"At 38, I might finally be at my peak": How Yorkshire golfer John Parry rediscovered winning feeling

Because in the intervening years there were plenty more downs than ups, periods of time in which he questioned why he was still trying so hard to make it work.

It had all felt so natural, so easy, when at 23 he won the Vivendi Cup in Paris in the October of his rookie year of 2010, on the European Tour as it was back then.

But it proved a false dawn, a noose around Parry’s neck that tightened with every failed attempt to rekindle the magic touch.

He slipped off the top circuit a little over a year later, and then fell away again in 2017, seemingly not good enough for the continent’s top table.

The name of Parry almost disappeared from plain sight, popping up at a 2020protour event one day, an Open Championship through qualifying another, but nothing ever really consistent.

Until 2024, when suddenly, in defiance at everything that had gone before, Parry won three times on the Challenge Tour to earn promotion back to the DP World Tour in late summer, momentum he carried through to the start of the 2025 season before Christmas.

He finished second at the Alfred Dunhill Championship at Leopard Creek in South Africa in December, and before anyone was allowed to wonder was this just another flicker of relevance, Harrogate Golf Club’s finest earned another chance the following week at the AfrAsia Bank Mauritius Open and stormed into the winner’s enclosure.

“You never know if the chance has gone because you don’t know how quickly it will come around again,” says Parry in reference to how he felt from one week to the next, a statement that also neatly sums up the last 15 years of his career.

“I think I played better at the Dunhill than I did in Mauritius but I didn’t take my chances on the back nine.

“I knew I’d got into the joint lead around 10, 11, but then I didn’t take my chances on the par-fives, I didn’t see any leaderboards until the 16th and by the time I did I’d have thought somebody would have pulled away. So mentally it was a bit of a surprise that I still had a chance, I still did all right but I didn’t really take the chance.

“Whereas Mauritius was a little bit different, I’d learned from the week before, that once I have the opportunity I’ve just got to go for it. Even if it goes wrong, take the risk and if it comes off, it comes off. Sometimes you need to do that.

“I was trying to win in Mauritius, if that makes sense, but I didn’t have that mindset at Leopard Creek. Having lost Tour status before, maybe there was something in the back of my mind when I was doing well at Leopard Creek telling me that I could easily go from second or third to 10th, and that’s a big drop, so be happy with what you have.

“But once I finished second there, that was me 80 per cent of the way towards securing my card for 2026.

“So when I was in Mauritius, finishing 10th would have been better because I’d had the safety net of the week before, so there was more of an element of trying to win in Mauritius because of the step towards keeping my card that I’d made the week before.”

Asked to pinpoint what clicked in his umpteenth year of being a journeyman professional, and Parry points to a number of reasons, even if 2024 didn’t start as well as he would have hoped.

It couldn’t have started much worse, a slipped disc in his neck forcing him to miss two months, the longest spell out injured of his career.

Even when he returned on the Challenge Tour in February, there were a couple of setbacks before the injury finally settled down. And when it did, Parry came out firing, winning in Delhi in March, France in June and Italy in September to earn promotion back to the DP World Tour.

“I’ve had a better plan in 2024 and better way of practising that helped me,” he tells The Yorkshire Post.

“One thing was I worked on the same technique the whole year. In years gone by, and it’ll be the same for a lot of golfers, you try something for a month and you have a bad round or two and you think that doesn’t work any more, so you’re a bit jumping from one thing to another.

“So I went more for working on the same thing but doing a lot of skills tests, using the Trackman app to simulate being on the golf course a bit better, working on that close-range stuff to get really good at that and it seems to have paid off.

“I’ve played better and performed more consistently because I’ve been practising like I’m playing.”

His home life also became more settled.

“I got married, so you’re just a bit more settled, you’re into more of a routine of life," he ventures. “When I’ve got a week off the schedule it’s become more of a Monday to Friday job and then I spend time with my wife at the weekend.

“It breaks up the practice which has become less important to me because there’s other things going on.

"I’ve probably learned from what I’ve done wrong in the past. How you practice, a more settled lifestyle – a little bit of everything, I couldn’t nail it down to one thing.”

There was the odd occasion in the years when he fell off the radar that Parry questioned whether it was worth carrying on, but through it all his love of playing golf sustained him.

“I can’t remember what year it was, but I remember just playing at Harrogate one day and I was hitting the ball so badly and I just couldn’t work out what I was doing wrong,” he remembers.

“You can accept it a bit more when you’re not doing the right things or you’re not practising, but I was, and I was looking at it thinking ‘what’s the point?’. There’s no way I could compete at a DP World Tour level playing like this.”

Lockdown helped save Parry’s career, taking him away from the pressures of tournament golf.

“At the time it didn’t feel like it did, but looking back now, it definitely helped,” says Parry, who worked his way back up through the divisions from the one-day 2020protour in the north of England.

A winner back at the top table again in his late 30s, he feels better equipped to handle what comes next than he did in his early to mid-20s.

“When I won that first year back in 2010 it came amid a strong end to the year, and all of sudden my expectation levels jumped too high,” he reflects.

“However I was playing after that, I was always looking at that period and asking ‘why can’t I play like that any more?’

“And that’s what makes it so tough, because it means you’re then always searching and I was trying to find why I did it and how to get back there.

“It’s not a bad thing trying to improve, but it’s a fine line when you’re trying to search for something.

“You’re always asking why and trying to fiddle and change things and perfect it. And it’s really hard to accept when you can’t.”

He adds: “I’m definitely a better golfer now than I was back then, just purely from a consistency standpoint. I feel like I make a lot more cuts, and that gives me more chances to win. When I was younger I was up and down a lot more.

“Now the difference might be whether I have a good or bad week with the putter, so that fills me with confidence.”

Winning so early in the season means he has this year to enjoy the ride, safe in the knowledge that his playing privileges are secured for the 2026 season.

There are enough little goals to set along the way to keep challenging himself. For the first time ever he is ranked in the top 100 – 99th – and if he stays there the next few weeks he’ll get into the US PGA Championship in May.

There’s a DP World Tour Championship to qualify for in November if he stays in the top 50 of the money list. He is currently No 1 after the first four events.

“It just helps a lot with how I can prepare for events, I’m playing Dubai next week which off my category from the Challenge Tour I don’t think I would have got into,” smiles Parry.

“So it’s little things like that, knowing I’m playing in the bigger events which I would have missed out on. There’s less pressure now I don’t have to play to keep a card, so it’s trying to push up as high as I can. I’d love to get into all the majors.

“This time I feel like I can push further on, whereas last time I wasn’t sure if I could.

“I definitely look at it in a different way. Before I was always searching and fiddling, but now I know what I’m doing, I’m a little more set.

“At 38, I might finally be at my peak.”