THE


Q


uit your job and devote 10,000 hours to master- ing the game? It sounds like every hacker’s fantasy. As crazy an idea as this may be,


one guy has actually done it: Dan McLaughlin, a Portland resident who in April 2010, at the age of 30, gave up on being a commercial photographer to chase the dream of making it through PGA Tour Q-School. Thus was born the Dan Plan, which McLaughlin is chronicling on thedanplan.com and various social media platforms. To say it is a quixotic quest is an understatement in the extreme. In his third-person bio on his website, McLaughlin writes that at the outset of his experiment he had “no previous experience as a competitive athlete, nor was he in particularly good physical condi- tion. Dan is slightly under aver- age height and weight, had never played a full 18 holes of golf, and had only been to a driving range a handful of times. He was not even sure if he was a left- or right- handed golfer.”


At his current pace McLaughlin will run out of time around December 2016. It’s quite possible he’ll be a scratch golfer by then.


26 / NCGA.ORG / FALL 2013


DAN PLAN


BY ALAN SHIPNUCK


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