Gary Hurley’s mental approach paying off

Gary Hurley: Secured Challenge Tour card. Picture: Getty

THERE is an element of playing with house money when Gary Hurley begins his bid for a DP World Tour card at Empordà Golf in Girona this morning at the second stage of Q-School.

The first reason is that the 29-year-old product of West Waterford Golf Club and former Walker Cup winner has already secured a European Challenge Tour card for next year courtesy of his top-four finish on the Alps Tour order of merit. The second reason is more significant because Hurley is finally reaping the rewards of a three-year, Covid-interrupted journey of enlightenment on the course that has not only turned his golf game around but the entire mental approach he now takes to dealing with pressure, failure and now success.

It is an approach, fostered by his work with Cork-based performance coach Dr Ed Coughlan, that has taken Hurley from considering quitting professional golf in 2019, four years after he turned pro, to landing his first tournament win at the Alps de Andalucia in southern Spain at the end of June and earlier this month and following up by claiming his Challenge Tour card with a tie for eighth at the 2022 Emilia Romagna Alps Tour Grand Final, won by fellow Irishman Jonathan Yates in Modena, Italy, that secured his order of merit finish.

He had already earned a bye to the second stage of Q-School, which begins today in Girona, courtesy of his top-six standing in the order of merit in mid-August but even as he talks about the challenge, his new finely-tuned positivity underpins his every thought.

“It’s nice to have a Challenge Tour card now, going into Q-School. It takes a little bit of the pressure (off) but I don’t know if it matters a whole lot,” Hurley told the Irish Examiner.

“If I finished sixth (on the final Alps Tour order of merit to miss out on the Challenge Tour card) I’d still be going into second stage, I’d still want to get through it all and get to continue the work I’m doing and be curious about what it brings and just keep engaging. Keep having good conversations and apply myself the way I want to and allow my skills to come out and play some nice golf hopefully.”

Hurley’s work with Coughlan has been a game-changer, as has the backing from the darkest of his golfing days three years ago by girlfriend Emily-Rose Byrne, whom he met during their college days at Maynooth University.

“She supported me through all the really tough times with my golf, supported me in whatever I wanted to do at the time I was making the decision about whether to go back in or not. She listened when I was hurting the most in 2019, after the Turkish Challenge Tour event.

“After that week I was like ‘I don’t know if I can keep doing this the way I’m doing it’.

“I said to Ed, ‘if I’m going to keep doing this, something has to change’. It wasn’t healthy, for one. I was unhappy on the golf course, I was lost in what I was doing and it’s tough place when you’ve put in a lot of time into something and you don’t seem to get anything back.

“I had that for a long time and I was getting nothing back from it but I also wasn’t in a good enough head space to allow myself to see if I was getting anything back from it. So that’s why I talk about the openness now and the self-exploration that I do.

“I’m staying open to that, and it might not click but you’re already moving towards a more positive mindsetn. You’re removing the pessimistic and increasing the optimistic side all the time. Even if you’re not getting the reward but it just so happens that when you’re in that space you do start to see all the good things as well as the bad things. In the space I was in before, all I could see was the bad things that was happening and then in turn that created more bad stuff and more pain on top of that.”