‘It’s like the Serengeti with spikes on’: Irish golfers fight to survive on feeder tours

A fortnight ago, while you were glued to the Walker Cup in Lahinch, Sam Murphy finished tied second at an Alps Tour event in the northeast of France, swelling his season’s earnings by €3,875.41. As soon as the presentation was over, he jumped in a car with Hugh Foley and Robert Moran, both of whom had missed the cut, and they drove to the next tour stop, six hours away. The road irons out the wrinkles.A week ago, while you were entranced by Shane Lowry in Doonbeg and Leona Maguire at the Solheim Cup, Hugh Foley lost a play-off in Saint Omer, in the northwest of France. The €5,300 he banked was his biggest pay-day of the season, half as much as Harry Hall collected for finishing 69th at the Irish Open. The top 50 on the Alps Tour order of merit qualify for the Grand Final next month, and Foley is certain of his place in that event now. But there are only five cards up for grabs on the HotelPlanner tour next season, and three players have already sealed their promotion to the second tier of European golf. Moran and Murphy are knocking around the top 10, hustling hard for the other two spots.Professional golf is layered, like lasagne, though the meat and the sauce are not evenly spread. The prize money, the attention, the glamour, the perks, the courtesy cars, the fawning patronage of the corporate world is showered on the elite. READ MOREBeneath that, professional golf is a mud wrestle. It is easy to name the Irish golfers that appear on our television screens each week because between the men’s game and the women’s game it scarcely reaches double figures. From the tip of the pyramid, it is a sheer slope to the broad, teeming base. Dozens of Irish players compete on what are called feeder tours, out of sight and out of mind. This week, eight of them played at a DP World Tour first stage qualifier. The competition is deep and fierce. In all, there are 10 first stage qualifying tournaments, feeding into a round of second stage qualifiers. The final stage of tour school is played over six harrowing rounds, as the juice is pummelled from the fruit. Only 20 full cards for the DP World Tour are on offer.“It is a brutal environment,” says Gary Murphy, the head teaching pro at the K Club who spent 15 years on the European Tour and the Challenge Tour. “It’s like the Serengeti with spikes on.”Gary Murphy at Seapoint Golf Club in Louth in 2023. Photograph: Phil Inglis/Getty Images Everybody must navigate their own path through the wilderness. Sam Murphy is a rookie on the Alps Tour, the third tier of European golf. In February he made a staggering entrance, winning on his professional debut in Egypt. The first prize was €6,200.“You pretty much don’t make ends meet on this tour,” says Murphy. “I’m doing okay this year – I’ve won one event and I have three or four top 10s. But that’s only getting you up to the guts of €20,000 in earnings. This a tour where you don’t care how much you make but you need sponsors [to keep going]. I’m lucky, I have great sponsors.“You just get on this tour and try to leave it as fast as possible. I will be playing on the Alps Tour again next year if I’m not in the top five [on the order of merit]. But there’s a lot of lads out here and it’s their 10th year on the Alps Tour. If it’s my fifth year on that tour, I hope somebody will tell me it’s time to stop. I hope I have enough sense to say that I’m packing it in too.” To get this far has already been a searing test of Murphy’s resolve. Like all of the most talented Irish amateurs he was offered a golf scholarship at an American college, but his time in the States was racked by injuries that threatened to derail him. “In my four years in college I got five ankle surgeries and one elbow surgery. I actually managed to play quite a bit of college golf when I probably shouldn’t have. I got a few surgeries that were short-term fixes that should have done me for five or 10 years but did me for six months.“I had no side-to-side movement in my ankles because of arthritis. It was causing me so much pain just walking or trying to swing that the easiest way to fix it in the end was to fuse my ankles. They drilled two screws up through my heels and into my leg. No joint, no arthritis and no pain.“The elbow was a bit of a freak one. I was just hitting shots one day in Hawaii, playing a tournament, and I couldn’t feel my hand. It just went completely. I got a trapped nerve. I lost the feeling in my hand for about six months. My fingers were stuck and couldn’t move. I couldn’t pick up a glass.”The circumstances of Sara Byrne’s elbow injury in January were more conventional, though it was deeply troubling too. She slipped on ice and fell awkwardly, fracturing her right elbow and damaging the ligaments. For the sake of her career Byrne was advised against surgery, but in the beginning, nobody could guarantee that she would be able to straighten her arm again.Sara Byrne at Gambito Golf Calatayud. Photograph: Andalucía Golf TV “I was like mourning the death of my golf game at that point because they were unsure how it was going to heal,” she says.It was May before she returned to tournament play on the Ladies European Tour [LET]. “It took four months to the day before I got fully cleared to play. I think it was a bit of a blessing in disguise because I was so physically and mentally burnt out from 2025.”Byrne was one of the stars of the Great Britain and Ireland team that won the Curtis Cup two years ago and after that she left the amateur ranks. Before the end of that season, she had secured playing rights on the LET, but also on the Epson Tour, the second tier of professional golf in America. For the first seven months of last season, she tried to juggle a schedule on both tours. Ultimately, it was unsustainable. In July she returned full-time to Europe. “It was hard because I wanted to play in America but I knew it was the right thing to do. I had never really given up on something – and I haven’t given up on America – but I was doing too much.