I Love it When Golfing Underdogs Have Their Day

I love sport. It has the power to thrill. It can reduce you to tears. It can leave you on the edge of your seat. It can break the hearts of those who compete at the highest level. But it also has the power to make dreams come true.

It also has to be said that there is much about professional sport that leaves me cold. 

Who on earth ever thought that putting Mike Tyson in a boxing ring with Jake Paul was a good idea? Unbelievably, 60,000 souls bought tickets to watch the farce and millions more tuned in as it was screened live on Netflix. It turned out to be the shambles everybody expected it to be. Tyson is nearly 60 years old - what did the promoters expect?

I hate the fact that golf continues to be torn apart, with various factions fighting for control and obscene amounts of money up for grabs.

However, I want to focus on three men who have enjoyed some life-changing play as the season has come to end on both sides of the Atlantic. Rafael Campos, Paul Waring and Justin Lower have spent much of their careers as journeymen, scratching together a living and battling to keep their playing rights on the DP World Tour and PGA Tour respectively.

Before teeing it up in Bermuda last week, Campos was 147th in the FedEx Cup standings and was heading back to the Korn Ferry Tour. At the age of 36 it would have meant he had little to look forward to. Four days later he was $1.2m richer, had climbed to 80th place in the standings and earned himself a place in the fields for The Masters and Tournament of Champions. It was little wonder that he could barely speak afterwards.

There was absolutely no sign of this coming - he had missed 13 of his previous 15 cuts and had enjoyed just one top-10 finish all year. From nowhere, he has become a winner. He may never pick up another title - in fact the odds are heavily against it. But nobody will ever be able to take this one away from him.

Ahead of the Abu Dhabi Championship, 39-year-old Waring had only ever managed one victory. He had enjoyed a decent year in 2024 - good enough to get him into the field of 70 for the Abu Dhabi Championship. But never in his wildest dreams would he have imagined that he would win the tournament and everything that came with it.

He now finds himself in possession of a PGA Tour card for 2025. He has some tough choices to make. How does he balance life on both tours? Does he opt to focus on a challenge on the PGA Tour, does he divide his time between both or does he decide to stick with what he knows, namely life on the DP World Tour. At this stage in his career he will probably feel that he has absolutely nothing to lose and give it a proper go in America. And who can blame him? Just one good week could change his life again.

This was his reaction: "I've been knocking on the door a few times. I had a few seconds. I've been in and around a few times. To get over the line again is fantastic and to control it the way I have as well, especially today.

"I thought I might have let it slip [in the third round] but to keep a lead the way I was playing, I knew I wouldn't have two days in a row playing like that. I felt like I had another gear that I needed.

"I don't want to sound over the top or anything, but I felt like my golf game has been in such a good place over the last year. I just haven't put it all together. It's nice to put it all together and get a tournament like this.

"I was quite happy living in Dubai to be honest with you," Waring said. "It's going to be a long way to travel, a long commute over to America. But I'm looking forward to that. Absolutely made up.

"I love the DP World Tour, I absolutely love it. I love the people and I love playing here and I have lots of great mates, but it's another chapter for me now - especially at my advanced age."

Lower is another who has battled against the odds. He has faced some challenging times in his life.

His father and younger brother were killed in a car accident when he was 15, and in 2018 he missed out on being promoted from the Korn Ferry Tour to PGA Tour in 2018 by just $500.

Since finally making it to the PGA Tour in 2022, Lower has finished 138th, 103rd and 91st on the FedEx Cup points list. He has hardly set the world alight. He has been forced to play in 30 tournaments this season and until the World Wide Technology Championship in Mexico it had all been something of a struggle. But he found something and finished second to ensure his immediate future.

And that glorious form continued when he travelled to the Bermuda Championship, where he finished fifth. In the blink of an eye, he has banked around $2m and his immediate future is secure.

I often get the feeling that many leading tour pros really don’t know how lucky they are. Lower is not one of them.

This is what he had to say about what winning would mean to him: "I work really hard in this game, I work really hard at it. Sometimes I think I never would have gotten this far, and I’ve been through a lot in my life and it’s just, I don’t know, it’s just a lot of fun. It’s nothing sad that I’m crying. I don’t know, it’s just joyful. I love being out here. I hate all the changes the PGA Tour are making, that’s a whole other subject I could rant about for like an hour. Seems like anytime I do something good they make a change. Yeah, it just means a lot to me. I just want to see how good I can do and prove to myself that I can actually do something in this game."

Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele will grab most of the headlines when the story of 2024 comes to be written but for me, it was Campos, Waring and Lower who summed up what goes is all about - or should be!