Matt Kuchar wasn’t smiling much.
Then again, what was there to smile about since the PGA Tour returned in June after a 13-week break due to the COVID-19 global pandemic? In 19 starts, the man with nine PGA Tour titles and 67 top-10s since the start of 2010 had one top-20 finish and missed seven cuts.
He had fallen to 54th in the Official World Golf Ranking, his lowest mark since 2009. And there were very few “Koooch” calls from fans.
Then he landed in Austin, Texas, and started smiling again as he finished third in last week’s World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play at Austin Country Club.
“It was fun for me to play some good golf again,” Kuchar said Tuesday during a conference call with reporters. “It had been a while for me. Since the break, really been somewhat frustrated, disappointed with my performance and it was so nice to regain some form and play some good golf.”
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The smiles likely will continue this week in the Valero Texas Open. He’s making his 16th start in the tournament and has five top-15s to his credit. His family is with him, the clan loving the water parks at the TPC San Antonio golf resort. And the AT&T Oaks Course is an ideal track to get ready for next week’s Masters.
All in all, he’s in a much better place than he was two weeks ago.
“There were certainly huge amounts of frustration, definitely some lows, and that’s what golf does to you,” Kuchar said of his slump. “My wife (Sybi) was such a big supporter, a big help, kind of letting me know I’d been pretty fortunate in my career not to have too many, let’s call them slumps. I fortunately didn’t have many of those experiences and kind of expected it to continue on that way but found myself in one of those slumps or ruts or kind of a stretch of golf that I was very, very unhappy with.
“But my wife said, ‘Listen, you’ve got to stay positive, you’ve been so consistent, this is a normal thing. If you just stay the course, keep working, it will get better.’”
It finally did get better, the hard work with coach Chris O’Connell paying off.
“We’ve been working hard the past six, eight months trying to sort things out,” Kuchar said. “Finally, it’s turning the corner and it feels good. I take a lot of confidence from the sheer fact of hitting quality shots. Every match felt like it was truly meaningful golf and to be able to execute under those situations was certainly a good feeling.”
It took a lot of golf shots to get back to hitting more quality golf shots.
“One of the great things about this game is when you’re playing great, you can’t wait to keep on playing, you can’t wait to continue the good play. When you’re playing bad, you wake up and you can’t wait to fix it, you can’t wait to go out and make it better,” Kuchar said. “I certainly had that bug going, well, I know if I sit around, I’m not going to get better, I’ve got to keep trying things out.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever hit as many balls, I don’t know if my hands have ever hurt so bad. I’d go out the next morning and go, my body’s hurting, my hands hurt, but I know I’ve got to stick to it. The only way of getting out of this is figuring it out. It’s funny as a professional golfer how rare you hit just the perfect golf shot, but it’s coming out of the center of the clubface so much more often now than it was the past three, four months.
“It’s much more fun, much more enjoyable again.”
