GRAEME McDOWELL is ready go back to basics after 12 months from hell forced him to contemplate a career-ending slump.

The Portrush man turns 42 at the end of this month and while he has “sprinkled” a barren seven-year run with three wins that “polished things up”, he’s missed 20 of 28 cuts since the PGA Tour returned from the Covid shutdown last summer and come to the conclusion that he must become the best version of his former self if he’s not to fade unceremoniously into the sunset.

“It’s been certainly one of the tougher 12 months that I can remember in my career,” McDowell, now 167th in the world, said at Mount Juliet. “Because the disappointing thing was, going into the time off, I was actually really starting to get a head of steam up. I won in Saudi, finished well in Hawaii and played well in the first round of The Players Championship.

“The dream of playing a Ryder Cup was starting to be very real all of a sudden. But then I got back on the golf course and things started going sideways. (Caddie) Kenny (Comboy) got sick two weeks in, got Covid and took another couple weeks off after that and he couldn’t caddie for me when we came back because he was still testing positive.

“Two months later I’m missing cuts left, right and centre and then you start scrambling. You start searching, looking, trying and grinding.”

He’s spent the last two months re-setting and reflecting and realised he needs to get back to what made him a Major winner and former world No 4 in the first place. Still, it’s a catch-22.

“My confidence is low,” he said. “My expectation levels are high, so I’m really trying to adjust that. At this point, I really should be out here playing golf tournaments, enjoying myself, everything else is gravy from here. If I wasn’t to hit another shot here, it’s been a great run. It’s been a great career.

“But I’m not ready to walk away. I’ve got things that I want to achieve, and it’s about kind of just refocusing on what does success look like for me now.”

At worst, he has lost none of his good humour as he showed when discussing if his trip from the US was as difficult as Rory McIlroy’s, given the Covid-19 restrictions.

“My G5 (jet aircraft) was in for maintenance actually,” he quipped. “So I flew American Airlines. But there’s not even an Orlando-Dublin or an Orlando-London at the minute.

“So I flew Charlotte-Heathrow-Belfast and drove up to Portrush from there. It was like going back in time 10 or 15 years ago. I couldn’t remember the last time I’ve taken three flights to get to somewhere.”

The journey back to the top looks like being another odyssey but with three spots in The Open up for grabs this week and again in next week’s Scottish Open, he at least has a concrete goal in mind.

When he hit a similar slump in 2006 and failed to make the Ryder Cup side at The K Club, he returned to Europe to regain his confidence and went on to win six events in the next three years, including the US Open.

With young children at home, that’s no longer an option. But he’s not despondent.

“I think on your darkest day, you’re thinking, is this it?” he said. “But I’m exempt on the PGA Tour through the end of next year. I’m exempt on this tour for the next four or five years.

“If I continue to play the way I’m playing, it’s not like my playing privileges are going to go away. I have the ability to continue playing.

“I guess when I say it like that, ‘I’m not ready to walk away,’ I’m not ready to walk away like this. I feel like I have the ability to continue to compete and play at a high level again.”

The solution, he feels, is not over-complicated and having seen Phil Mickelson, Jordan Spieth and Stewart Cink emerge spectacularly from the doldrums recently, he has hope.

“I feel one of the mistakes I made the last 12 months is searching too deeply and trying to do things differently rather than focusing on the things that made me great to this point and trying to get better at those again: my putting, keeping the ball in play, my wedge play and things this like that,” he said.

“But it is inspiring. It’s inspiring to see that guys can dig themselves out of holes.

“I’ve dug myself out of a hole a couple of times the last four or five years. There’s no reason why I can’t do it again.”