Tom McKibbin doesn’t need telling about expectations. The Holywood golfer was barely in braces when he won the World Junior Golf Championship at Pinehurst in 2015. That victory meant that people essentially knew three things about him before they knew anything. He was 12 years old, he was a world champion and he was from the same club as Rory McIlroy. Don’t be talking to him about expectations.
On the flipside he knows plenty about being underestimated too. In March 2021 he took a phonecall from one of the GB&I Walker Cup selector, breaking the bad news that he hadn’t made the team. Throughout the previous year’s lockdown the Walker Cup was what had kept him fuelled. For months he had hit balls into a net out in his back garden, convincing himself they were going where he was aiming. Turned out the selectors figured they knew better.
Just over 18 months on from that phonecall, McKibbin is established on the Challenge Tour and sits at 335th place in the world rankings. Of the Walker Cup team that was beaten 14-12 by the US that spring, only Kinsale’s John Murphy is within 100 places of him, at 476. None of the other nine are inside the top 800 in the world, and seven are outside the top 1,000. Don’t be talking to him about being underestimated.
The coming week distils it all. No judgment calls, no guessing. By next Sunday night McKibbin will either be a DP World player for 2023 or he won’t. He goes into the Challenge Tour Grand Final in Mallorca, Spain, in 15th place on this year’s rankings list. The top 20 will take home a Category 14 card for 2023, meaning automatic access to all but the very top layer of Tour events.
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As a starting point for the week it’s mildly purgatorial. High enough for any kind of reasonable week to keep him in the top 20, just close enough to the borderline so that he can’t be blasé about it. It would take an unlikely confluence of events for him to drop out of the top 20 – something like him finishing dead last and each of the players between 16 to 20 in the rankings finishing in the top 10 – but it’s not impossible. Nothing for it but to keep the pedal to the metal from Thursday morning.
“Obviously I want to make sure of the top 20 and get a full card for next year,” he says. “Anything worse than that and you’ll definitely get events on the main tour by being inside the top 45 but it would be complicated. You’d have to decide whether you want to dabble in events on the main tour or go full time on the Challenge Tour. That seems to not work out the best for people when they try and combine the two – there’s a lot of chopping and changing.
“So top 20 is the aim, definitely. This is what the whole season has been working towards. It should be good. It’ll be fun. It will be my first limited-field event where there’s no cut and you’re guaranteed four days’ play. I’m looking forward to the week and seeing how well I can play.”
This isn’t where he was supposed to be. Not yet, anyway. The Challenge Tour Grand Final generally features far more scrabbling journeymen than whizz-kid prodigies. Hence, there are twice as many over-30s trying to win their cards next week as there are under-21s. While the average age of those in the mix is 26½, McKibbin is still only 19.
There’s a simple explanation for the age gap. Had it not been for the pandemic he’d be in America now. McKibbin and his family have been making plans for his golf career since his early teens and for most of the way along they presumed he’d be heading to the US for college. He had made a verbal commitment to play for the University of Florida and would be well into his second year in Gainesville by now.
But Covid jabbed a nine-iron into his spokes and flipped his plans out over the handlebars. It ruined the end of his final school year at Belfast Royal Academy and meant he couldn’t meet the admission requirements for his US college. It moved certain tournaments around that he had planned to play in and couldn’t. It tossed everything in the air and left him to deal with where it all landed.
“Yeah, it meant exams being cancelled and pushed back a year and stuff like that,” he says. “My school was great with helping me but I was trying to do American schooling too to meet the requirements and it was all online and it just didn’t work out. I would have had to take a lot of time off golf to catch up with it all and things like that. So I guess I just decided against it.
“But, like, 100 per cent, that was the plan all along. Ever since I was 14, 15, I was all set to go. That was definitely the route I had planned out. But things just changed with the pandemic. Right now,I’m delighted with how things turned out. Looking at it now I don’t think I’d change anything.”
It’s not difficult to view it as a blessing in disguise, certainly. No sooner had his Walker Cup hopes dissolved than he announced he was turning professional. He made his pro debut in May 2021, playing on a sponsor’s invite in Tenerife. Those first few months last year were about getting his legs under him – although he did make a brief, scintillating run through the first stage of Korn Ferry Q School in September with an opening round of 62. He faded at the second stage, though, and set his mind squarely on this year’s Challenge Tour.
His rise through 2022 has been incremental but insistent. His world ranking the day he turned pro was 1,851 – the climb of 1,516 places is the most by any Irish golfer in the 18 months since he joined the paid ranks. The only Irish players ahead of him now are McIlroy, Shane Lowry, Seamus Power and Pádraig Harrington.
His big leap forward this year came in South Africa in February. McKibbin scorched the field with an early 62 in the Cape Town Open and carried a two-shot lead into the final day. He couldn’t hold on on the Sunday, though – his 73 was the worst score of anyone who finished in the top 15. All the same, he didn’t come away downhearted with his third place. The opposite, if anything.
“I was pretty okay with it actually,” he says now. “I was disappointed not to win obviously, but I came away from it knowing it could have gone either way. I played decent enough the last day and I just had a few bad breaks here and there, and a couple of other people got nicer breaks.
“I didn’t play myself out of it or do anything stupid. So I guess I sort of knew I was there after it and that if I was in that position again I could just as easily do better. In the end it was only the second tournament of the year and it was good to make a good start and get some nice points. It kind of set me up for the year.”
Another top 10 the following week in Durban gave him a toehold in the upper reaches of the Race To Mallorca that he didn’t relinquish all season. He was fifth in Italy, second at the K Club, fourth in Belgium. Any slight worries about his current form were zapped last time out when he shot a final round 65 to tie for fourth in Abingdon, England. He is here and he is ready.
His parents Sara and Robin will be with him, naturally enough. Apart from the fact that he is their only child and it’s a massive week, Robin never misses a tournament anyway. “He has to come,” Tom says. “Because of my age it’s way too expensive for me to rent a car!”
The first week of the rest of his life, then. Hard not to feel he’s on the cusp of something special.
