Three weeks after the new PGA Tour season, Tyler McCumber may be just the first example of how the COVID-19 pandemic that stopped playing golf for 3 months can offer a moment’s chance.
McCumber had the most productive Sunday of his young career on the PGA Tour in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, without bogey in the last circular with very good stops of torque and a putt for birdie of 25 feet that hit in the cup in the ultimate hollow for a 66. It looked like I could put him in the playoffs.
But then Hudson Swafford hit a 6-10 foot for a birdie in it and won with an 8-foot shot through the putt at 18.
McCumber had to settle for the place at the moment, his most productive result on the PGA Tour. With $436,000, he stood out for who won $284,230 on 20 occasions last season as a rookie, he scored 300 numbers and is tied for fifth in the FedEx Cup. .
Yes, it’s too early. But he’s on his way.
And without the final pandemic store from March to June, it’s a possibility that McCumber doesn’t even have a business card.
“Indirectly, I feel like I had a break, how it went,” McCumber said Monday night.
The son of 10-time PGA Tour winner Mark McCumber has traveled far and worked hard to get to this point. He has won the PGA Tour Latin America 3 times (Ecuador, Mexico and Peru) and 3 times in 4 tournaments in 2018 at Mackenzie. Tour in Canada Ended in the 25th most sensible Korn Ferry Tour the following year to triumph on the PGA Tour.
His rookie season is pretty decent. McCumber made nine out of thirteen cuts, center of attention Saturday at Torrey Pines in front of the largest gallery he’s ever seen (Tiger Woods in his organization that day) and filming 68.
But he is not eligible for the player championship, so he went to Costa Rica to see a friend at TurfSafari for a lot of surfing and golfing. month until you can take a flight house and have a concept of when, if . . . golf would resume.
It’s a dubious moment, especially for a PGA Tour rookie.
And then, on April 30, when the tour set out to resume in June, it turned out that the only fair way to continue with a plan in which no one lost a card, regardless of a player’s prestige at the start of the season. , was implemented for the next one, unless players advanced in their ranking.
Three months out of the festival did not help McCumber. He played six of the 8 tournaments he qualified for, made only one drink and finished 161st in the FedEx Cup.
“I didn’t get the boost I expected from the beginning,” he said. “I got a little bit on the eighth ball and I was a little urgent. It was an exclusive situation, anything no one would have dealt with. “with before this has made me more mature in how to take care of one more curveball.
Without the more sensible page that led to the elimination of 8 tournaments from the calendar, McCumber would have played six more times, it is not known if this would have allowed him to finish in the more sensible 125 and keep his card.
And now it’s no longer relevant.
Because instead of going to the three-tournament series to look for his card, and face a return to the Korn Ferry Tour if he couldn’t, McCumber allowed him to start over effectively. Ferry Tour is in the same situation, they have one more year, in the hope that it will be a full year and that there will be no setbacks.
McCumber, who showed wonderful composure on Sunday, made the most of it with his position at the moment in Punta Cana.
There are examples.
Ted Potter Jr. , Aaron Wise and Michael Kim won the PGA Tour in 2018 and were granted two-year waivers that would have expired this year. They all ended up in the 125 most sensible and would have lost their status. year in the “tournament winners” category, the highest precedence for participating in events.
For the past six months may seem like six years, McCumber has brilliant memories of being in Costa Rica with so many strangers about the pandemic and his own work.
“I think it is the uncertainty of when humanity’s fitness will improve, and then, selfishly, when will I stop by to go to work. Will I go to work?” he said. And then, just as it happened, no one would have predicted it.