Courtesy: European Tour

Thomas Levet and David Duval should get together over a drink, sometime.

They'd have plenty to talk about.

Duval, the Open winner in 2001 and Levet, a French golfer who played on the Ryder Cup team in 2004, have both seen their careers take a beating from vertigo.

Vertigo is an inner-ear ailment, often caused by a virus, which leaves its victim suffering intense bouts of dizziness and nausea that can last for hours. Not a pleasant thing at all.

For a golfer, vertigo is a game-wrecker. And that's what happened to Duval (a lot of other things were going on his life, as well) whose game evaporated over the next season after winning his one and only major.

It has taken Duval a long, long time to come back. And he's still struggling to find his game. At least he's not shooting rounds in the 80s anymore.

He has played in five events on tour this season and has made the cut in three.

Last season, Duval missed 13 cuts, five of them in a row. So things are looking up, perhaps.

For Levet, his bout of vertigo came in New York City last year.

Levet had devoted himself to playing on the PGA Tour full-time in 2006 but vertigo struck him out of the blue in New York City one day.

"I felt as though I was in a washing machine for a whole five minutes. I got out of the car and didn't know my name, I couldn't even walk straight", he said.

He played just three more tournaments in 06 and called it quits.

As a result, he lost his tour card for both the PGA and the European PGA tours.

In short, he was unemployed.

There were days, he said, when he could only stand up for about 10 minutes and then he would have to lie down for three hours.

But, like Duval, Levet is now climbing his way back up golf's difficult and unforgiving ladder of success.

When a professional golfer is forced into an extended layoff, getting one's game back to a competitive level is a long, hard process. The swing has to be re-grooved, muscle memory restored; the short game sharpened, the putting stroke refined again.

But the one part of the game that can't be recreated through practice is the mental game.

That only returns through competition and it's the most elusive and difficult part of golf to re-establish.

Levet still hopes to do well on the PGA Tour where he can play this season on a medical exemption.

The Frenchman has competed in just one PGA event this year and missed the cut.

"My goal is to have my card by the end of the year, whether that's in the U.S. or in Europe," Levet said.

Yes, he and Duval would have a lot to talk about over that drink.

Or maybe they'd just rather not talk about it at all.