PROFESSIONAL GOLF REMAINS swamped in this alphabet soup of LIV and PIF along with the DP World and PGA Tours; its landscape roiling and its future uncertain. There is a framework agreement for all to merge into a single entity but nobody knows when it will happen or indeed if it will happen.
But below the increasingly absurd elite, the contours and the terms of the dream remain the same as they ever were.
The Challenge Tour is the second tier to the European – now titled DP World – Tour, on which players compete for a year, playing up to 29 tournaments in 18 countries. At the end of it all the top-20 ranked players earn a card to play on the DP World Tour, while the rest are condemned to another year in obscurity.
The Tour’s slogan is “where heroes are made”, and its apt. This isn’t a world in which they are born into purple robes, but where they are knocked and spurned and eventually quarried into competitors. Brooks Koepka came through the Challenge Tour, saying he wouldn’t be the player he is now without the experience, which included playing in Kenya, sleeping in cars, and eating horse meat in Kazakhstan.
“It’s not a tour you want to be on for too long”, says Ireland’s Conor Purcell.
Purcell came close to being one of the elevated 20 last year, finishing 29th in the overall rankings. He was close enough to the top-20 to harbour ambitions of promotion going into the crescendo event in Mallorca, where, in brutally windy conditions, he hung around the top of the leaderboard. A sixth-place finish, though, wasn’t quite enough.
“I thought solo fourth would have got the job done”, he says. “I did a great job that week: I focused on myself, not once did I look at a leaderboard. It was the first week ever I had zero idea what anyone else was doing, which was very comforting that week. It came to the wire and I missed out by a few spots, but you look at it as a positive. I’ve had a lot of good weeks this year, so it was those average weeks where I needed to do a little more.”
Purcell has been professional for four years, but between Covid interruptions meant this was his first full year on the Challenge Tour, and so he learned all of its quiddities and frustrations. One of the main challenges: how to learn to give yourself a break when it seems that all your rivals are sprinting around the world?
“It can be quite a difficult tour, in terms of where you travel to and where the events are held”, he says. “A lot of events are held quite far away from major airports, and logistically it can be a bit of a nightmare getting to events. The start of the year was nice: you’d have a couple of weeks in South Africa, a forced break, a couple of weeks at home, then we went to India for two weeks, then home for two weeks, then to the Middle East. The first half of the year is lovely: you’re playing in lovely weather, and on really nice golf courses.
“Then May hits and it’s the European swing and there were 22 events in 24 weeks. As scheduling goes, it’s a nightmare to pick and choose which ones you’ll play and the ones you’ll take off. Everyone on Challenge Tour seems to play a lot of golf. Over my short career I’ve never been one to want to play 25+ events, and here we are on the last week of the year, playing my 28th event of the year.
“It’s hard to give yourself a break when you know everyone else is playing most weeks. As I finish the year and look back, I recognise those breaks are just as important as putting the foot down and playing more golf.”
This was one of the main lessons of the year: better to have a pared-back schedule in which you’re fresh to target significant results. “Outside of top five you’re not really being rewarded for too much”, explains Purcell. “You finish between 20th and 40th, and you’re making no inroads on the rankings.”
Another discipline to be learned is the need to focus solely on oneself. Purcell says he largely disengages from social media during the golf year, and does his best to avoid looking at the overall rankings, too. Challenge Tour players also have to get used to spending time with themselves.
“A lot of it is solo travel, renting cars on your own, doing three-hour drives from the airport on your own to hotels. Challenge Tour is definitely not as glamorous as some people think pro golf is.
“People have crashed rental cars: anything that can go wrong for players has gone wrong. [It's about] dealing with all of that and trying to play good golf at the same time.”
Money is a major issue too. Purcell has sponsorship and is part-funded by Golf Ireland’s professional scheme, but nobody is getting rich on the Challenge Tour, where players have to cut costs as best they can but not false into the trap of a false economy of not investing in their own development.
“If you’re not finishing high in the week you’re losing money”, says Purcell. “I’ve been fortunate enough to have had good backing over the last couple of years, and I have managed to take a caddie out with me this year which is a huge help. There are lads out there pulling their own trolley every week, and scrimping on everything they do. It’s a really difficult way of getting off the tour. The way I look at it, the more I invest now the more it will pay off in a couple of years. Every week is costing a lot, and the way I do it, if I finish outside the top 15 on any given week, I’ll be losing money, without a doubt.
“You’d be lucky to finish outside the top 30 of the [overall] rankings and break even. There’s a huge disparity between getting your card and finishing between 20th and 45th in the rankings. It’s quite frustrating at times when you’re out there, but you realise the better you play the quicker you’ll be off it, and it’s not somewhere you want to play full-time.
“You’re not making money for the first while, and you have to accept that, but you still have to be pumping money into yourself, spending money on coaching. I think the less I do for myself, it will backfire on me. Trying to be tight on money now is not the best way to get off this tour.”
Purcell met his caddie for the first time in South Africa this year, and they hit it off. They travelled to 20-odd events together, and it was an adventure for them both: Purcell’s caddie had never been outside of Africa before.
Challenge Tour can also make it difficult to put in that work, given some of the facilities are, well, sub-optimal. Purcell remembers an event in China this year with no practice putting green and where the driving range involved hitting reduced-distance balls into a lake.
Purcell has had a taste of his ambition, playing at this year’s Irish Open at the K Club, where he made the cut.
“I love playing in front of people and it almost makes me switch on a little bit more”, he says. “At Challenge Tour events, you have nobody out watching, maybe a few people out with the final few groups on a Sunday. But very few people on a given week, so those weeks when you’re 30th and 40th you really have to dig deep and find that motivation within yourself to push up the leaderboard.
“I’d be one to feed off the energy of other people. I have found it difficult at times when you make the cut and you’re just at the number and the weekend can just seem like a slog. When you’re not at the upper end of the leaderboard it can be difficult to engage with the tournament itself, it feels like a muttley medal when you’re out there. It’s about getting your headspace right, and bigging it up to be bigger than it is.”
Whereas the trick at the likes of the Irish Open is the opposite.
“At the start of my career I valued these bigger events – Irish Open, DP World Tour events – to be bigger than they actually were. Having played a couple, you realise everyone out here is doing the same thing and everyone started at the same level. It’s interesting to just see players at the top of the game who you think will finish and go home straight away are actually still hanging around, practising to be better the next day. No matter what level, everyone seems to be doing the same thing.”
Purcell is just 26, and will return to the Challenge Tour for 2024, which kicks off in South Africa on 1 February.
“I am trying my hardest to play as well as I can, to get up onto the DP World Tour and then hopefully the PGA Tour in years to come”, he says.
“It’s very cliched, but I don’t feel I am even close to my best. With the little bits of success I’ve had, I am excited to see where I can go to, and keep pushing myself to know there’s more in the tank, there’s better results ahead and huge opportunities and cool experiences in general.”
