned how to spray, then called him back after Hall moved on from Sah-Hah-Lee. “‘Do you want to be the superintendent here next summer?’” Bud asked. How else would a 21-year-old golf nerd respond? “‘Heck, yeah,’” Stenhouse replied. “I was cheap labor and willing to do it,” he adds.

Stenhouse returned in advance of the season, “and burnt the place to the absolute ground,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was doing with the irrigation system or fertilizing. I had the keys to the whole place and besides some landscaping experience, that’s all I knew. I tried my best and it was a good, good time.” He and Bud ended the run the next season. Stenhouse moved on to Portland Golf Club, working under superintendent Jason Dorn and assistant Mike Cortner, attended Penn State World Campus Online, learned more about agronomy and the industry. “One day, Jason walks in and says, ‘Waverley’s hiring an assistant and you need to apply.’”

Billed as the second-oldest private golf course west of the Mississippi River, Waverley Country Club is filled with history. Tiger Woods won his final Junior Amateur there in 1993. Juli Inkster won the Women’s Amateur in 1981. Lanny Wadkins won the U.S. Amateur in 1970. The club started awarding green jackets in 1934, which might have inspired Bobby Jones to do something similar down in Georgia. Established in April 1896, it is 99 years and 11 months older than Stenhouse.

Stenhouse started at Waverley in July 2021, hired by longtime superintendent and two-time interim general manager Brian Koffler — “an incredible teacher,” Stenhouse says — and working alongside fellow assistant superintendent Lucas Pfaller. He describes his first years there as “a ride.”

The ride halted suddenly during that morning commute in January 2023.

AMONG THE 37,654 fatal car crashes tallied by the National Safety Council in the United States in 2023, more occurred during the eight-hour window from 8 p.m. Saturday to 3:59 a.m. Sunday than any other block — 3,164, about 8.4 percent. Conversely, just 728, about 1.9 percent, occurred from 4 to 7:59 Wednesday morning. Stenhouse survived the collision, but the Golf driver, a 22-year-old Washington man named Miguel Adams, did not. The road remained closed for four hours as Stenhouse was flown north of the city, passing almost directly over Waverley on his way to Lutheran Emanuel.

“I was out for a week,” he says. “I remember the night before, and then the next thing I remember is having to use the bathroom in the hospital. Apparently, I was angrier than cuss. Apparently, I cussed out my grandma. I was awake, but I don’t remember any of it. I have zero recollection of any of that.”

Stenhouse’s laundry list of injuries is more unsettling with more detail.

“My back was pretty screwed up,” he says, “so the lower three vertebrae, right above my tailbone, are all fused together. There was fracturing down there, and it was swelling. They had to take off some protective layers of my spine so I wouldn’t be paralyzed, because it was going to restrict my spinal cord.

“Both my feet were obviously broken. Both feet were mangled. I broke the heel on my left foot. My right foot broke in half, every bone across my foot. I have a big scar right above my right eyebrow, and then it took my right ear off, a portion of it, but they were able to sew it back on. You can’t even really tell. You can see the scar.”

Over the next two years, he endured four surgeries on his right foot, two on his left foot and one on his back. “The back is, for sure, the scarier injury,” he says. “But the feet are what affect me the most.”

He remained in intensive care for two weeks, then headed home for five days before returning for two more weeks.

“People would come visit me,” he says. “My mom and dad would come visit me. My wife, Stephanie, would spend a lot of time with me. It was probably one of the better memories, as crazy as that sounds.”

After one nurse learned that Stenhouse worked at a golf course, he would bring a cane into the room and ask for swing advice. “He was always talking to me about golf and it was kind of the last thing I wanted to think about, because I wasn’t there,” Stenhouse says. “My whole life was ripped from me. I didn’t want to think about what I was missing out on.”

Pain seared through his body at all hours. Whatever medication Stenhouse asked for, he received. Oxycontin. Oxycodone. “One of the good things was the drugs,” he says. “It sounds horrible to say, but I mean, those things are powerful. Make you feel pretty darn good. Pretty crappy situation and the only thing that makes you feel better is some drugs and some camaraderie.”

More than once, Stenhouse screamed in pain, “and they brought out the big guns, a drug called Dilaudid” — a Schedule II controlled substance generically known as hydromorphone. “That was the best feeling in the world.” In a flash, Stenhouse understood drug addiction. “‘I had more pain than I’ve ever had in my life and you gave me just a little bit of this substance and it’s like peaches and rainbows. I feel great.’”

