George Coetzee is a master of hitting the reset button.

Admittedly, it’s not always by his own design. Sometimes, as was the most recent case, it’s because of injury. But he never fails to use the time away productively and come back an even better golfer. And he uses the most interesting methods to achieve this.

A few years ago he hit the reset on his golf swing. It came after he broke his ankle while surfing, but he took that layoff as an opportunity to rebuild his swing in a search for what he said was “identity”. His inspiration was a book he read about a child prodigy who became a chess grandmaster and then left the game in a greater search for his own identity.

Coetzee returned to the Sunshine Tour and DP World Tour fairways earlier this year after surgery to repair a torn ligament. It kept him away from the game for 16 months, during which he also became a father for the first time.

“You see, you leave us at home for a year and a half and we come out with a baby,” he jokes.

“I tore a ligament in my wrist and it took me a couple of months to figure out what to do to get it sorted so that I could start my rehab. It ended up needing surgery,” he says.

Coetzee’s normally calm demeanour hides just how anxious such a time can be for a professional golfer.

“Surgery is always high risk. Nobody ever gives you that 100% assurance that you’ll be alright. You spend a lot of time worrying about what’s going to happen. The first two tournaments back were nerve-wracking because I was testing out the wrist and it was tough on me in the evenings especially at tournaments not knowing whether or not the hand would hold up. It did feel a little swollen at night but was fine again in the mornings,” he says.

But Coetzee has had enough experience of these cycles in his career to know how to work through them.

There was a similar sentiment of uncertainty when he broke his ankle and remodelled his swing, with Coetzee saying at the time, “I did freak out a little bit. I was very open about it to my team and didn’t try to hide it from them. I missed a bunch of cuts and it was terrible for me.”

And in 2013 he broke a bone in his wrist while mountain biking, and again had to find a workaround for his swing. His coach at the time, Doug Wood, said: “George knows his body really well, so he’ll know what he needs to do and when he’s ready to go.”

That’s exactly the process Coetzee followed this time too.

“I decided that golf is still my purpose and I’ve got to tick a bunch of boxes to get back to playing competitively again. So I did everything I could to get back. I started adding new healthy habits to my life, and luckily so far it looks like everything is holding up and the wrist is strong. It’s all about working hard now, getting the cobwebs out of the game and hopefully starting to play better golf,” he says.

That’s what it boils down to for Coetzee – the drive to play better golf. It was there when as a 10-year-old he played his first tournament at Pretoria Country Club, named the Gary Player Week, and shot 49 over the front nine to win.

And it’s never left him.

IMAGES: TYRONE WINFIELD/CARL FOURIE/SUNSHINE TOUR