Billy Hurley combats golf pressures
The violent dictator had gone to the gallows, but insurgents continued to wreak havoc with truck and car bombs in Baghdad. It was the summer of 2007 and the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq peaked at 170,000. Two terminals in the Northern Arabian Gulf pump millions of barrels of crude oil around the clock into waiting supertankers, shipments that generate an estimated $18,000 a second for the Iraqi government. These terminals are the country's most precious assets and they will be the key to the nation's economic future.
One of the U.S. troops that summer charged with protecting those oil platforms was junior Navy lieutenant Billy Hurley III, a surface warfare officer aboard the guided missile destroyer USS Chung-Hoon, a 280-member Pearl Harbor-based ship that was a part of the Maritime Security Operations working with coalition forces.
Hurley had been an All-America golfer at the Naval Academy, destined for a career on the PGA Tour, but first he was a member of a team that drove the ship 8-10 hours a day around a 2-mile barrier surrounding the platforms. The Leesburg, Va., native had been on active duty for three years.
Six collegiate wins in 2004 and a 2005 Walker Cup appearance were deep in the back of Hurley's mind. Occasionally he would swing a weighted golf club in his spare time to feel the old sensations, but a war was taking place and golf would have to wait. He had to keep watch over Iraq's black gold.
Four years later, Hurley is headed to the PGA Tour after earning his card by finishing 25th on this year's Nationwide Tour money list. The 29-year-old, who taught economics for two years at the Naval Academy before joining the Chung-Hoon, went into the Nationwide Tour Championship in late October on the bubble for that last automatic berth to the PGA Tour.
Many players might have wilted under that kind of pressure, but Hurley is not your typical tour pro.
"I told everybody that one of the reasons why I cannot be as fazed as some other people is because I have more life experience," Hurley said. "I was active duty in the Navy for five years and I have been in far more situations that were more stressful than trying to get my tour card.
"Driving a ship through the Suez Canal takes way more attention than playing 18 holes of golf. It makes it easier to focus on the right things and not lose perspective."
Hurley is hardly the first professional athlete to put his career on hold to fight for his country. In the early 1940s, World War II thinned the ranks of all professional sports organizations. Hurley knew that he would have to serve five years of active duty after he graduated from the academy. He knew that another midshipman, Roger Staubach, hadn't started his NFL career until he was 27 because of his commitment to the Navy.
In 2006, Hurley petitioned the Navy to grant him the same reduction in active duty service as it had David Robinson in the late 1980s, but the Navy turned him down.
"It was a bad time politically to let somebody play golf," Hurley said. "I was disappointed but I wasn't upset. I wasn't trying to get out of my commitment.
"I just thought the Navy could make better use of me. I thought that I could do some good in recruiting and get involved with public affairs and still play tour golf."
Nevertheless, he would end up on a two-year deployment aboard the Chung-Hoon. After his commission was up in June '09, he tried PGA Tour Q-school that fall, but he didn't make it through to the final stage.
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Over the next year he learned the intricacies of the pro game on the mini tours, where he built a more repetitive golf swing under the tutelage of his instructor, Mitchell Spearman. After constructing a simpler swing that depended less on timing, Hurley -- who always had a good short game -- added solid ball striking to his repertoire.
"I've only played golf for 2½ years now full-time in my life," Hurley said.
"So I had far less practice time than a lot of these guys I'm playing against. And even when I was playing in the Walker Cup or a couple of tour events, it was always secondary to my commitment to the Navy. It was always a balancing act for me."
After a win on the Hooters Tour and some other good finishes, he earned a conditional Nationwide Tour card through the 2011 Q-School. In his eighth start of the season, at the Chiquita Classic in Maineville, Ohio, he birdied five of the last six holes in his final round to shoot a 64 and finish second.
He had two more top-10s, and by the season-ending Nationwide Tour Championship in Daniel Island, S.C., he held a comfortable margin over his nearest competitors for that highly coveted 25th spot on the money list.
Later this month, Hurley will play in the grueling six-round PGA Tour Q-school finals in Palm Springs, Calif. He wants to improve his status so that he can ensure he gets into most of the events on the West Coast swing at the beginning of the year.
"I'm just going to try to go have fun and make a lot of birdies," said Hurley, who resides in Annapolis during the off-season with his wife, Heather, and their two sons.
Their youngest son, 2-year-old Jacob, was adopted from Ethiopia.
"And if I don't play well, I have something already in my back pocket."
What advice does he have for anyone considering going to the Naval Academy to play golf?
"The most important thing for playing golf at the Naval Academy is fundamentals," he said. "If you have a real quirky swing where it takes a lot of balls to continue to hone your skills, you're not going to get the chance to hit a lot of balls with all the demands of being a midshipman."
Hurley still has a clean-cut All-American look and the swagger of a Naval officer, and his golf clothes are as perfectly ironed as he kept his Navy whites, but he's let go of some of the trappings of military life. He now doesn't mind sleeping past 4:30 a.m. and he doesn't try to make his bed with hospital corners. But he wonders if he'll ever be completely out of Navy mode.
"The Navy is a large part of who I am," he said. "So in a large respect, I'm still settling into civilian life."
As he looks toward 2012 and the start of his rookie season on the PGA Tour, he carries the clarity of purpose that helped focus his days and nights as a surface warfare officer on the Northern Arabian Gulf.
"My goals are to be a better golfer at the end of the year than I was at the beginning of the year," Hurley said. "And if I keep becoming a better player, the skies are the limit."
Farrell Evans covers golf for ESPN and can be contacted at evans.espn@gmail.com.