After heading home, he received a prescription for an Oxycodone every morning along with 15 milligrams of Oxycontin every three hours. Whenever his supply dipped, he “freaked out,” because he didn’t want the pain to return. But he realized he has an addictive personality — he calls it an excessive compulsive personality — gravitating over the years to golf, to work, to nicotine, to alcohol. “It was always something I could kind of reel in, but you hear about the drug addiction problems with opiates, and I was very aware of it,” he says. “They tell you what to watch out for. Those chemicals are powerful.”

Stenhouse feared the pain. He feared addiction more.

“I had to step it down, and step it down, and step it down to the point where I was off them completely,” he says. “My doctor called and said, ‘I can’t refill this. You have to cut it.’ That was two weeks of hell.”

During his last days on opioids, Stenhouse traveled with Stephanie and some friends to a beach house rental in Pacific City, about 100 miles southwest of Portland, along the coast. He stared at the waves.

“You try to distract yourself as best you can,” he says. “I was really resentful. I was not happy with anybody or anything. God bless my wife, I’m thankful she didn’t leave me, because I was just rude, angry at everything. I was just pissed off all the time. In the hospital, I was happy-go-lucky. Anybody who visited me, I was respectful, I tried to put on a good front and have a positive attitude, but behind closed doors, it was hell. I was angry and self-reflecting, trying to have a relationship with the Lord but at the same time pissed. How could this happen to me, you know? How in the world did this happen?”

Like about 44 percent of U.S. households, the Stenhouses own a handgun. At one point during those two weeks of hell, Stenhouse turned to Stephanie and told her to “hide it.”

“Those drugs basically shut off pain receptors and when you get off of them, those pain receptors are throbbing, saying, ‘Where’s that drug?’ It makes that pain worse. So I’m feeling more pain than if I had never taken them. That was just a really dark time — throwing stuff in the house, breaking bowls, just frustrated. I couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t go outside. Everything had to be done for me. It’s such a crippling feeling. I didn’t sleep for four or five nights. I hated my house, because I couldn’t leave it. I would stare at the ceiling, this one corner, all night long, for eight hours of darkness. My wife would get up and go to work, and here I am alone. People would come visit me and, luckily, I have a good support system. My best friends would call me and I would talk with them for as long as possible.”

Before Stenhouse went in for his seventh and final surgery last January, he told everybody he wanted only Ibuprofen and Tylenol. “I’m proud of that,” he says. “I don’t think a lot of people would think that’s something to be proud of but I’m proud that I never took one this time around.”

DURING HIS DARKEST days alone at home, Stenhouse numbed his mind with Netflix or YouTube, not really watching whatever was on the screen, just in his own head, hurtling down “all the wrong rabbit holes.” Relegated to a wheelchair, he munched on Trix all day. Circling his Walk Date on the calendar — and planning his return to Waverley — helped lift his spirits. So did leaving a PGA Tour video game on all day, listening to the digital renderings of chipping golfers and chirping birds.

And so did an old family friend named James Lee.

A realtor by trade, Lee helped Stenhouse’s parents purchase a home about 15 years ago. He helped Stenhouse and Stephanie purchase their home a few years ago, too.

And he did it all from a powerful robotic wheelchair.

Lee is almost totally paralyzed, the result of a swimming pool accident. In Stenhouse, he saw a man in need of support and some perspective.

“Don’t ever tell me that it doesn’t hurt, or it’s not bad, or you’re fine,” Lee told Stenhouse. “Tell me what you’re going through. People look at me and they think I have it worse than them so they’re not going to complain. That’s human reaction.”

One day, Lee dropped off his wheelchair ramps at Stenhouse’s home to help him get in and out. Another day, he took Stenhouse to a mall, where they drifted in robotic wheelchairs.

“When other people would share their pain, instead of saying, ‘You don’t know what real pain is,’ have some sympathy,” Stenhouse says. “Talk with them. How can you help them? James taught me that perspective. The worst thing in your life is the worst thing.”

