After an excellent 2023 that saw him winning twice on the Alps Tour, finishing the season as the number one player on the tour’s Order of Merit, and with a 2024 Challenge Tour card in his pocket, Ronan Mullarney was on the up.
But things didn’t quite pan out the way he’d hoped in 2024, and the step up in standard, combined with unfamiliar territory, unfamiliar courses and unfamiliar opposition proved too much. The performances dipped, all too often he found himself the wrong side of the cutline on Friday afternoons, and ultimately, back on the Alps Tour again in 2025.
It’s far from being an uncommon story though. Roughly 50 percent of PGA Tour rookies lose their tour card after the first year, and that extends through the various satellites. Still, most professional golfers dream of making it to the big leagues and to get knocked back a step can be a confidence killer if you allow it to. Alternatively, you can take the experience, learn from it and come back stronger.
“I don’t think anything ever comes easy,” Mullarney says. “Coming off the Alps Tour as Order of Merit winner, you weren’t guaranteed starts in every event, but my status combined with the national invites that Golf Ireland got, I pretty much played in every event that I wanted to. There were guys a lot worse off than me, so that wasn’t a problem.
“Where it gets tricky is that you don’t know the golf courses that you’re playing on, so planning a schedule that suits you is tough. You can study golf courses all you like on the internet, but you can have a 7,500-yard course that’s firm and fast, and in 30-degree heat, it plays really short. Then you have the likes of Galgorm that’s 7,100 yards and felt like one of the longest courses I’ve ever played.
“But I can’t complain. I was very lucky last year; I just didn’t play well enough to take advantage of it.”
In his first start back on the Alps Tour, he very nearly found himself back in the winners’ circle straight away. Playing the Elin Bay Open in Suez, Egypt, a final round of 67 was enough to give him the clubhouse lead only for Swiss Luca Galliano to pip him by a single shot.
But it’s not Mullarney’s style to start talking tall and thinking that he’s a big fish in a small pond.
“I’ve given up on expecting to play well,” he said. “I just want to pitch up at every event and get the most out of what I have that week. Sometimes it’s going to be pretty reasonable and I’m going to give myself chances, other weeks it’s not going to be great, but you can still score pretty well regardless.
“That first week in Egypt, I didn’t drive the ball that great, putted ok, not great but the greens were tricky. I hit my irons ok, hit my wedges ok, made the right decision a few times, and that was it really.
“I didn’t even know where I stood in the tournament until I was playing the last. There’s a big scoreboard beside the 18th and I saw I was tied for the lead.
“I waited on the range, but then Luca birdied the 17th, I think it was, then parred the last and that was it. I go have lunch, we hang around for a couple of days and then go and do it all again.”
When people think professional golf, they think money – lots of money – and while that might be true for the multi-millionaires playing on the PGA Tour and LIV, it’s far from being the case for most pros.
Mullarney’s efforts in Suez saw the Play in Pink ambassador collect €3,453. Only Galliano, with €6,200 took home more, while 76 of the 120-man field went home empty handed.
“I’m so wealthy now that Donald Trump and Elon Musk have been on to me,” he joked. “But no, that just basically means that my three weeks in Egypt are sort of paid for. I’m playing with house money for the next two events. That’s how I look at it.”
And really, it’s the only way to look at it. Nobody is ever going to get rich playing on the lower tiers. But putting all your eggs in one basket and taking a ‘promotion or nothing’ approach doesn’t necessarily work either, even when he does have the knowledge that he’s performed well enough to win the Alps Order of Merit before.
Not in a game as fickle as golf, anyway.
“I evaluate every year at the end of it, see what I got out of it and what I could do better,” he explains. “In relation to where I want to finish or how many events I’m going to win? I don’t do stuff like that.
“There are many guys who’ve done extremely well at one period in their life, then it’s not going so well not long after. Golf can be like that. You just have to try to enjoy the good bits as best you can and try to forget about the bad bits. And that’s easier said than done, certainly for me anyway.
“That’s not being negative, that’s being realistic.
“Every week I could be here saying, ‘oh, if a couple more putts had dropped’ or ‘I had my C-game this week and still finished second’ or whatever, but more often than not the fact is that the putts didn’t drop, you didn’t bring anything better than your C-game, and the results are the results.
“I just go about things my own way. And if it’s good enough, I’ll get the rewards for it. If it’s not, then fair enough.”
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