“Epson was really, really tough. I would say the depth of standard of player would be a bit more on Epson that it would be on LET, but your world ranking points are way less and the money is way less. It was really throwing myself in at the deep end after just turning pro. “It was quite lonely out there too. You were kind of put into the middle of nowhere in America. The tournaments weren’t near a big city and there was nothing to do apart from play golf and sit in your hotel room.”[ ‘Being the centenary makes it extra special’: Luke Donald wants Ryder Cup hat-trick at Adare ManorOpens in new window ]Byrne gave herself enough time in the second half of the season to finish in the top 70 on the LET order of merit and keep her full playing rights for this year. For a rookie, it was an impressive feat of escapology. “When you’re playing amateur, you’re just so free and you’re at the top of your game. But when you come out on tour everyone you’re playing against was one of the best amateurs. You’re definitely not playing with as much freedom. That’s a big thing. You feel like everything matters a little bit more. You feel like one shot makes so much more of a difference. There are so many other things going on.”Not all of the pitfalls are flagged in the orientation course. She tells a flabbergasting story from a tournament on the Epson Tour last year. Byrne was first reserve for the Pro-Am, which meant she was obliged to be at the course before the first group teed off and until the last group went out, in case one of the pros on the time sheet pulled out. Byrne’s father Derek was her caddie that week, and during the day they went for lunch in the area designated for the Pro-Am players.“One of the tour officials saw us eating and I got an email to say that I was being fined for it [by the tour] – $250 for me and $250 for my caddie. Because we weren’t playing, we weren’t allowed to have lunch, even though we weren’t allowed leave the golf course. It was only like a bagel and other stuff. I was thinking: ‘In what world does that make sense?’ I can’t be dealing with that.”Conor Purcell has been up and down the mountain: climbing, falling. He turned professional during the pandemic and in the beginning, he depended on invitations just to play in Alps Tour events. Within a couple of years, though, he had reached the HotelPlanner Tour and in 2024 he won twice on that circuit. Last season, he was the only Irish golfer playing full-time on the DP World Tour. Conor Purcell at the Open de Portugal in Lisbon on September 17th, 2026. Photograph: Octavio Passos/Getty Images His form, though, didn’t stand up. On the way to losing his card he missed 11 cuts in 25 events. This season he hasn’t been able to arrest the slide: in 19 starts he has made just five cuts.“Certain random moments hit you harder,” he says. “I remember vividly last year I was playing in the Scottish event up in Trump Aberdeen and my Mum and Dad came over and Noel Fox [his coach] was out there that week and I put two lovely rounds together [on Thursday and Friday]. I really felt like I was turning a bit of a corner. “And then I went out and had a really poor Saturday and fell down to the back of the pack. I just remember sitting in the players’ lounge with my parents just going: ‘What on earth am I doing here?’”Golf never stops asking awkward questions. He says the game is “80 per cent mental” and that part is always under attack. His last prize money cheques were in July; before that it was March. Add them together and it was less than six grand.But in Purcell’s career there have been good pay-days too, and over the years he has amassed about €700,000 in prize money. He says “he hasn’t been silly” with the money and his sponsors have been loyal and generous. He has the resources to keep going. And the heart. “Obviously life comes into it too and next year I turn 30. You’ve other obligations outside of golf. I’m very real with myself. I wouldn’t want to be clinging on to anything if things weren’t going my way for a long time. “But I’ve seen that my game can get me to the highest level in Europe on the DP World Tour. I haven’t even tapped into my full potential. That was like a glimpse of what I can do. This is a game where you need to have a lot of optimism and a lot of self-belief.”Only the top 70 players keep their cards on the HotelPlanner Tour and Purcell is outside the top 150 now. Unless he can produce something spectacular in the final three events of the regular season he will be heading back to Q school.Sam Murphy tried his hand at the first stage of qualifying for the DP World Tour last month and finished one spot outside of qualifying places, eliminated by one, tormenting shot. Thomas Higgins made it through. This week, Ronan Mullarney is in the hunt. And the other seven? In this wilderness, people get lost.