From Morrisons driver to Open in six months – Dean savouring stunning rise

The grubby obsession with money in modern golf can make it easy for players to lose touch with reality, but few in this Open field are as humbly grounded as Joe Dean.
At the start of this year, the 30-year-old from Sheffield was still working as a Morrisons delivery driver, a job he held for nearly four years, after his once flourishing career had hit an expensive standstill. There were shifts at a friend’s car detailing business, too, and his golfing prospects had been reduced to local one-day tournaments that fitted neatly between shifts.
“I’d been a golfer pretty much full-time up until that point and I constantly had unrealistic expectations of myself,” Dean said after taking refuge from the relentless downpour behind the 18th green at Royal Troon.
“I was spending loads of money and I was unhappy doing it. As bad as the pandemic was, it gave me the break and reset I needed. I started the delivery driving in March 2020 and my last shift was in January. It was one of the best things that happened to me.”
A level-par third round of 71 confirmed that Dean will not be this year’s Open champion, but he was still only four over for the tournament and in a tie for 33rd as the leaders battled not to be swept backwards by the tide. That is no mean feat in itself for a player ranked 254th in the world, let alone one who has spent the past five years in the golfing doldrums, but the Open has a habit of throwing up such heart-warming stories that deserve celebrating in their own right.
Dean’s only previous appearance at a major was at Royal Birkdale in 2017 when he made the cut and claimed a career-high purse of £20,000. His modest star was seemingly on the rise, although not quite on the same trajectory as his former England team-mate Dan Brown’s here.
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He then progressed to the second-rung Challenge Tour in 2019 with little outside financial support, but the pressure of competition told and he spent hours on the range bashing balls searching for perfection and succeeded only in missing nine out of 16 cuts that year.
“My fiancée Emily and I are on the tight side with money, but in seven months on the Challenge Tour I went through £30,000 in savings. It got to the point where it wasn’t worth it,” he said.
It didn’t help that Dean had a deep dislike of travelling, owing to self-diagnosed separation anxiety he believes stems from the death of a childhood pet while he was at an England training camp in Portugal about a decade ago. “It was a massive struggle. It got to the point where I couldn’t travel, especially abroad, on my own,” he said. “I could only manage it with my fiancée.”
The start of the pandemic brought a forced but ultimately merciful end to that cycle. Dean spent two years on the EuroPro Tour, with events largely held in the UK, and topped up his income with part-time shifts. One of the perks of winning the order of merit in 2022 was 12 sessions with a hypnotherapist, who helped to alleviate some of his anxiety about travelling. But after the EuroPro Tour folded that same year, he was consigned to the mini-tour events that carried no world ranking points and he arrived at them barely 15 minutes before teeing off.
Yet despite that limited practice and competition, Dean came through all three stages of the DP World Tour Qualifying School at the end of last year, even after suffering anxiety attacks when the second stage extended into a Monday and Emily had to fly home. “I wasn’t in a good mental state but fortunately the only time I felt OK was on the golf course,” he said.
His caddie had helped to find a sponsor willing to stump up the Q-school entry fee, but Dean still couldn’t afford the travel to the season-opening events in Australia and South Africa. He admits the first time he played in Qatar in February felt “quite alien” and he missed the cut, but Dean then finished joint-second in Kenya a mere fortnight later and won £170,000.
“It covers quite a few years of delivery driving,” he said, laughing. “It freed everything up. We’re in a comfortable situation now. This season and most of next season are covered.”
The results have followed and travel anxiety abated in the comfort of that knowledge, with a joint-fifth finish at the Belgian Open in May followed by the runner-up finish at the Dutch Open last month that secured Dean’s place at Troon this week.
“It’s been a tough spell from 2017 to last year. There have been a lot of learning curves and unfortunately some of us have to be learning the hard way by failing,” he said. “A hell of a lot of people would love to be walking the fairways, even in this awful weather. I’m grateful for it.”