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VALSPAR CHAMPIONSHIP

March 7, 2017

Lee McCoy

Palm Harbor, Florida

Q. How do you expect to be mentally after the car accident?
LEE McCOY: The six weeks I was in a cast I had nothing to do but sit home and whine about it. It was tough. You know, I couldn't even -- the toughest part was I couldn't even get my hand around an Xbox controller the way the cast was. I was home for like two days just whining and moaning and groaning, and I was like, I'll start playing Call of Duty for a month or do something to waste my time because it's not like I could go to rehab, you just sit there in a cast and do absolutely nothing. I mean, I wore a little -- I'm not very wide. I wore a hole about that wide in my couch. It's tough, I just had to sit home and wait it out.

Q. Was it a fractured wrist?
LEE McCOY: Yeah, I had two fractures. I had one fracture that wasn't too bad, and then I had one on the other side on the top of my hand where like the tip of the bone that goes into the hand where all your ligaments attach completely lifted off, so I had to kind of wait for that to settle. But I didn't have to have any surgery or anything, which was a huge blessing. What the doctor told me was I had a bunch of face-to-face time with a really good orthopedic surgeon who told me if that bone would have just fractured or would have stayed put, all my ligaments would have detached from that bone and I would have ruptured every ligament in my hand and I probably never would have played golf again. I keep saying that I'm the luckiest unlucky guy ever.

Could always be worse, I guess.

Q. What's your plan now for the next six months?
LEE McCOY: Well, after I win this week (laughter) -- yeah, playing a lot of Mondays. I don't have to do the pre-qualifiers for the big Tour Mondays, which is nice from a travel standpoint. When you have to go out there for those Thursdays, it's impossible. The travel is just ridiculous. It doesn't really make it worthwhile and that's why you see most guys doing the Web Mondays because you've only got to go for two days and you play well and you get through, whatever. I'll be doing a lot of those, and I could say if I do this this week or if I finish here this week or whatnot -- I mean, you get one shot at it, you really can't put too much pressure on yourself. You're never going to play well with a top-5-or-die attitude.

I'm back on my home course. I'm surrounded my family and friends. I get to sleep in my own bed that I grew up in. I just have to try to enjoy the week. It's not really worth it to put any pressure on myself because all I did last year was come out and have fun, have a great time, and everything worked out. You can't go out there and try to win it on Thursday. It doesn't work.

Q. Is there any residual effects in terms of things you've maybe compensated with with your wrist, or do you feel like you're back to where you were before?
LEE McCOY: I'm absolutely, unequivocally 100 percent. I feel like I never broke it. I can do push-ups with whatever weight on my back. I feel absolutely nothing. I didn't do any -- I didn't play any golf until it was 100 percent.

You know, the hardest part was just kind of knocking the rust off. But no, the recovery process was pretty quick, but I didn't rush it. I was very patient, which is tough, but I didn't really have anything planned, so I just made sure I took the time, and now it's 100 percent.

Q. So you didn't get in any bad habits or anything like that?
LEE McCOY: No, I didn't. I hit wedges for the first week after I was told it was totally good to go and there was absolutely nothing I could do to make it worse. For the first couple days it was just making sure that, hey, you can fully cock that wrist, it's not going to hurt. You can snap it as hard as you want, and after a couple of weeks I started -- what I had to do was drop some balls in some really deep rough and hack it out and kind of tell myself, hey, there's nothing you can do to hurt this thing, it is good, you're 100 percent. That's kind of the attitude I've taken.

Q. When was it you hit your first shot?
LEE McCOY: Right at like eight, eight and a half weeks after I had the accident. Two months. It was about two weeks after I got my cast off.

Q. When you look back at last summer, is there something that you can pinpoint about where things went wrong versus how you played in college, how you played here?
LEE McCOY: No, it's tough, you see like -- after I was here, I won a couple more times in college, then I won an SEC championship and I was still playing well. I didn't really hit it very well, but I was still putting great and everything was all good. But I just kind of had a really bad two-month stretch of golf at just the wrong time. How many top 50 to 125 players out here can have a bad two-month stretch of golf and nobody would say a word about it? I just played bad for a couple months. It happens. I didn't do anything dramatically different. I didn't really try to change anything. I just didn't hit it well.

It's tough to accept, but you know, one of those things that just took me a couple months to work out of.

Q. I think the Times used the headline "reboot." Do you consider it like a reboot coming here?
LEE McCOY: Not necessarily. Like I said, it was just a bad stretch of golf there for a couple of months. It's not like I had been out here for five years and I missed every cut for the last two. It was eight weeks. I just played bad.

It was unfortunate, and it was bad timing, and what I've always been told or the question I always get is did you put too much pressure on yourself, did you try to put everything -- how much pressure were you feeling from other people and blah blah blah; I had seven starts. It's not like I went out every week and said, all right, I've got to top-5 this week or I'm not going to be able to keep my lights on. I was as calm as I was here. It's not like you were playing for -- obviously there's cash involved, but I was playing obviously more for the points and the status and that sort of thing, so it's not like it was a ton different than playing here last year. I don't know. Why did everybody miss the cut last week that missed the cut?

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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