What is My Longest Drive?
My Longest Drive is an insight into the life of a professional golfer playing the mini tours and living in a converted van. I am fascinated to embark on this journey myself, so I thought it might be interesting to share as I go. Sharing my progress throughout my career is not something which comes naturally to me, but having considered it on multiple previous occasions, I decided now was the time to bite the bullet!
The golfer behind the wheel
As you may have seen on the homepage, my name is Owen Edwards. I am a professional golfer from Wales, although I will be living in a van soon, so quite where to say that I live is a mystery. I finished an International Business degree from The University of Birmingham in 2014 and committed to full time amateur golf with the Wales national squad set up from 2014-2017. I loved every minute of those few years and I will take a more in-depth look at elite amateur golf in a specific blog post, so keep an eye out for that if you’re interested in why it was such a fantastic time in my life!
I enjoyed moderate success as an amateur and turned pro in October 2017 with a handicap of +5 and amateur World ranking of 133. Having turned pro, I played for two years on the PGA Europro Tour. I had a couple of good results in 2018 on the Challenge Tour and scattered results on the Europro, but I can’t say that I achieved anything bordering on success during these first two seasons. It was a tricky introduction to professional golf but one which taught me plenty. I know we hear that a lot, but what I found interesting was what I learnt about myself outside of golf as well.
Nowadays, I ply my trade on the Pro Golf Tour (PGT) which is a third tier development tour based in Germany, holding events there but also in Austria, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Poland, Morocco, and Egypt. The point of this tour is to achieve one of the five “promotion spots” at the end of the season which will move you up to the second tier (The Challenge Tour). There are four tours that offer this same prize (we call them “satellite” tours), the PGA Europro Tour is one of these as well. This will be my second year on the PGT.
I was looking for a change at the end of the 2019 season and chose the Pro Golf Tour because I was moving to the Netherlands to live with my girlfriend. I didn’t feel like the Europro Tour was suiting my game or my personality. The Europro Tour is a fantastic tour which actually provides the best earning potential of the satellite tours, but it just wasn’t feeling right to me. I grew up in the Netherlands so I have never quite felt at home in the UK, and I was missing being around international people and cultures. Moving back to the Netherlands meant that the PGT was going to be the most convenient option for me and I liked what I was seeing, so I went for it.
Having finished tied 4th at the PGT qualifying school in October 2019, staged in Paderborn, Germany, I was already feeling positive about the switch. My 2020 season started very slowly though, I couldn’t afford to play the first couple of events in Egypt, then only managed to play three of the six events in Morocco before Covid enforced a four month hiatus. I was understandably rusty in Morocco but did play some good stuff in the final of the three events to finish tied 16th and get me up and running on the Order of Merit (OoM).
When we finally started up again it was August and I was set to play five of the remaining six events, followed by the Tour Championship if I was inside the top 70 on the OoM at the time. I showed respectable consistency to post three top 20s and one top 10 by season end, finishing up 35th on the OoM. It had been such a stop-start season without playing the full schedule, so I was happy to have got a feel for the tour, seen some of the courses, and proven to myself that I could be one of the best players on this tour in 2021.
Now I am back in the UK, building the My Longest Drive website and trying to get ready to attack the 2021 season. The PGT schedule was released just a couple of days ago so I’ll spend a bit of time going through that soon and working out my travel plans for the season. The schedule actually is not as condensed as I was expecting, so I will probably have to make a couple of trips to mainland Europe at different times. Depending on finances, I would like to play a few Clutch Pro Tour events to supplement my schedule, plus there will of course be The Open qualifying as long as I am in the UK at the time!
Right, there’s a brief introduction to me as a golfer. I hope that helps you to understand where I am at in my career and what my year is going to look like in the van! This blog is going to cover general golf posts, van life posts, and updates on how my own journey is going as well!
Hope to see you soon,
My Longest Driver – Owen Edwards
My Longest Drive 
