Louis Dobbelaar has opened up for the first time on the struggles that have plagued him during the past two years, the moment he hit rock bottom and why he returns to this week’s New Zealand PGA Championship with more self-belief than at any other time in his career.
Still just 23 years old, Dobbelaar has endured a dip in the trajectory that had him pointed towards a prosperous career on golf’s international stage after his New Zealand PGA Championship triumph in 2023.
He won the 2016 NZ Amateur at Royal Wellington Golf Club as a 15-year-old, in so doing becoming the youngest winner in the championship’s history.
The trans-Tasman double was complete when Dobbelaar claimed the Australian Amateur in 2021 and, shortly after turning professional that same year, he earned playing rights on the PGA Tour’s Latin America tour.
Highlighted by a third-place finish at the 2021 Australian PGA Championship, Dobbelaar had four top-five finishes in his first 12 months on the Challenger PGA Tour of Australasia and then broke through two years ago with a maiden professional win at Gulf Harbour Country Club.
What happened next is not only a cautionary tale but a reminder of the reality young players accustomed to winning must face.
“You get a bit of a taste of success but what came after that was a little bit of a false sense of where I was at and maybe a bit of complacency,” Dobbelaar concedes.
“When you do have a nice amateur career and you are in contention a lot and you maybe have a few trophies, you just think it’s going to be this slow, constant progression and the graph keeps trending upwards.
“You’ve got to go back a couple steps every now and then. Not that you want to, it’s just all part of it.
“Maybe I have run off a bit of confidence in my past when I’ve been doing well. It’s just been an easy thing to keep doing, but playing poorly took a toll on me mentally.
“I’ve had to really take a step back from my emotions with the game and stand out on the golf course naked to a degree, embarrassing yourself a few times to kind of work through it.
“You’ve got to hit some rock bottoms and ask some hard questions.
“That’s something that can be so hard with your ego on the line.”
‘My head was getting the best of me’
Two key elements conspired to derail the momentum of one of Australia’s most promising young professionals.
Dobbelaar’s physical development convinced him that he had to play the game differently. As the boy matured into a young man, there was a temptation to use his more muscular frame to hit the ball harder, make the ball fly further.
He also ventured down a path where Dobbelaar evaluated his game by how his swing looked on video, not by how many shots it took to get the ball in the hole.
“A couple of little technical things that I probably hyper-fixated on that probably didn’t need the amount of attention I was giving it,” Dobbelaar reflects. “That took my focus away from playing good golf.”
In the 12 months after his NZ PGA win, Dobbelaar made 18 starts, missed nine cuts and didn’t have a single top-25 finish.
That trend continued to start the 2024-2025 season, walking off after shooting 81 in round two of the Queensland PGA Championship at Nudgee just six months ago his breaking point.
“My head was getting the best of me. I just couldn’t be present and play golf,” he says.
“I was just all over the shop. I had a couple sit downs with my psychologist (Jonah Oliver) and identified some stuff that actually needed attention. I was driving myself nuts and every swing meant more than just a golf score.
“Most guys go through something similar as a pro, but that was the first time I’d ever experienced it with a game that I just love so much.”
‘Believing more than ever’
No longer trading on confidence accumulated as a star amateur, Dobbelaar has sought to build belief to become the professional he has proven he can be.
He has drawn inspiration from the way the past two Challenger PGA Tour of Australasia Order of Merit winners, David Micheluzzi and Kazuma Kobori, have identified and owned who they are as players.
As he prepares to tee it up at Hastings Golf Club this morning alongside last week’s NZ Open winner, Ryan Peake, and the 2024 NZ PGA champion, Pieter Zwart, Dobbelaar is a believer once again.
“I’m believing more than I ever have,” said Dobbelaar, who tied for 11th at Webex Players Series Sydney a fortnight ago.
“The past few events, in my eyes, have shown the calibre of player that I think that I am more so than I have probably ever in my career, which is exciting to me.
“Who knows if that means I’m going to play well or not, but I’ve been able to actually do the things that I believe I can do lately, which has been fun.”
The Wallace Development New Zealand PGA Championship teed off at 5:45am AEDT today.
