Calum Hill aiming for big Wentworth week in push for PGA Tour card

Since 2023, ten cards for the US circuit have been up for grabs through the DP World Tour’s Race to Dubai, with Bob MacIntyre being among the players who have made that step.

Another ten DP World Tour players will secure PGA Tour cards for next season, with Race to Dubai leader Patrick Reed among those in the prized positions heading into the final few weeks of the season.

It remains to be seen how many cards will remain to be on offer when the PGA Tour changes to a two-tier set up - a Championship Series and Challenger Series - in 2028, with a possibility of the number dropping to five.

“I’ve heard that,” admitted Hill, speaking to The Scotsman as he prepared to tee up in this week’s BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth. “I’ve never not had a drive for it,” he added of a PGA Tour ticket being one of his big goals. “It’s always been on my mind since the beginning, to be honest.

“The goal has always been for me to play on a tour across there. It’s still the goal and I will be giving it my maximum effort every time and see what happens. - that’s all you can do. To secure that reward eventually would be very nice indeed (smiling). It would make things a lot easier and be more convenient.”

Hill’s wife Miranda is American and Hill himself is now a US green card holder, with the couple now based in Arizona with their five-month-old son, Josh.

“They’re back home,” said Hill of his wife and son not being with him at the moment. “They were over here for a month but left after Switzerland. The plan was for them to come over for the Dunhill and Madrid, but it’s hard on the little guy when he is getting jet-lagged all the time.

“It takes about a week to get him back on some sort of cycle in terms of eating and sleeping then you leave again then he is messed up again. So I think we are going to try and give him a couple of months of regularity.”

A big performance in this week’s $9 million Rolex Series event would boost Hill’s hopes of joining MacIntyre as a PGA Tour player next year.

“It’s in nice nick,” he said of the iconic West Course at the Surrey venue. “You can see they have had a hot summer down here as there’s less rough on the outskirts of the course than there would normally be.

“You’ve got two or three yards of thick rough but, if you miss it a bit more than that, then there’s really not too much of a hefty punishment.

“It’s playing really good. The greens are nice. They’ve been quite soft and not as fast as normal, though the sub-air has been on the last couple of days, so I am sure they will be a lot faster by the time the weekend comes around.”

Helped by his back-to-back second-placed finishes in the Bacpo Energies Bahrain Championship and Qatar Masters, the 31-year-old sits 21st in the Race to Dubai and is on course to improve on a career-best 32nd in 2021.

“I’ve been steady,” he said. “I’ve always been in a golf tournament. I just need to tidy up a few errors here and there. I said to Stu [Davidson, his caddie] and Grant [Veenstra, his South African coach] last week that it’s not down to an inability to play the golf shot. It’s more a case of maybe not executing it well enough at that moment.

“Last Sunday in the Irish Open, meanwhile, I had a couple of soft bogeys due to three putts, which is a bit uncharacteristic. I also missed a couple of birdie putts to shoot one under and my golf was definitely better than the score suggested.

“I’m not working on anything too deeply at the moment. It’s just a case of trying to get the playing side a little sharper and score a bit better. One or two shots here and there and, instead of finishing 30th or whatever, you might finish tenth and all that adds up.”