CRAWFORD | Drew Doyle comes home for the ISCO Championship with proof in his pocket | Sports

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Golf is a fine game if you don't have to play it for groceries.

As recreation, it's a walk through expensive grass interrupted by bad language. As a profession, it's a traveling nervous breakdown with yardages.

Unless you've just won.

Then the airports seem friendlier. The rental cars smell better. The putter suddenly becomes an old friend again.

Drew Doyle knows that feeling now.

Three weeks ago, the Louisville native stood over a 13-foot par putt on the 72nd hole of the Inter Rapidisimo Golf Championship in Bogotá, Colombia. Make it, and you’re a PGA event winner. Miss it, and you spend another week wondering when your turn will come.

The putt curled in.

"It really just proved to myself that I can do it," Doyle said. "It's one thing to think you can, and it's another thing to know that you've done it."

Which is a nice thing to know before coming home.

Doyle returns to Hurstbourne Country Club this week for the ISCO Championship, where he's played enough rounds to know every ridge, every bailout area and every place a golf ball can disappear. Last year he arrived as one of many local stories — a St. Xavier graduate with a sponsor exemption trying to prove he belonged on a PGA TOUR leaderboard.

This year, he arrives carrying proof.

"I feel a lot less pressure this year," Doyle said. "I don't really feel like I have to prove anything."

Everybody around Kentucky knew Doyle could play long before he became a professional. At 13, he became the youngest player ever to qualify for the Kentucky Amateur Championship. He starred at St. Xavier. He built a successful college career at LSU.

But golf is laden with promising players.

They're on mini-tours, in Monday qualifiers, in airports, in rental cars, in hotel gyms and in the back of restaurants ordering chicken because it's the cheapest adult food on the menu. They all have pretty swings. They all once shot 64 somewhere. They all have somebody telling them they've got the goods.

The goods are wonderful. The receipts are better. Doyle has one now.

His victory moved him to third on the PGA TOUR Americas points list. Finish in the top 10 by season's end and he'll earn a Korn Ferry Tour card.

Professional golf has always been a game of better neighborhoods.

Louisville native Drew Doyle talks to reporters after a practice round for the PGA ISCO Championship at Hurstbourne Country Club.
ERIC CRAWFORD

The PGA TOUR is the mansion on the hill. The Korn Ferry Tour is the front porch. PGA TOUR Americas is still down the driveway, waving at the gate.

This week, the real mansion is in Scotland, where golf's gated community is tuning up for the British Open.

But for Doyle, Hurstbourne is still a much nicer neighborhood than the one he's been living in.

The PGA TOUR Americas schedule has taken him across North and South America, teaching lessons that have as much to do with airports and hotel rooms as wedges and putters.

"The Americas Tour does a great job of prepping players not just from a golf standpoint but from traveling in general," Doyle said. "It's a big deal to be on a tour and traveling around and being away from home. ... It definitely teaches you how to play professional golf the way it was designed."

This week there are no rental cars. No unfamiliar restaurants. No wondering where to eat after the round.

Instead, Doyle is sleeping in his own bed. Seeing family. Eating at Volare on Frankfort Avenue.

Most of all, he's back at Hurstbourne.

"This is my favorite place in the city," he said.

He's been coming here since he was seven or eight years old, when his uncle, Kentucky golf Hall of Famer Buddy Demling, and cousins first brought him out. He estimates he's logged more than 500 rounds here.

"I've played it too many times to count," he said.

Last year, though, tournament conditions made it feel like somebody else's golf course. It was firmer, faster and meaner than he'd ever seen it. This year it looks more familiar.

"I'm excited to kind of really have a home game this week," he said.

He'll also have family on the bag.

His caddie is cousin Robbie Bender, another St. Xavier golfer and former Indiana player. Bender laughs that he used to sneak Doyle onto Hurstbourne so often he figured they were pressing their luck.

"I know they probably started to get upset how many times he'd come out here and play," Bender said. "We've been best friends forever."

Between those rounds at Hurstbourne and countless more at Long Run, Bender says he knows Doyle's game "like the back of mine."

That's useful because Doyle doesn't want four hours of golf talk.

"Golf's hard enough as it is," he said. "There's no reason to make it any harder."

Bender understands the assignment.

Around the shots, he'll be all business. Between them, anything goes. One minute he'll be talking yardage. The next, who knows? That's one advantage of having your cousin on the bag instead of a career caddie.

Doyle admits he's thought about Sunday. A hometown player contending in his hometown PGA TOUR event? Of course he has.

"I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about it," he admitted.

But there is another voice he'll hear this week.

His grandfather, Moe Demling, a member of the Kentucky Golf Hall of Fame, spent years telling Doyle the same thing.

You've just got to believe you're good enough. That's half the battle.

Three weeks ago in Colombia, a 13-foot putt finally convinced him.

Now he comes home to the golf course that helped raise him, not hoping he belongs, but knowing he does.

And Louisville gets to see how far that kind of confidence can travel.