Ryan McCormick: 'Playing the Korn Ferry Tour Championship is like a cold shower'

Editor’s note: PGA TOUR rookie Ryan McCormick earned his first PGA TOUR card at last year’s Korn Ferry Tour Championship presented by United Leasing & Finance, finishing at No. 27 on the season-long standings after a nerve-wracking final day on the bubble for an all-important top-30 position.

After this week’s Korn Ferry Tour Championship, contested for the first time at French Lick Golf Resort’s Pete Dye Course, the top 30 on the season-long Korn Ferry Tour Points List will earn 2025 PGA TOUR membership. McCormick is competing on TOUR at this week’s Sanderson Farms Championship, but he took time earlier this week to provide a firsthand account of what it’s like to compete at the Korn Ferry Tour Championship while on the doorstep of a childhood dream.

Five minutes of discomfort.

You know it won’t kill you, but it’s not the first thing you want to do to start your day. Everything inside you is screaming at you not to do it. You walk in there anyway, the cold water hits your face and you immediately wake up. A shot of adrenaline runs through your body. You can do everything you normally do in the shower: use soap, clean your body, wash your hair. But all you want to do is immediately cut off the water and grab that towel to dry off. As the seconds and minutes go by, you learn to embrace it. Finally, it’s over, and you feel a little sense of accomplishment as you walk out and dry off your body warming itself back up.

A cold shower. That’s the best way I can describe what it’s like to play the Korn Ferry Tour Championship presented by United Leasing & Finance with your dreams hanging in the balance. Five hours of ultimate discomfort for four days.

One of the ways to endure that discomfort is to remind yourself that you are capable of beating it. David Goggins calls it the “cookie jar.” You reach into it and remind yourself of all the things you’ve overcome, all the things you suffered through, all the things that got in your way and you fought through. Any player who is successful this week will most definitely be reaching into their own cookie jar.

Everybody in attendance can feel anxiety all week. As a player, you are doing everything possible to help relieve yourself of that anxiety. Caddies will be fired and hired before the week starts. Some players will have their families there to support them, friends, a spouse or girlfriend. Others want to make the journey alone, able to focus better with no distractions around. Some coaches and teachers will make the trip, helping you prepare and sharpen your game for the season’s final test. You might converse with a sports psychologist, recite Bible verses or meditate in the hotel room. All of this helps relieve some of the week’s anxiety, and having a great support team around you is very important. But none of those people will be able to hit the shots for you. They can give you all the helpful information you need, but none of them have been in this scenario. Trust me, it's better that way.

At some point this week, every single player who tees it up in Indiana will reflect on their journey to get there. Their reasons why they are chasing this dream: for their family, their kids, themselves. The ridiculous plane rides and miles driven. The great weeks, the bad weeks, the weeks you thought you quit, or when you did quit, when you retired, when you unretired, your best shots and worst shots.

If you had mac and cheese during your best tournament this year, it's mac and cheese again this week. Your buddies you played with during the practice rounds of that great week, that's your group on Tuesday. Maybe you watched “Frozen” every night before going to bed; it looks like your dreams will have Olaf in them all week. That song stuck in your head earlier in the year when you played your best round? Guess it’s Taylor Swift in the car on the way to the course this week. Whatever it is, most players are creatures of habit, and we will do our best to recreate the same routine we had those great weeks.

Last year, I started my final round projected 28th on the Korn Ferry Tour Points List, needing to stay inside the top 30 to earn my first PGA TOUR card. My family, my coaches and my future in-laws were there to watch what would end up being the most important round of my career. Everybody will have days in their life that define them, and that Sunday was going to be one of them. I was either going to fail spectacularly in front of the people I loved most, or it was going to be one of the best days of my life. After a double bogey on my ninth hole, sailing a chunked iron shot into the water, I was projected 29th, and after a hooked drive led to a bogey on my 10th hole, I was projected 30th. Eight more to go. I didn’t know at the time exactly where I stood, but I could tell by the looks on my parents’ faces that it wasn’t looking too good. They had been there the previous year, watching me three-putt my 17th hole on Friday during the last Regular Season event to decide PGA TOUR cards, missing the cut by one, ultimately falling two spots short of my dream. You see, you're not the only one dealing with anxiety during your rounds.

