Manitoba's top golfer enjoying career year as he prepares for DP World Tour playoff debut

Aaron Cockerill has been carefully working away at his golf game like a master craftsman, just chipping away with a hammer and chisel.

As a result he's enjoying his best season as a professional golfer, and will play in the European-based DP World Tour's playoffs for the first time when the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship tees off on Thursday.

Reaching that elite tournament has been the product of incremental improvement year-over-year.

"My whole career has been like that, I've slowly improved," Cockerill said in a phone interview from his home in Dubai. "Whether it was an OK year on the Canadian Tour to a better year on the Canadian Tour, to moving over to the Challenge Tour, to getting on to the DP World Tour, and since then every year, I've gotten just steadily better.

"Nothing is really too drastically different, just slowly been chipping away."

Cockerill, from Stony Mountain, Man., played his first three DP World Tour events in 2019, finishing the year 261st in the Race to Dubai standings. He moved up to 118th in 2020, slipped back to 152nd in 2021, then rose to 107th in 2022, 76th in 2023 and now sits 47th in the rankings.

The top 50 golfers after the HSBC Championship will move on to next week's DP World Tour Championship in Dubai.

"I have basically two goals every year, and it's to win and to make the DP World Tour Championship, so I'm very close," said Cockerill, who recently moved his family to Dubai full time and is just a 55-minute drive from Yas Links where this week's event will be held. "I'm just looking to have a steady week, play well, and play my way into that one and just see what happens.

"I'm pretty familiar with the area in the courses, so I feel like I'm I get a little bit of an advantage there, but no expectations. Just try and have some fun and play aggressively and see what happens."

It will be a tough field at the Abu Dhabi Championship, with some of the PGA Tour's best players also competing in the DP World Tour event.

Australia's Min Woo Lee, Ireland's Shane Lowry, England's Tommy Fleetwood, and Scotland's Robert MacIntyre, who won this year's RBC Canadian Open, will all tee it up.

Most notably, Northern Ireland's Rory McIlroy, ranked No. 3 in the official world golf rankings, will play.

McIlroy's the top player on the DP World Tour's rankings, despite spending most of the year on the PGA Tour. He can finish a season as the European tour's top player for the sixth time with a win this week.

McIlroy arrives with a new swing

He'll attempt to do so with a new swing after being hunkered down in a studio — first in Florida, then in New York — for three weeks, just hitting balls at a screen with a modified swing.

McIlroy told reporters on Wednesday that he hasn't liked the shape of his swing for a while, and wanted a more robust one that could hold up in the most pressure-filled moments following a number of missed chances this season.

"The only way I was going to make a change, or at least move in the right direction, with my swing was to lock myself in a studio and not see the ball flight for a bit and just focus entirely on the movement," McIlroy told reporters Wednesday in Abu Dhabi.

"It's something," he added, "just to make my golf swing more efficient, and then if it is more efficient, then it means it's not going to break down as much under pressure."

McIlroy has won twice this year — at the Dubai Desert Classic and the Wells Fargo Championship — and has had four second-place finishes, including recently at the Irish Open and the BMW PGA Championship on the European tour.

That has left McIlroy frustrated but well clear in the Race to Dubai rankings that determine the year's best player on the European tour. A win in Abu Dhabi can seal the title and remove some suspense — at least for McIlroy — from Dubai next week.

"If I go out and win this week, obviously you know, it makes it a bit boring next week," the four-time major champion said. "But I won't find it boring. It will be lovely."

For his part, Cockerill welcomes the challenge of having McIlroy and his PGA Tour peers at the DP World Tour's playoffs.

"Those guys have supported the tour a lot throughout their careers, especially all the U.K. guys — guys originally from Europe — because that's where they got their start," said Cockerill, who is the 255th-ranked player in the world. "It's cool to have them back and it makes the events feel bigger.

"I think it's a great thing for our tour, absolutely."