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GREENSBORO -- Greg Kraft fought his way onto the leaderboard Friday afternoon at the Wyndham Championship and will go into the weekend with his head and his heart and most of his lungs.

That he's back out here is a testament to his head and heart. That he only has part of one of his lungs is a testament to something else -- either the wonders of modern medicine or the lack thereof.

Kraft shot a second-round 67 at sweltering Forest Oaks, then walked into the media tent and started talking about survival. A lot of golfers were talking about that Friday as the temperature and humidity rose to unhealthy levels, but Kraft survived something that most golfers don't even know exists.

"They call it Valley Fever," said the 43-year-old. "It's a fungus. I'd never heard of it. I know all about it now."

Kraft thinks he caught it playing golf. In fact, he's sure of it.

"It was in Tucson," he said. "I caught it in the desert at the '02 Tucson Open."

The fungus thrives in hot, distressed environments common to the southwestern United States, particularly the valley area of Arizona where the Tucson Open has been played off an on since 1965. Kraft believes he got it from spores sprayed into the air from divots blasted off the desert floor.

"It only grows in that valley," he said. "It's something that a hundred thousand people a year catch there. Diagnosed right away, you take anti-fungal medicine and you're perfect within five days."

Kraft caught it. No one else who played in that Tucson Open did. His is a cautionary tale and a nightmare.

"Two weeks later I started showing signs of it at the Honda," he said. "Had to withdraw after five holes. Had to withdraw from Bay Hill after the first day. Players Championship, I could hardly walk.

"I ended up losing about 30 pounds and it took them five months to really figure it out, because when you have a fungal infection there's no bacteria, so when they take your blood and they run it, check on you, nothing shows."

Doctors suggested he might have a virus. Then they thought it might be mono.

"Five months later, when they finally did a CAT scan on my body for the third time, they said I had cancer," Kraft said. "I lived with that for about seven days."

Surgery revealed he didn't have cancer. He was put on antifungal treatments, which Kraft said was like chemotherapy, then he waited nine months only to see the fungus return.

"They put me on medicine again for six months," he said. "Three months into it, I started getting worse and they finally just went in and said, 'We've got to remove part of your lung.' So they took that out and I had to be back on that medicine for three more months just in case."

Through it all, Kraft tried to play golf and stay sane. He played nine events in 2003, managed only four in 2004 before landing hard on the Nationwide Tour in 2005. He wondered if he could ever return to the form that carried him to a victory in the 1993 Deposit Guaranty Classic as he turned 40 and then 41 and began to doubt his health and then his age and then, well, everything.

"I had to get by the psychological part of it, wondering if I was ever going to be back to where I was," he said. "Or I wondered: Am I just older? Is this the way I'm supposed to be?"

Kraft began to fight his way back in 2006, playing in 26 PGA Tour events with an exemption based on the number of cuts he'd made in his career. That's the last of 34 exemption categories. In other words, he's hanging by a thread. He now plays on the Nationwide Tour and the rare PGA event to which he can gain entry. That he's playing at all says something about his heart and soul.

"I never thought I didn't want to play again," he said. "But I did think I might not."

Kraft was angry and bitter for a while, suing the tour at one point seeking a medical exemption. All through the ordeal he continued to fight his way back.

Kraft talks matter-of-factly about what he went through. He looks you in the eye and tells you the statistics, about the attempts to find cures and vaccines for something almost no one knows about. He knows the various stages of it, the chances of recovery and the effects it has on a person's health, his mind, his golf game. Kraft talks easily about them all, pantomiming putts on slow greens and hard swings from sandy divots.

He smiles a lot and points to his chest a lot, noting where one lung remains strong and the other defiant after a disease he knows more about than anyone in golf.

There's still a lot he doesn't know, but Kraft knows he'll play golf again today and he'll play again Sunday. And if it all works out, he'll be playing for a long time, no matter which tour, which event or which city.

Even the one in Tucson, right?

"Uh, no," Kraft said.

He wasn't smiling.

Ed Hardin can be reached at 373-7069 or ehardin@news-record.com