Everybody plays a role this week, and if you’re lucky you will end up paired with great people like I was that day. Tim Widing and Davis Chatfield were my playing partners that day. Both of them were out of the running for a PGA TOUR card but nevertheless understood their role as professionals that day. Without saying it out loud, they knew what was at stake that day for me. They talked down the fairways when I wanted to talk, left me alone when I wanted to be left alone, and were always aware of how their play was affecting my routine. It’s in the form of “yeah, go ahead” as you look over to see who is away, and “please do not worry about stepping in my line” as you go to tap in on the greens. Most days when guys say that, you still go out of your way to avoid their line. It's the courteous thing to do, an unwritten rule perhaps. But on that day, I stepped wherever I needed to. On my 17th hole, I had a 2-footer for par, and Davis’ ball was directly behind me 30 feet away. He looked at me and said, “Stand wherever you want to stand, finish whenever you want to, please don’t worry about my line at all.” I knocked it in with both feet firmly planted on his line to the hole. I had conversations with Tim that had nothing to do with golf, as he knows that, as a player, it is the last thing you’d want to be talking and thinking about. The silence they gave me, when needed, allowed me to refocus after a bogey or double bogey. I’ll be forever thankful for their kindness that day, understanding as players how hard this journey is and doing what they could to help make it a great day for me. Tim is already #TOURBound, having a career year that included two wins. I’ll be cheering on Davis to join him.

I finished the round not knowing if I had made it or not. Many will have the same feeling. You double- and triple-check your scorecard. You wait and watch the scoreboard with all the projections for the next hour or two. You tune into Golf Channel to watch the action unfold. Most players would be lying to you if they said there isn’t rooting for and against the cut line at every tournament, especially one as important as the top 30. But on that Sunday, you eventually succumb to the nature of the game of golf, its unpredictable and mysterious forces as you hope that what you’ve done is good enough.

In the end, it was good enough. After some late movement up and down, I settled in at 27th, safely inside the top 30 needed for a PGA TOUR card. You will never see a group of happier people in sports, the group of guys who have earned their way to the PGA TOUR, celebrating with their closest friends and family, realizing that it was all worth it. In this hyper-competitive world of professional golf, which can be incredibly cutthroat, I hope every player who is competing on the Korn Ferry Tour gets to one day feel the same satisfaction that I did, accomplishing that dream we are all after, of achieving a PGA TOUR card. It comes at different times for everybody. Some have already felt it, as they locked up #TOURBound status earlier this season. Some will be feeling it for the second or third time, having returned to the Korn Ferry Tour to work their way back to the PGA TOUR. Some will feel it as they are holing out their last putt at French Lick on Sunday, or when they are walking across that green to get their official PGA TOUR card, staring down at their name etched beautifully on it. For me, it came the next day, riding with my fiancée, Addie, as it sank in that I had made it. We started recounting all the things I had overcome in the last 10 years that led up to that day. All the people who have supported you along the way. The ones closest to you who you could not have done this without. We cried all the way to the airport.

Of course, dreams will also be shattered. Perhaps there is no other way to show what it can feel like coming up short than what happened to Shad Tuten a year ago. He finished his round projected to finish inside the top 30, only to fall outside that projection after two penalty strokes were added to his 15th-hole score. Shad has openly talked about his heart issues that developed after the stress of that Sunday. It kept him out most of the 2024 season. Having played with Shad many times, he is a world class player, and though he is not at the Korn Ferry Tour Championship this year, his time to graduate will come soon.

My advice to any player this week: Believe in yourself and your abilities; that's what has gotten you here. Yes, you'll be making this final climb up the mountain to the PGA TOUR by yourself, but as scary and uncomfortable as those last steps are, the satisfaction of proving to yourself that you have done it will feel better than anything you've ever felt in golf.

One more thing: As you’re celebrating on the top of that mountain on Sunday, when you arrive back home the next week, you’ll realize you are back at the bottom again. For those who have already experienced it, they know what’s ahead, and while they are enjoying a cold one that Sunday they know the work has only just begun. You'll be a part of the last category to get in PGA TOUR fields next year, the last tee times, fighting and clawing for every point you can get, as the top players will start their year out playing Signature Events. But this is the challenge you love, as you start to scale the mountain again, working every day to get better at a game that is inherently unfair and impossible to master, one that will drive you crazy but provide the best memories of your life.

So if you’re a fan of sports, or golf, or watching people’s dreams come true, tune into the Korn Ferry Tour Championship this week in Indiana. And if you want to know what it feels like, tomorrow morning, when you walk into the shower, turn that handle to cold. You might experience some of the same thoughts and emotions the players are going to have to deal with this week.