Pat Perez is back in the winner’s circle as he successfully completed a comeback from surgery with a win at the OHL Classic at Mayakoba. Perez was absent from the PGA Tour for eight months due to shoulder surgery and he must admit that his surgery was extremely successful.
This is his second PGA Tour win in over fourteen years on tour. He last won in 2009 at the Bob Hope Classic.
During his downtime for rehabilitation Perez had time to think and certainly came to play with a new attitude.
“I had an attitude that I can’t really repeat, but I had a lot of thoughts going on,” Perez said. “The main one was I wanted to stay aggressive. I knew if I just stayed aggressive I was seeing the line great on the putting green. … This type of grass and these greens, if you can get it on line you can make them.
“I just saw the line, I thought I could make them all and I just had a confidence. I had an entirely different attitude than I would have had a few years ago. It was definitely a different win than last time. Last time, I was a little more scared coming down the stretch. I didn’t really believe and this and that. This time, I really had like this calmness, kind of like a madness to get it done.”
“When you hit 40 and then you have surgery, it’s like `Oh, God, you know, what are we going to do?'” Perez said. “I had sleepless nights, I had a lot of sleepless nights wondering, `What are we going to do? How are we going to do this? What’s going to happen here? What would happen here? Because all you do is sit around and think. That’s all you have time is to sit around. You’re just sitting in a sling doing nothing and you can’t hit balls for five months. I had a lot of time to think about a lot of things.”
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