McPherson went a full month without touching a club following surgery - her longest complete break from the game since she was 12.
She began chipping and putting about Jan. 8, and over the past month she has worked her way up to full swings. She was still trying to get to the point she was swinging at full capacity last week before leaving for Thailand.
"You'll always get a little nervous when it's a month before the season and you haven't hit a golf ball yet," said McPherson, who didn't play a full 18 holes until Jan. 20. "It's going to definitely take a little time to get my feel back."
McPherson takes medication, receives physical therapy and exercises to limit the effects of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, which was diagnosed at age 11, when she was hospitalized for three months and bedridden for about a year.
Most of McPherson's aches and pains can be attributed to the disease, so whenever she felt discomfort in her left elbow last year, she essentially dismissed it, until one week last August while at the house she bought for her parents in Murrells Inlet.
"I don't really know when I got the injury," McPherson said. "I was in South Carolina, and all of a sudden my elbow started swelling up and giving me fits. It ended up being a chipped bone in my elbow that got caught in the wrong spot."
McPherson considered having surgery a couple of weeks before the Dec. 2-5 LPGA Tour Championship, but because recovery from the bone chip was only expected to take up to four weeks, she waited until the 2010 season was complete.
When the surgeon took a closer look, he also discovered tennis elbow, which had likely been the source of mild elbow pain for years. "So I got a two-for-one surgery," McPherson said.
The procedure to release tennis elbow involved more scar tissue and inflammation so more recovery time was required, pushing McPherson's rehab to the brink of the season.
McPherson rehabbed at Lowcountry Physical Therapy into mid-January, returned to her home of the past year in Tampa, Fla., to practice in warmer weather, made appearances for sponsors at the PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando in late January, and caught up to friends and fellow tour members at a get-together in Colorado. McPherson asserts that she avoided the ski slopes.
"They all went skiing, but I just watched them ski and hung out," McPherson said. "Don't get me wrong, I'm good enough I probably wouldn't have fallen. But if I did, I just didn't want to fall on my left side and hurt it any further. I made a lot of people promises that I wouldn't [ski]."
McPherson planned to use last week's Australian Women's Masters as a warm-up to the LPGA's two opening events in Asia - the HSBC Women's Champions in Singapore is next week - but she withdrew about three weeks ago.
"I wasn't sure if I'd be ready and be able to make it three weeks in a row," McPherson said. "I pulled out to make sure I'd be strong enough to play both Thailand and Singapore."
The third tour event is in Arizona from March 18-20. The limitation McPherson has been working through is mainly in the extension of her backswing, and regaining range of motion has been a painful process. "I can get it around but probably need one extra club right now," McPherson said late last week.
McPherson said she's not concerned about recapturing her smooth swing. She's been one of the tour's better ball-strikers and ranked in the top 30 on tour in both fairways and greens hit in regulation last year.
But she was outside the top 60 in putts per round, putts per green in regulation and sand saves, and worked extensively on her short game and putting when she was unable to fully swing.
"I think it's going to be a blessing in disguise," McPherson said. "Everybody knows short game is where it's at and that's where you win and lose tournaments. ... That's where I needed the most work anyway. Short game has been what has let me down."
McPherson has gone back and forth between belly putters and traditional-length putters over the past few years, and is starting the year with the shorter Odyssey Black Series Blade she used in the second half of 2010. She recently received putting lessons from a few friends, and the results were enough to elicit praise from her father, David.
"If daddy says that then obviously it looks a lot better," McPherson said. "I feel I've done a few things in my putting already to be a little more consistent."
After two consecutive years of improvement in results, scoring average and earnings, McPherson regressed last season. Her scoring average went up a full stroke from a career-best 71.25 in 2009 and she finished 27th on the money list with $418,000 in official earnings, down from 16th in '09 with $816,000 earned.
Perhaps the most dramatic drop-off came in the tour's four major championships. After recording three top-seven finishes in 2009, including a tie for second in the Kraft Nabisco Championship, McPherson failed to finish inside the top 18 in a major.
She managed to record her third runner-up finish in the past two years at the CN Canadian Women's Open to account for one of her four top-10s in 2010.
McPherson hopes to relive one of her most gratifying experiences in golf by making her second consecutive U.S. Solheim Cup team. The 12th Solheim Cup, pitting a team of 12 U.S. players against a dozen European standouts, will be played Sept. 23-25 at Killeen Castle in Ireland.
Ten U.S. players qualify on points and there will be two selections by team captain Rosie Jones. McPherson is currently 10th in points, and points are garnered for top-20 finishes through the Aug. 19-21 Safeway Classic.
"My main goal for this year is to make the Solheim Cup team," McPherson said. "...I want to get on that team, get my first win, second, third and fourth wins and all that to come, but I really want to improve from last year. I didn't put myself in contention as I did the year before and didn't contend in majors as I did the year before."
Whatever McPherson accomplishes this year, it appears she'll do it with a former Grand Strand resident by her side. Matt Gelczis, a New Jersey native and Pittsburgh resident who lived on the Strand from 1999-2004, is her new caddie.
McPherson's caddie for the second half of last season, Jon Yarbrough, was hired by long-hitting PGA Tour member Gary Woodland, who already has a pair of top-five finishes in four 2011 events. "You can't blame the caddie, that's where they all want to get," McPherson said. "I think I would go caddie on the PGA Tour if I could with the purses they have."
Gelczis had been caddying for LPGA Hall of Famer Se Ri Pak for the past two years, but Pak is playing a limited schedule and they parted ways.
"I've always liked his style and his work," McPherson said. "Any time you can be on a Hall of Famers bag and stay on it for a couple years you must be doing something right.
"Clearly he's a vocal guy for sure. He's not going to hold back what he thinks. He always seems like he enjoys it. Anytime I get a new caddie I want to find someone I enjoy being with on the course for six consecutive days. The main thing is you always try to get a personality that matches."
When he learned he would no longer work with Pak, Gelczis immediately targeted McPherson, whom he often read and heard about while at the beach and was paired with a few times in recent years. He contacted her friend, Brittany Lincicome, and McPherson offered him a job less than two weeks later.
Gelczis managed The Wine Shoppe in North Myrtle Beach for a couple years, and it was there he met then-Little River resident Angela Buzminski, who has bounced between the developmental Futures and LPGA tours for several years.
He first caddied for Buzminski in an unsuccessful attempt to Monday qualify for an LPGA event in 2003, and has been on the LPGA Tour full-time since 2004. Prior to Pak, Gelczis looped for players including Kelly Cap, Grace Park, Jane Park, Sun Young Yoo and Amy Yang.
"It's been just a lot of climbing the ladder with better bags and better bags," Gelczis said. "...I purposely held myself back because when I did get a good player who was capable of winning I wanted to make sure I wasn't holding them back. After Amy Yang [early in 2009] I was ready to go after better players."
After several runner-up finishes with a few players, Gelczis got his first win with Pak last May in the Bell Micro LPGA Classic in Mobile, Ala.
"I was excited even more than Se Ri was," said Gelczis, who was so ecstatic he embraced Pak both before and after the awards ceremony. "She said 'You like this, huh.' She hadn't won in three years but it was her 25th tour win so she was used to winning."
Gelczis has been on tour long enough to know what he's got in McPherson, who has shown her resolve since she was 11.
"I've always been a fan of hers because she plays with such confidence and determination," Gelczis said. "I've worked for other players and sometimes it's just human nature that some players quit. I don't think I'll ever be able to say that about Kristy. There's no quit in her.
"We're both excited about what can happen this year and beyond."
McPherson more so than any previous season-opening week.
