Dan McCarthy was playing the best golf of his life.

And then he wasn’t. In fact, he wasn’t playing at all.

The 33-year-old ripped through the Mackenzie Tour-PGA TOUR Canada schedule in 2016, winning four times (he added a runner-up finish for good measure) en route to winning the money title and finally breaking through to the Web.com Tour for 2017.

But the celebration was short-lived. McCarthy – who started the 2017 Web.com Tour season with a fourth-place finish and a bit of a here-we-go-again feeling from outside observers who knew what kind of run he was capable of getting on – hurt his wrist and was out for five months.

It was a partially torn ligament between two really small bones, McCarthy said, and he was misdiagnosed, to literally add insult to injury. He got nearly three months of treatment in the wrong area. Once it was properly diagnosed he was fixed up in about 10 days, he recalled.

He said he likely returned too early – to play in front of a somewhat hometown crowd at the LECOM Health Challenge in July of 2017 – but the Syracuse native was itching to get back to playing again on the Web.com Tour, a place he had coveted being on for so many years.

“I didn’t want to sit at home and waste the whole year,” he said. “I really wanted to get back out there.”

McCarthy struggled for the balance of 2017, making just one cut in his final seven tournaments. But in 2018 he started to regain his form and finished 54th on the Regular Season money list, well inside the mark to earn status on the Web.com Tour for 2019.

He said he’s already feeling much better with a few weeks in the rearview this season.

After taking some family time at the end of last year – McCarthy’s grandfather passed away last year at 89, and he said he spent more than two months back home in Syracuse, the longest he’s spent back home since he turned professional – he said he feels, essentially, 100 percent again.

He admitted it’s taken him “a lot longer” than he would have imagined for his swing to return. He figured as soon as he got healthy it would only take a month or two before he got back into a normal groove, but he said he’s just recently started to see signs that his swing is back to where it was when he was playing so well on the Mackenzie Tour.

While his ball-striking numbers were solid a year ago (he was 15th in Driving Accuracy and 30th in Greens in Regulation), he knows he needs to improve on the greens. It’s his putting, he said, that will be the key for his success this year.

“I played great last year tee-to-green but my putting stats was pretty far down. That’s definitely the focus for this year to try to get my putting back to where it was (in Canada). I made darn near everything up there that summer,” he said with a laugh. “It set the bar pretty high.”

McCarthy, at 33, knows he’s a bit of an elder statesman on the Web.com Tour. But since he’s only been on Tour for three years, he has a ways to go yet to be considered a full-on veteran.

It’s been neat, he said, to watch the evolution of the sport since he started out. He played basketball growing up, and during the brisk American northeast winters he would occasionally hit balls in a dome. But come October, he would swap spikes for sneakers until at least January when he would get ready for the spring high school golf season.

“I was 12 years old when Tiger Woods exploded onto the scene, and nobody my age played golf year-round. We always did other sports,” McCarthy said. “Up until the last 10 years or so, kids are coming out on all Tours and have dedicated themselves to golf their whole lives. I’m not saying they didn’t play other sports, but they played golf year-round.

“The young kids are coming up so much more prepared to play at this level. It’s really impressive.”

McCarthy said he’s been able to counsel a few young guys on the Web.com Tour and is always happy to help out. Why? Because he knows how hard it is to get to where they are. He likes seeing people succeed, he said, because he knows what everyone puts into it – both on the course and off.

“It takes a tremendous amount of work away from the golf course and the cameras where people don’t see what you’re doing. All the practice swings in a mirror while you’re watching TV (and) the hours in the gym,” he said. “I’ve experienced the whole spectrum of successes and failures.”

But despite the injury setback and the long climb to full-time Web.com Tour status, McCarthy is thrilled with his success to this point.

He said, depending on whom you ask, the Web.com Tour is either the second or third best professional golf Tour in the world. His injury put things into perspective, he said, as he couldn’t physically do the things he loves doing the most. It was tough coming off the best year of his life to have to take a step back.

But the step back is, so far, helping him to take more steps forward.

“Obviously the goal is to get to the PGA TOUR and compete at the highest level, but I’m not going to take it for granted any more,” he said. “There were many years when I wished I was in the position I’m in now.”