Zen approach is key to Lobo golfer Mesa Falleur's success

Mountain West Men's Golf Championship

May 3-5

Omni Tucson National Resort

Tucson, Arizona

It’s not a secret where Mesa Falleur’s game is at right now.

Not to his coach. Not to his teammates. Certainly not to himself.

“I’m playing really well,” New Mexico’s senior golfer chuckled Wednesday.

In late March, Falleur finished 12-under-par at The Goodwin to win his second individual title of the 2025-26 season. The Muskogee, Oklahoma native has also finished top 15 in four of his last five tournaments, a run that’s helped buoy UNM to No. 21 in the NCAA rankings — the best in the Mountain West.

In turn, Falleur himself has rocketed to 21st in the NCAA rankings (the second-best placement of any Mountain West golfer) and 72nd in the World Amateur Golf Ranking (WAGR). That’s all after joining the Lobos in 2024 as the 3,404th ranked amateur golfer and it’s exactly why Lobo golf coach Jake Harrington thought the University of Missouri-Kansas City transfer could be among the league’s best.

“Mesa has stepped up in a huge way for us,” UNM’s third-year head coach said Wednesday. “And we go the way Mesa goes. He’s our number-one guy. There’s no ifs, ands or buts about that.”

Getting to that point, especially at this time, required a step back.

At the start of the fall season, Falleur was coming off a back injury without knowing quite what to expect. But a third-place finish in The Wohali and a win at the Windon Memorial Classic masked any issues to the outside world. Falleur looked exactly like the All-Mountain West golfer he was already known to be.

In UNM’s last fall event, however, Falleur fell back to an 11-over-par finish, good for 25th place. If golf isn’t already demanding enough, he felt he was going into tournaments in a “negative state of emotions,” the fallout from playing a little more sore than he’d like.

His solution?

Take a month off from the game.

“I’m just such a big competitor, I’m always like, ‘oh man, I need to do better, I need to just marginally get better at this,’” Falleur said of his decision to reverse course and take time away. “ … That was huge for my body.”

Falleur returned after that month feeling mentally better, too. Not only was he making fewer mistakes managing the course, he was looking at every shot in a more “abstract” way, detached from the situation at hand.

For example: “If you’re on the putting green and you have a five-footer, you have no nerves, you’re like, ‘O.K., this is gonna go in,’” Falleur said. “But if you have a five-footer to win the tournament, all of a sudden it becomes way tougher.

“Having that abstract thought of, at the end of the day it’s just another golf shot – it allows you to do the best you can do.”

And while that change to Falleur’s approach has shown up in scorecards, perhaps no one has seen it in Falleur quite like Harrington. If he wasn’t the most confident golfer coming in, Harrington believes his senior has now proven himself among some of the best — so why not be confident?