While PGA Tour schedule is suspended, Delaware County native Vince Covello rests and deals with a back injury
While he misses the competition, Covello said he is enjoying the break after three years of grinding on the Korn Ferry Tour to get to his current status.
Vince Covello had waited his entire life for the 2019-20 PGA Tour season. After 15 years as a professional competing all over the United States and Canada, including the last three seasons of grinding on what is now the Korn Ferry Tour, he finally reached golf’s major league.
However, the Delaware County native had to stop playing after nine events of his PGA Tour rookie season. No, it wasn’t the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent suspension of the Tour schedule that did it.
Instead, it was a nagging back injury that prevented him from competing at his best. After making the cut in his rookie debut and tying for 47th, Covello missed the cut in his next eight events and took a break after the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines on the last weekend of January.
Covello said he hurt his back last June but kept playing because his first Korn Ferry victory earlier in the year had given him a real chance of finishing in the top 25 of the tour’s points standings and earning his Tour card.
“I was on the fast track to get my card and I managed it as well as I could,” he said recently from his Atlantic Beach, Fla., home. “On the PGA Tour, it still wasn’t right, and I think it was the best time to try and get myself right because I worked very hard to get this opportunity and I wanted to make sure I give myself the best chance to succeed.”
He received a medical extension from the Tour, meaning that however many events he would have qualified for under his ranking while sidelined, he will get to make up next season. If he can earn enough FedEx Cup points in those events to equal that of the 125th-place finisher on the 2020 points list, he will be exempt for the next year.
“Obviously this is a really weird situation,” Covello said. “Taking the medical was a tough decision. It’s such an opportunity to play the PGA Tour … you’d have to tell me I had a broken leg or something to not play. But I’m not required to have any surgery or anything so the outlook is very good. It’s just some rehab and hopefully the injections help.”
He said doctors, who called the injury a minor disc herniation, are performing diagnostic injections in his back to narrow down what’s causing the pain but that there was no time frame on how soon he could resume competition.
Covello, 37, was born in Springfield. He lived in Havertown and attended Episcopal Academy before his family moved to Florida when he was 17. He played junior golf at Llanerch Country Club and still keeps in touch with members. Three of his five siblings live in the area.
Covello’s heart goes out to his friends and colleagues on the PGA and Korn Ferry Tours who are idled by the suspension, and for players on the outside who continue to compete on the few mini-tours operating in Florida and Arizona.
“It’s really unfortunate what’s happened,” he said. “The PGA Tour said they’re still shooting for a start date of May 18. So I hope that happens for everybody else’s sake. As far as my own, I’m not exactly sure. My back will tell me when I’m ready to go. Ultimately there’s no big rush for me. It’s just making sure my back is 100%.”
While he misses the competition, Covello said he is enjoying the break after three years of grinding on the Korn Ferry Tour to get to his current status. He has been involved in projects at his new home, which he purchased six months ago.
“It was a lot of golf, and it’s nice to just kind of unwind a little bit, catch my breath,” he said. “Life on the road means you’re gone basically half the year, so you’re trying to handle things at home while you’re away and that gets tricky. Getting used to home life is a nice treat that I haven’t had the liberty of having for a long, long time.”
Covello’s initial PGA Tour season included his first trip to Hawaii for the Sony Open and the opportunity to compete at famed Torrey Pines in Southern California with a field of golf’s biggest stars, including one Tiger Woods.
“He was about three tee times away from me,” he said. “To see the amount of people that were out for him, being three groups away you still had the impact because people were running up in front to go get to see him, just the course weaving among itself, you crossed paths a couple of times. It was really cool to see.
“One day I was hitting balls on the range next to Rory [McIlroy] and it’s incredible. He was hitting drives, something I had never seen in my life before, or only a handful of times.”
Though it appears Covello has been a bit unlucky in his first season on the Tour, he has called the experience “incredible.”
“There’s certainly more than just golf in my life,” he said. “There’s family and there’s friends, and I think the people that are closest around me knew that it was always coming, it was just a matter of time. But it’s been cool. It’s been really great and so many blessings have come with it. It’s opened doors and let me be able to reach out to more people than in the past.
“My biggest thing is wanting to keep the younger generation in the game. I’m big in helping out in any junior clinic or any opportunity I can to do things for kids in junior golf. That’s something that’s important to me.”