No pain, no gain for Tyler McCumber.
The 29-year-old former Florida Gator shot a bogey-free 4-under 67 at Riviera Country Club in the opening round of the Genesis Invitational just days after smashing his hand in a sliding window door and having surgery to have the fingernail removed.
“Tuesday morning I was coming out to the course and I went to open the windows to cool off the hotel room before I left,” he explained. “It went underneath the back of the nail bed and lifted half of the back of the nail up.”
McCumber booked a flight back home to Florida Tuesday night figuring he wouldn’t be able to play, but visited the Tour’s on-site doctor on Wednesday, and the emergency surgeon happened to be a hand specialist.
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“He said, ‘We can bandage it up, obviously you can’t play because it’s just too painful, or we can do a procedure where we just rip off the nail, but half of the nail is still intact.’ So, he numbed the finger and ripped off the nail,” said McCumber, who videoed the procedure and said, “watching the video is almost more gross than in person.”
McCumber hit five balls on the range after the procedure.
“Basically, I was able to kind of see if I could hit balls that next day and I was. I just kind of altered my glove and kept this on all day and putted with it on,” he said. “It’s just gone numb. It hurt this morning a little bit. It’s a lot less without the fingernail on there, but you can tell it’s just kind of bleeding all the way through this bandage. Yeah, I mean, Riviera will take your mind off the pain.”
So much so that McCumber shot one of only two bogey-free rounds on Thursday.