The 2026 HotelPlanner Tour season is a month old and the fourth and final event of the South African swing came to a close on Sunday with Irish players making encouraging starts.
Max Kennedy’s runner-up finish at the NTT Data Pro-Am was the best of the Irish over the four tournaments while Gary Hurley, Liam Nolan and Conor Purcell also have plenty of positives to take into the spring break before heading to India for two legs.
It bumped the Royal Dublin golfer into the top-10 on the Road to Mallorca Rankings a fortnight ago and he has remained there despite falling from 6th to 10th after a missed cut last week.
The top-15 will earn DP World Tour cards after November’s Grand Final in Alcanada.
Kennedy narrowly missed out on a place in last year’s finale after some early season form fizzled out on him towards the end of the campaign but he learned a lot and feels he has the tools to truly launch a DP World Tour bid.
“I learned that it’s a long year, there is a lot to go through,” said the 24-year-old. “Even if you have one good result or bad result it doesn’t really matter you just have to keep getting better throughout the year and try to be at the top of your game at the end of the year. That’s one of the things I will do this year is take a couple more breaks, I played a lot last year and really prioritise the courses that suit me.”
Hurley’s resurgence has been as unexpected as it has been remarkable. Nobody knew he would be teeing it up at all this year as he continues his battle with parsonage turner syndrome, a rare nerve injury that is affecting his right shoulder muscle.
The West Waterford man has been plagued by the condition for the last twelve months and considered walking away from the game before making his first start of the season in a year in South Africa. Prepared to go through the pain barrier, Hurley managed to stick around for all four events, making all his cuts, playing in sixteen consecutive rounds and even posting a top-10 finish.
The former DP World Tour member was briefly inside the top-10 on the Road to Mallorca but is still in a healthy 27th position with the top-45 making it to the final.
“I didn’t play much golf in November, December. I went to Spain and really struggled with my shoulder. Last December (2024) I woke up one day and couldn’t lift up my arm, six weeks later saw a specialist and she said I have parsonage turner syndrome which is where the immune system attacks your spinal accessory nerve which controls how you move your arm and shoulder.”
“In September, I was waiting for it to recover, it takes so long I will never be 100% and I decided I’m not waiting anymore and I started looking at other things and not continuing to play golf and when I did that things started to get a little better, some blue skies showing,” he admits.
“I still struggled with it and I was working with my coach and we figured out how to load the shoulder a bit differently. It’s still the same but doesn’t seem to cause me pain anymore which is great.”
Galway’s Nolan, who made last year’s Grand Final, has started solidly with four successive cuts to lie 37th on the Road to Mallorca while Purcell drop down to the HotelPlanner Tour where he won twice en route to promotion in 2024 has been steady and he is 61st.
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