Following Duval's victory at the 2001 Open Championship, he never won again on the PGA Tour and his performance declined dramatically due to injuries and various medical conditions.

The family sought treatment at Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, where David underwent surgery to donate bone marrow.

Counseling enabled him to reunite with his wife and children in 1982, and David continued to receive golf instruction from his father.

[5] In 1993, just as Duval was starting his professional golf career, his father again moved out of the family home, this time permanently.

While in college, he led an official PGA Tour event, the BellSouth Classic (which he would win as a professional), after three rounds.

Duval led the PGA Tour money list in 1998, and also won the Vardon Trophy and Byron Nelson Award for lowest scoring average.

[8] Other career highlights include achieving the number one spot in the Official World Golf Ranking in March 1999 and shooting a 59 in the final round of the 1999 Bob Hope Chrysler Classic on the Palmer Course at PGA West in La Quinta, California.

Before 1999, only two other golfers in PGA Tour history, Al Geiberger and Chip Beck, had posted a 59 in competition and no one had ever done so in a final round.

After his Open Championship win, Duval entered a downward spiral in form that saw him drop to 80th on the money list in 2002 and 211th in 2003, prompting an extended break from the game.

Numerous reasons have been postulated for the decline, including back, wrist and shoulder problems, personal difficulties and a form of vertigo.

[11] Many commentators believed Duval's career to be over but he returned to golf at the U.S. Open in 2004, where he shot 25 over par and missed the cut.

He made the cut in only one PGA Tour event in 2005 but did finish in the top ten at the Dunlop Phoenix tournament in Japan.

This prompted the PGA Tour to amend its medical exemption policies – and Duval was granted twenty starts for the next season.

After a lackluster first half of the following year, Duval reappeared on the leaderboard of the 2008 Open Championship, rekindling memories of his major victory.

He showed more signs of a comeback by shooting a final-round 69 to finish 2nd to defending champion Dustin Johnson at the 2010 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am.

In 2018, U.S. captain Jim Furyk named Duval as a non-playing vice-captain for the U.S. team participating in the 2018 Ryder Cup.

1Cancelled due to 9/11 QF, R16, R32, R64 = Round in which player lost in match play "T" = tied NT = No tournament "T" indicates a tie for a place CUT = missed the halfway cut WD = withdrew * As of the 2018 season Amateur Professional Player in italics denotes current number one