‘Tiger Hurley’ dared to dream the impossible

As a surface warfare officer, Lt. Billy Hurley III drove the 9,348-ton guided-missile destroyer USS Chung-Hoon from Pearl Harbor to the Persian Gulf and South China Sea to San Diego.

But all the while his dream was to drive a golf ball on the PGA Tour.

The untethered notion of a golf career, even spelled out on a bulletin board in his room at the Naval Academy — “What have you done today to get ready for the PGA Tour?” — sometimes elicited snickers from his fellow midshipmen.

And, why not? No Naval Academy graduate and, in fact, no graduate of any of the service academies, had ever earned a PGA Tour card.

Few dared to even attempt it.

You want to play for pay on the world’s biggest golf stage, you go to places like Georgia, Texas, Stanford and Oklahoma State that don’t mandate summer training and carry a five-year active duty commitment after graduation.

But today the man some had nicknamed “Tiger Hurley” for his undeterred pursuit of a golf career is scheduled, sore hip willing, to tee off in the Sony Open in Hawaii in search of a second tour victory.

It is a tournament that, when time permitted during his years stationed at Pearl Harbor (2007-09), he would watch a round of on his days off.

It is an event that once, with scant practice, Hurley almost earned entry to, losing out in a qualifier playoff. He came to look at it as “the carrot on a stick” that would redouble his efforts.

Walking Waialae Country Club he dared to imagine a day after his military service ended when he would again play amid the golfers — Bill Haas, J.B. Holmes, Ryan Moore and Brandt Snedeker — he had competed against in the 2003 U. S. Amateur Championships as a collegian.

Just earning All-America honors in golf at the academy was a remarkable accomplishment in itself, given the demands of Annapolis and his major in quantitative economics.

When Hurley confessed his goal of a PGA career to a teammate early on there was disbelief if not hilarity.

Navy coach Pat Owen knew Hurley had been a good high school golfer, but hardly saw PGA potential upon Hurley’s arrival at Annapolis. “I thought he was just another goal-oriented, straight-laced kid who wanted to be a naval officer. I had no idea he would become a tour player, to be honest,” Owen recalls.

But Hurley, now 34, honed his skills, won some tournaments, even managed to shoot a 61 and climbed to a No 2 national ranking in his senior year. Then, he eventually went to sea.

Unlike NBA-bound David Robinson, however, there would be no early release from an active-duty commitment by the Secretary of the Navy.

“The Navy came first and when I could I played golf,” Hurley said. “I’d made a commitment.”

So, shipmates sometimes glimpsed Hurley swinging an imaginary club or air-putting during down time. In his two years stationed at Pearl, the number of golf tips Hurley gave to shipmates far exceeded the number of rounds he got to play. Hurley figured he played a total of five days of competitive golf. There would be no shots off the deck going through the Suez Canal.

“He was always dedicated to the job at hand, always focused, always professional as a sailor,” said Lt. Brian Smith, the current chief engineer of the Chung-Hoon who served with Hurley.

When his active duty commitment ended in 2009, Hurley played the mini tours and tried to scrape the rust from his game. There would be a time when even he had begun to wonder if he had bitten off too much. But the man who had often reminded himself, “If people don’t laugh at your dreams, then they are not big enough,” hung in despite twice losing his card and six months ago, amid chants of “Go Navy!” won the Quicken Loans National at Congressional.

“I’ve been doing this 26 years,” Owen said, “and he is the most single-minded, hardest working and, also, smartest kid that I have come across. That’s a pretty tough combination to beat, isn’t it?”

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.