Yorkshire golfer Joe Dean goes from Morrison's delivery driver to the DP World Tour

Two weeks on from that moment, when he survived the mental and physical grind of the six-round marathon in Spain to earn a place on the continent’s elite tier after years of toiling in the professional game’s lower echelons, the 29-year-old is no closer to actually playing a tournament.

If anything, he is further away.

Qualifying for the DP World Tour after years of trying should have been life-changing for a professional golfer who has spent most of the year playing one-day tournaments and working 30 hours a week delivering groceries to make ends meet.

A fortnight on it feels life-halting.

Instead of excitedly booking flights to South Africa and Mauritius for the first four weeks of the season and plotting a schedule around the world over the next 12 months, as his fellow graduates will have been doing, Dean’s new reality has been considerably more stressful.

First off, he can’t get sponsors. He doesn’t have enough money in the bank to fund himself at more than three tournaments in a cutthroat world where if you don’t play well enough to make it to the weekend, you go home with no money in your pocket.

In the immediate aftermath of securing a place on Tour he spoke of next week’s Alfred Dunhill Championship at Leopard Creek – the third leg of the circuit’s pre-Christmas African swing – as his desired starting point.

But instead of flying out this weekend, Dean is now looking at not starting his season until the Ras Al Khaimah Championship in Abu Dhabi at the end of January.

“It gives me more time to get things sorted out,” Dean tells The Yorkshire Post.

“I’ve got a bit of money saved up from the 2020protour but it’s probably going to only cover three events at the most.

“There could be an option to go to Mauritius (mid-December) because we may know someone who has accommodation out there – but that could still be four or five grand to do it. And to be honest the prize purse isn’t worth it.”

He has written so many speculative emails to prospective sponsors that he is close to banging his head against the keyboard.

Dean has played on the Challenge Tour before, in 2019, and it nearly broke him.

“There was a friend of mine that was helping me a little bit towards the funding but it barely scratched the surface,” he remembers of a tough time on the second-tier circuit.

“Myself and (girlfriend) Emily are quite good at saving money but we had to plough a lot of savings into that 2019 season and it hit us financially quite severely.

“We were still living at Emily’s parents’ house.

"Most of my friends had moved out and started a family.

“That was a very low point and I was close to stopping it altogether.”

The Covid pandemic accelerated Dean’s feeling of indifference towards golf, as did a change of coach that didn’t work out.

He still dabbled, but golf was no longer his priority.

“Emily and I have recently bought a house so golf had to take a little more of a backseat, and I had to find a different way to pay the bills,” says Dean, who has returned to his old coach Graham Walker, a friend of the family who more than a decade ago helped Danny Willett on his way to the top.

“I had to get a part-time job delivering shopping for Morrisons, anything from three to five days a week, from 20 to 30 hours.

“I kept my hand in this year playing one-day events, 2020protour mainly, the Golfing Days tour, pro-ams.”

By this stage his club deals had long since expired and he was playing with a set of irons with tape on the grip.

But when he did play, Dean was competitive and won a few times – enough to keep the fire burning.

“I’ve been playing well all this year in the one-day events, if I’m being honest I got very comfortable playing one-day events and coming home, and as limited as delivery driving was, it was nice to be back home after every shift,” says Dean who in a long career in Yorkshire golf has been attached to Birley Wood, Renishaw Park, Lindrick, Hillsborough, Worksop and now College Pines.

“But at the same time part of me wanted more.

“Luckily the guys at College Pines managed to get me some sponsorship through their contacts to go to Qualifying School, and from there it really has been one step at a time.

“I had a strong feeling I could get through first and second stage if I could roughly play how I’d been playing.

“Obviously final stage is a bit different because you’ve got players who have been on the Challenge Tour or not done so well on the main tour, and is a different kettle of fish.

“So once I got through those two stages, it was just a case of one shot at a time, not getting too far ahead of myself.

“It was just the fact that I wanted more, it wasn’t a sustainable lifestyle what I was doing, picking up a bit of money here and there on the 2020protour.

“I was looking down the teaching side if it didn’t pan out to make it onto tour, so I went in to Qualifying School feeling like I didn’t have much to lose.

“I think that was a massive factor in me being able to play well.”

Even when he stood 33rd after five rounds at Infinitum Golf in Tarragona, knowing he needed to climb at least eight places to finish top-25 and earn a card, he didn’t burden himself with pressure.

Nor did he when he stood on the 18th tee, a par-five reachable in two that at the time he felt like he needed to birdie.

“I’d birdied the par-fives every day that week,” says Dean of the five previous days across two courses.

“I looked at my caddie and said ‘I can’t see anything but driver’ so pulled driver out, hit it straight down the middle.

“I only had a six-iron left, pushed it a little bit, 12-feet away for eagle, it wasn’t the greatest of putts and three-and-half-foot for birdie. It wasn’t the easiest three-and-a-half footer I’ve had but probably the most important.”

His immediate reaction was one of mixed feelings – relief, elation and a large amount of trepidation.

“I’m venturing completely into the unknown,” he told The Yorkshire Post a couple of days later.

“I do get homesick quite easily, so there’s quite a lot of fear involved at the minute, we’re just trying to get as much information as possible.

“I do struggle with being away from home which is a stupid thing to struggle with when you do this job, but that’s another demon I’ve got to figure out over the coming weeks.

“A lot of people would think I’m crazy, but everyone’s head is different.

“In an ideal world I’d like Emily to come along and be a part of the journey every step of the way. But at the minute I’ve got zero funding and I need to prioritise getting myself and my caddie Max out there, never mind another person’s expenses on top – but we’ll see.”

What has happened over the past fortnight has done little to allay those fears.

He at least has his clubs sorted.

“Ping (manufacturer) rung me back within 20 minutes, got me in for a meeting the following week and they’ve kitted me out,” he says, relieved something has fallen into place.

“I played a one-day Golfing Days winter series event on Tuesday just to try the clubs out, I shot eight-under and won.”

Through all the doubts and the worries, at the end of the day he’s a damn good golfer.

He has the fall back of going back and doing a few shifts at Morrison’s if he needs it – “They’ve been pretty good,” he says – but hopefully Joe Dean finds someone to back him and believe in him as he embarks on the biggest challenge of his golfing career.

Because qualifying to play among the best players on the continent really could be life-changing.