While the majority of Challenge Tour Members have had a two week break from tournament competition ahead of this week’s Peugeot Challenge R.C.G. El Prat in Barcelona, England’s Lee Slattery has been performing with distinction during The European Tour’s last two events in Portugal and rediscovering the form and confidence that made him the 2004 Challenge Tour Number One.
His second place finish in the Madeira Island Open Caxia Geral de Depositos in particular, where he finished just one stroke behind Frenchman Jean Van de Velde, was the kind of performance that typified Slattery’s dominance of the 2004 Rankings, and he is hoping that he can produce a similar result in Barcelona.
It was midway through the 2004 Challenge Tour season that Slattery began a run that made him he player of the year. In the space of three months, the 27 year old won the Telia Grand Prix and produced a further six top five finishes to accumulate €95,979.
Slattery’s outstanding form was the story of the 2004 Challenge Tour season, and he finished the year in some style by leapfrogging Italy’s Alessandro Tadini at the top of the Rankings in the last event of the season – the Bouygues Telecom Grand Final – to finish the year as Number One.
Like many Challenge Tour champions before him, Slattery struggled with the pressure of over expectation when he stepped up to The European Tour last season, but his failure to retain his Tour card has made him all the more determined to recapture those Challenge Tour glories and get back on Tour as soon as possible.
“It was just hard getting on the main Tour last year and it was a big challenge,” said Slattery. “The pedigree of the players out there is so high, and the standards are so high that you have to raise your game to that next level. That is quite a hard thing to do. It can be quite intimidating – especially at the big events because I seemed to get a few really good draws at big events and was playing with world class players, who you look at and think ‘how can I become that good’.
“I think there was a bit more pressure on me because I had won the Challenge Tour and I was reading in the papers that I was favourite to win the Rookie of the Year award. That was at the start of last season and I knew straight away the pressure was there and the most difficult thing is that you don’t know how you are going to deal with that stuff until you are in the situation. If you add all of that in with the fact I just didn’t play that well then you can see why I didn’t do that well.”
Slattery’s determination to get back on The European Tour has made him re-evaluate his life, and, just like he did before winning the Challenge Tour, he has made sweeping lifestyle changes to help him concentrate solely on golf. With a new coaching and psychology team in place, he feels ready to relaunch his career.
He said: “It’s coming back. It has been a bit of a struggle but the confidence is back and that’s what you need, because having confidence can give you the ability to put together good scores even if you are not playing well. That happened to me a lot when I won the Challenge Tour in 2004. I wasn’t playing great at some points in the last half of the season but the belief got me through.”
Slattery, and indeed the rest of the Challenge Tour field, will need every ounce of confidence and belief at the Real Club de Golf El Prat, where the players will face one of the toughest courses on the 2006 Schedule.
The Greg Norman designed 7,070 yards par 72 layout is true test for top professionals. Last season, just one player – champion Thomas Jesus Muñoz – finished the event under par, and that was after a breath-taking birdie-eagle finish.
