The Red Line of Failure

Social media is an inevitable place of reflection as we reach the end of the year. In the midst of posts I apparently have no control over seeing or not in this post-Elon Musk world, there seems to be a consensus of disconnect among the golf community. The professional game, particularly the men’s, seems further away than ever from something golf fans can relate to. For what it’s worth, I think this is a long way from being the fault of LIV on its own. It isn’t just about money, or just about distance, or just about the best players not playing against each other every week. It’s probably been happening over the course of decades, which is why we misremember the ‘good old days’, and why there is no obvious or immediate cure.

I’ve mentioned a few times in my most recent and most sporadic blogs that I sometimes wonder why the desire to write has faded for me over the past couple of years. It has often felt loosely connected to the things mentioned above. But ultimately, I think a more fundamental question is at its heart… do I write for me? Or for you? Because the undefinable blend of men’s professional golf splintering, a social media golf community I once took for granted, and my own career arc and subsequent identity complex nudges at both of those possibilities.

The fact that I ever posted anything I’d written online suggests that my writing may be for you. But the fact I ever wrote in the first place – and then continued to write when there was no tangible link to connect my world as an elite amateur golfer in college 5000 miles away from home, living what felt like multiple lives at once, to anyone else at all, suggests that maybe I just wrote for myself.
However it started, writing has always been a way to make sense of things for me. No matter which way my career has arced, I’ve always found small victories; I’ve always found sense in the midst of the chaos. It’s what has driven me, and shaped my identity. And I think, maybe, that’s why I connected with some people – I’ve lived my life both as a golf fan and a golf professional. I’ve connected those two worlds for myself, and perhaps that has helped others connect them too. But the last couple of years I’ve struggled to make sense of any of it. Maybe it would help to remember how any of us connected in the first place.

Golf has always been a slightly niche sport in consumer terms, even as its popularity has grown exponentially in terms of people actually playing it. That part brings me a semblance of happiness; even pride – that the sport with an iron fist around my soul has managed to pierce the consciousness of unsuspecting victims across the world. Every time I play with a relative beginner, I’m struck by the same bewilderment: how on earth can you enjoy the process of getting only marginally less terrible, with glimpses of success so fleeting it’s unsettling rather than satisfying, at something so endlessly complicated? That only gets more complicated the more of it you understand? But then, I realise, they must wonder the exact same thing about me.

Here we are, in December 2024, and I’ve just been to LET Q School for the third time. Ironically the same number as LET wins I have in my career. Yet this is the first time going to Q School itself has felt like a sign of my failure. The first time I went, I was 22. I was having an identity crisis then too, because despite reaching the top 20 in the amateur world rankings and winning an LET Access event as an amateur a couple of months prior, I managed to convince myself I would only be ready to compete as a professional if I’d achieved more. I finished outside the top 20 and thought that that proved it. I was wrong.

The second time I went to LET Q School, it was the end of 2021 and off the back of playing a full season on the Symetra (now Epson) Tour. I won out there and finished within touching distance of gaining an LPGA card. I was also having an identity crisis then because after an incredibly intense year where I’d ultimately failed in my goal, I also spectacularly and painfully failed at LPGA Q Series, which was over the two weeks immediately preceding LET Q School. I played that week in a whirlwind of jetlag and mental exhaustion, too numb to care about whether I actually got my LET card back or not. Unsurprisingly given the psychological paradox that is this sport, I did get it back.

And now, the third time. 2024 was a year that nearly broke me, yet by the time I got to Q School I was closer to being myself again than I can remember being for a long time. By then, Q School was an opportunity, not a humiliation. Another step in the journey of being better than I’ve ever been before. But after two weeks of continuing in that journey, the red line on the LET app says I failed.

Yet that red line is not what it says it is. It is not the definition of success or failure, either tangibly or mentally. For one thing, it doesn’t explain that those coming 21st – 50th receive a category that due to the nature of the schedule (rightly or wrongly) means a not too dissimilar level of access than those in the top 20. But because the red line is there, and because of the turmoil of my 2024, pieces of logic and progress and small victories were scattered far beyond the 140 holes that I’d played to get myself inside that red line. Because the red line existed, the final question to my belief and confidence and identity at the end of a year that had shattered every one of those things came simply posed as this: “can you play your last 4 holes in level par?”
And the quiet rebuilding of stability over 6 weeks and 140 holes made way for the fragility that had preceded it. As Eddie Pepperell said about his Sunday in Mauritius – unfortunately, the Sunday felt right for the year.

But did that make it a failure?
If Pepperell had won in Mauritius, it would have felt like a perfect end to a perfect story for so many that have followed him. If I’d finished with 4 pars, or played those 4 holes the exact same way I did the previous day, I’d have my full LET card back and it would have felt like the perfect redemption story for me; a reward for being resilient enough to finally figure out some answers int he last few months of the year. But that’s not how golf works, it’s not how life works. The pieces don’t fit neatly together at the end. Often, as my sister and I found as we devoured a 1000 piece jigsaw over Christmas, you think you’re about to complete it and then life throws something else at you. In our case, the 1000th piece had hidden itself under a chair. In Pepperell’s case, he came 9th in Mauritius instead of winning. In my case this time at Q School, I played my last four holes in 2 over to miss my full card by two shots. But that doesn’t make it the end of the story. The red line doesn’t get to decide that. I’m still a golf fan and a golf professional. And hopefully, if you’re reading this, you’re somehow connected to that too.