FAIRMONT — After sitting out the last seven months recovering from surgery on his left hip, William McGirt can count a lot of memorable moments, but none of them involve golf.

“This fall I got to teach Mac how to ride a bike without training wheels, I watched him lose three teeth now, took him to swim lessons and taken Carolina to dance and to swim. All the stuff that you don’t even think about,” the 39-year-old Fairmont native said of his two children.

“I miss the guys and being out there with the guys. But other than that, I’m having way too much fun doing stuff with my kids that I never had time to do.”

In his time off, McGirt can count the times on one hand that he has focused on professional golf, both in person and watching on TV. The three times he has tuned into golf on TV has been the final rounds of the Tour Championship, the Ryder Cup and the Masters all have the correlation of watching Tiger Woods back to his prime form, but that time has been limited.

While it might seem strange for someone who’s occupation is to play golf professional to check out of the game for a while, the break has been just important mentally as physically for McGirt.

“I kind of checked out of golf for a while. Honestly, it’s been good for me,” McGirt said. “I don’t feel like I’m beating myself over the head and all this other stuff. It’s been great to get away for a little bit.”

Golf has been an afterthought for the last seven months for William McGirt as he has been rehabbing from surgery that has improved his range of motion in his left hip. When he got clearance to finally test out the surgically repaired left hip, the results were immediate.

“Literally the first ball I was able to hit felt totally different,” he said at his clinic at Fairmont Golf Club earlier this week. “So much cleaner with no restriction.”

Now he’s working on getting back to playing shape on the rugged courses that PGA Tour golfers encounter on a weekly basis and playing 72 holes a weekend. McGirt said that he is prepping for the worst before he thinks about teeing it up in a tournament again.

“My ultimate goal is to be able to walk 36 in a day and turn around and play 18 the next two days. Because I know if I’m only prepared to walk 18 when I go back out there we are going to have a rain delay,” he said.

After initially saying he would be away from competitive golf for close than a year, McGirt intends on making back-to-back rehab starts on the Web.com Tour in July, 10 months after surgery. In eight years of competing on the PGA Tour, he has averaged more than 28 events a season during that span. To keep up with that pace when he returns, he said it will require not only improving stamina in his rehabbing left side, but also the right as well.

“Everything feels great, but it’s just a matter of building the stamina back up,” McGirt said. “If you look now, strength wise, my left is a lot stronger than my right. If I was able to do leg presses, I could press 20 percent more weight in my left, but I could probably do 100 percent more reps with my right.”

Jonathan Bym | The Robesonian Fairmont native and PGA Tour golfer William McGirt speaks to attendees at his golf clinic at Fairmont Golf Club on Tuesday. McGirt is currently rehabbing from surgery on his left hip he had in September.
https://www.robesonian.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/web1_DSC_0980.jpgJonathan Bym | The Robesonian Fairmont native and PGA Tour golfer William McGirt speaks to attendees at his golf clinic at Fairmont Golf Club on Tuesday. McGirt is currently rehabbing from surgery on his left hip he had in September.
Fairmont native eyeing rehab starts this summer on the links

By Jonathan Bym

Sports editor

Jonathan Bym can be reached at 910-816-1977 or by email at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @Jonathan_Bym.