The People
Behind the Book

Richard Hughes has spent four decades as a clinical optometrist. For most of that time, golf was something he played on weekends — a passion, not a professional concern. Then he started noticing a pattern in the players he worked with. Dedicated golfers, some of them very good, who were struggling with problems no amount of practice was fixing. And none of their coaches were looking at the one variable Hughes was trained to examine: the visual system.

The question he kept returning to was simple. Eye dominance — the brain's deep-wired preference for one eye as its primary spatial reference — is foundational in clinical optometry. It shapes how we perceive space, how we align to targets, how our motor system responds to what our eyes tell it.

Hughes began working with golfers the way he works with any patient: systematically, clinically, without assumptions. He took his instruments to the range, to the putting green, and eventually to the tented village at the 2023 Irish Open, where his team tested elite tour professionals. More than half were cross-dominant — the opposite of what population statistics predict, and the opposite of what most golf instruction has ever assumed. The implication was hard to escape: the game has been teaching the wrong model to the majority of its players for generations.

Over two decades of applied work across elite golf, rugby, GAA, and motorsport, Hughes has seen the same story repeat. A player at a ceiling they can't explain. A miss pattern that defies mechanical diagnosis. A career stalling for reasons no swing coach can identify. In almost every case, when the visual system is examined properly — the way a clinician examines it — something has been hiding in plain sight.

Visual Edge is the result of that work. Built with coaches and scientists he respects, it is written for anyone who has worked seriously at this game and still can't figure out why it isn't working.

Colm Hughes came to this book the way most golfers come to their problems — from the inside. As a Type I player (right eye, right hand, right foot dominant), he spent years as a high-level amateur unable to reconcile the golf he played in practice with the game that showed up under pressure. He holds a +2 handicap, competed on a golf scholarship in college, and has played seriously for more than a decade. But it was a round at the Irish Amateur Open — flat calm conditions, five greens hit, no explanation for where the swing had gone — that crystallized what his father had been trying to show him for years.

The problem wasn't mechanical. It was visual. The big shoulder turn, the loss of fixation at impact, the non-dominant eye taking over at the worst moments — these weren't swing flaws that more practice would fix. They were patterns encoded into a system no instructor had ever examined. Working through those patterns, and understanding them well enough to explain them clearly to other players, became the foundation of his contribution to Visual Edge.

Beyond his own game, Colm participated in the research that underpins the book: the 2023 Irish Open elite amateur survey, the 2023 Irish Open DP World Tour survey — which contributed to the laterality publication from that event — and the 2025 Women's Irish Open. Over the course of that work, he collaborated closely with the coaches featured in Visual Edge, helping translate the clinical framework into the language of competitive play. His perspective — that of a serious player who lived the problem before understanding it — is woven throughout the book.