The evening of March 24, a little more than 10 weeks after the collision, Stenhouse sent a text to Koffler that he describes as “a little cringey”: “Happy Friday! Hope your week at the course was a good one. Today I had an appointment for my feet. They pulled the last pin and stitches. They said my feet look amazing. I’m going to start PT and swimming ASAP. April 25th, I’ll have my appointment to start walking again and will be able to move freely without a back brace then as well. We will see how quick I’m able to get integrated back into working, movement dependent. I’m giving my all to get back to work ASAP and it can’t come soon enough. I hope I can get to ‘normal’ physically so I can give you and the team everything. I plan not only to be back to normal but be better than before. I have learned a lot of my mental toughness through this time, which I hope is an asset to the team. Thanks for the support.”

Koffler replied early the next morning, telling Stenhouse he was glad to hear the good news and that no one was questioning his work ethic.

Stenhouse took his first steps on April 25 and returned to Waverley on May 16 — first with a walker, then a cane, then an inverted wedge.

But he never felt quite right.

STENHOUSE WORKED THREE days his first week back. The next week, he worked every day, always staying late, “because the last place I wanted to be was home.” He also wanted to be on the grounds for the 2023 U.S. Women’s Senior Open, the eighth USGA championship at Waverley since 1952.

He worked through the rest of the season with pain in his feet and his back rearing up again and again. “I was always the guy that people looked to for the grunt work,” he says. “But now I couldn’t do that anymore.” He focused on golf course logistics — moving people around the course, studying how long various jobs take, building a different skill set.

He still wanted the physical work. He felt he owed Waverley everything he could give in 2024, especially with Koffler’s season-long promotion to interim GM on April 9. He worked hard alongside Pfaller, dragged hose, added more and more physical work to his load. “And it hurt,” he says. “It was hard, and it was not sustainable.”

Stenhouse says on a scale of 0 to 10, 10 being the worst pain of his life — staring at the ceiling in the dark for eight hours, his feet screaming — the work throughout the summer of 2024 was about a 6. “In the morning, it would be decent, and then the pain would start in the afternoon. I have a hard time putting things on other people. ‘I should do it.’ It’s really setting the tone as a leader. They see me walk around with a limp and my foot all cockeyed to the right. We’re all capable of a lot more than we think we are. And all the guys were unbelievable.”

But even before the end of the summer, he remembers thinking, “‘I’ll do this for this year, but I need to have the surgery and find something that is sustainable.’”

He planned a Thanksgiving week trip to Florida with Stephanie. She has family in the Sunshine State, including her brother, and her parents discussed moving there after they retired. Maybe they could all head across the country? Perhaps he could find a job in the industry that meshed with his newer skills?

They drove around the state, across the Panhandle, down to Tampa, stopping at courses everywhere. One night at a bookstore, he stumbled on “Wild at Heart” by John Eldredge — a Christian book about “a man’s journey through life” that he read faster than any other book. He has since gifted it to multiple friends.

He wrapped up his week with a visit to John Reilly, the director of agronomy at Longboat Key Club west of Sarasota and an online mentor. Reilly is always listening. His doors are always open.

Stenhouse mentioned the accident “many, many, many, many, many times,” he says. Reilly looked him “straight in the face” and delivered unforgettable advice.

“Sounds like you need to get over it.”

“What?”

“You need to get over it. You’re fine. You’re better for it. It’s over with. Move on.”

“YOU EVER HAVE those moments where you get that out-of-body experience, where your only real emotion is just tears come to your eyes?” Stenhouse asks. “Your eyes immediately get swollen with tears because you’re just like, That’s exactly what I needed to hear?

“At that time, that trip to Florida — Do I stay at Waverley? Do I have what it takes? — it was everything I needed to hear.”

Stenhouse walked away from daily golf course maintenance earlier this year. The revelations of the last three years were too strong — so many signs pointing him toward helping the industry in so many other ways.

“I felt like I couldn’t contribute the way that I could when I was an assistant superintendent, being an active guy, getting up, going and doing it. You have that imposter syndrome of, Can I do this? All those doubts running through my head. And then John told me that, and it’s so true. He’s right. I’ve proven I can do this job and can be successful in other ways. He was very influential.”

The Stenhouses still live outside Portland — no move to Florida yet — and he is busier than ever: He has carved a niche for himself in the Pacific Northwest with his company, Landscapes by NW Mowbotics, helping golf courses integrate robotic mowing, working with high-end properties on management and landscaping, and diving deeper into golf course construction, backflow and irrigation, and hardscaping.

“Whatever ego you think you have, you get everything ripped from you, it’s pretty amazing,” Stenhouse says. “Who cares? Who cares? I just had to get over it.”