How PGA HOPE Helped Army Veteran Alex Venker See a New Version of Himself

After trading his sedan for a motorcycle, Alex Venker and his friend Steve Young went for a ride from Charlotte to Weddington on a beautiful September North Carolina day. They were stopped at a traffic light. When it turned green, Venker accelerated and, seconds later, was suddenly smashed in the face by a buzzard that had been eating a dead deer in the middle of the median. Young hit Venker from behind and launched him 30 feet. Venker’s motorcycle rolled on top of him.

“The top of my nose was below my bottom lip,” Venker, now 35, said of the 2009 accident.

“That set the foundation, fortunately or unfortunately, for my military service.”

Cooking is a big family pastime for the Venkers and Alex jumped around as a cook for various pizzerias during his high school years. Then, at age 19, it was time for him to figure out his future.

He and his father remember the sequence of events differently.

“At the end of 2008, my dad and I are having a conversation, he pulls me in, I forgot exactly what I had done, but it wasn’t a positive thing, he looks at me as he’s putting his shoes on getting ready to go play golf and says, ‘you need to get your s--- together’,” Alex recalls.

Said Jim Venker: “He was floating around after high school, having a hard time finding a place to land. I said, ‘have you ever considered looking at the armed services?’ I said, ‘tomorrow you and I are going to the recruiting station, and I want to give you a chance to meet every branch.’ We spent the day there, he went through interviews, then we left, no commitments were made. A couple weeks later he came home and said that he had enlisted in the Army.”

Alex Venker always thrived on a structured environment, and he graduated at the top of his basic training class in Fort Benning, Georgia, then progressed to Airborne School, even though he was scared of heights. He went on leave after that and had some time before reporting to his next assignment.

Then the motorcycle accident happened.

A week later, the Charlotte native and his father drove to Fort Myer, Virginia, for Alex to start Alpha Company. He reported for duty with a leg brace from his groin to his ankle, his left arm in a sling and loads of stitches in his nose from a plastic surgeon.

There was only one realistic place for Venker in his physical condition – a desk job. It wasn’t an ideal start, but he was determined to excel in that role and created new processes to get things done much quicker than they had in the past.

Eventually he ran into Charles Pfetzer, one of the men he met in basic training. Several months later they were all coming back from a long, holiday weekend of leave and the group was scheduled to report for formation at 5:45 a.m. on July 5, 2011. Pfetzer was not there.

“He doesn’t come out to formation, and he won’t open the door to his room,” Venker said. “I go get the keys, thinking he’s asleep.”

When Venker opened the door he found Pfetzer on the ground, his body bloated and an empty bottle of 60 Percocet pills.

“I met him on Day 1, met his parents and his sister,” Venker said. “Personally, that hit me the hardest.”

Venker re-enlisted twice during his six-years of service trying to get deployed, but it never happened. Still, he was entrusted with high-profile assignments, like helping plan a quick response for President Barrack Obama’s second inauguration. On four different occasions he guarded the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

In the three years after he left the Army, he married Katie, they had their first daughter, Caroline, and Alex was working 70 hours a week handling operations, management and cooking at a quick-service taco restaurant. One night in 2018, when returning home from happy hour he had a massive panic attack. He pulled over on the side of the road, cried his eyes out and didn’t know what to do. He called an old 1st Sgt., who didn’t exactly tell him what he needed to hear, then got himself home. He never told Katie of the attack.

Venker suppressed it and woke up each morning to exercise before going to work saying, “that way I wouldn’t have the energy to deal with it.”

The couple moved back to Charlotte shortly after to be with family. But their relationship didn’t work. Alex and Katie separated in 2022.

“Looking back, my PTSD flared up and I did nothing about it,” Venker admits.

Alex Venker has always had a deep association with golf. Since age 4, he vividly recalls having Easter brunch at East Lake, where his paternal grandfather was a long-time member. The family met in the same private room to dine each year, but to get there he had to walk past halls filled with trophies, photos and some of the greatest bits of history in the game.

“From a very early age I fell in love with the beauty of what a pristine course looks like, what a pristine clubhouse looks like and everything inside,” Venker said. “I noticed service that was unlike anything you’d get anywhere else.”

Venker considers himself the perfect blend of all the different personalities he was around growing up, one who is the middle child of three boys. His aforementioned paternal grandfather, Ralph Venker, was a P-51 Mustang pilot in World War II. Later in life he partnered with a friend to run a dynamite distributorship.

Alex’s mother Mary was always adamant on giving back to the community. Venker remembers, while living near New Orleans for a brief stint, they would go to the 4th Ward to help build homes when he was very young. He often would help make sandwiches for the men’s shelters there too.

Venker’s father, Jim, was an architect and collected Civil War relics. Alex said he often felt like parts of his childhood home were like a museum. The attention to detail and discipline Alex received from his father served him well in the military, among other places, and even during a specific setting last week.

Venker represented the Carolinas PGA Section in Washington, D.C., as one of 19 Ambassadors participating in PGA HOPE National Golf and Wellness Week, which included time at Congressional Country Club. PGA HOPE (Helping Our Patriots Everywhere) is the flagship military program of the PGA of America’s REACH Foundation. It introduces and teaches golf to Veterans and Active Duty Military to enhance their physical, mental, social and emotional well-being.

“Walking through Congressional I’m looking at the detail,” he said. “Everybody else is looking at things on the wall, I’m looking at the details of a 100-year-old building. It’s impeccable. I was looking at the ceilings to see if could find a brush stroke out of place. It’s impossible to see an imperfection.”

Alex won a couple junior club championships at Raintree Country Club during his younger days in Charlotte but turned to lacrosse and weightlifting in high school. Weightlifting, in particular, helped him understand his body’s transfer of power that, to this day, still helps him with his golf swing, one that has produced a 5.1 handicap.

He didn’t play much during his military days, played sparingly when he left but he finally returned to the driving range last year for the first time in eight years. He was hooked again. Instantly. After the feeling of a few well-struck iron shots, he knew it was something he desperately needed back in his life.

Venker played 70 rounds of golf last year, installed a golf simulator in his house and hits balls there every day. While going through his divorce, Venker was asked to play in a Marine golf outing. It was there when someone mentioned he should look into PGA HOPE.

After attending a couple sessions, Venker discovered something that had really been bothering him for the past nine years.

“I had purposely not stayed in touch with people, minus a handful of commanders, since I got out,” he said. “I didn’t feel that I did my job as an Infantryman. I wasn’t in a line company doing firing squad or [Combat Airman Skills Training] of whatever. I didn’t get deployed. I was trained to jump out of airplanes and shoot bad guys with any sized caliber round and I got good at it. I just wanted to do that. I didn’t do what you guys did. I had a totally different journey. I felt lesser of a man than those that I served with.

“Now I’m at peace with it, but I didn’t realize that until PGA HOPE,” he continued. “After sharing my story and people reiterating to me that you did a lot of cool stuff and it takes a certain person to be on the straight and narrow and do what you did. Do not think for one second the battlefield was any better.”

Venker is doing great these days. He’s an enterprise account executive at ThoughtSpot, an enterprise, search-based analytics product. He’s met a new love, Missy Scott, who just moved into his house in Charlotte. He’s fulfilled, happy, working hard, is a devoted father to daughters Caroline (8) and Reagan (6) and is eager to continue to support PGA HOPE.

There’s nothing missing at the moment, other than that one little itch he’s had since those days when he was 4, having Easter brunch at East Lake.

“I’d like to work in golf for the rest of my life,” he said. “It’s always been there. It’s now just becoming much more prominent.”