Ontario’s best club professional golfers were in Barrie last week.
James Seymour, who is one of Barrie Colts minority owner Ward Seymour’s four sons, left the Barrie Country Club with his name on the shiny trophy and a $5,000 cheque, having been named 2024 PGA of Ontario zone champion.
Seymour, who grew up in Aurora and now lives in Newmarket, recently took over Kirby Links, a range/par 3 facility in Maple, which was previously named CarrickMacross Golf Centre.
“I play to stay competitive,” said the 35-year-old, who has a seven-month-old daughter, Charlize, with his wife, Dana. “… It always feels good to (play well) and to win.”
Five grand also buys a lot of diapers and formula.
Seymour, who teed it up for parts of four seasons on the Mackenzie Tour, recently missed qualifying by a single shot for the Canadian Open that was held last month at Hamilton Golf and Country Club.
Far removed from the glitz and glamour of touring golf, club professionals are the grease that keeps the wheels moving at courses everywhere.
Most club pros were, at one time, good players with aspirations of playing on the PGA Tour. But the bottleneck to get through the various stages is much tighter in golf than it is in team sports. The vast majority also fund their own journey while competing for tournament purses that barely cover costs for even the most successful of players.
Golf’s competitive ladder is more like a slippery pole, but dreams die hard.
When that reality hits home, often in the form of too many missed cuts and ballooning credit card bills, for those who want to stay in the game it generally means they take jobs as club/teaching pros.
A century ago, that journey worked in reverse. Now, there are worse ways to make a living, but it’s also hard to imagine if we would even know the names of Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods if they first had to teach lessons and keep a pro shop running smoothly.
Imagine Tiger folding shirts and working a cash register.
That is not to say some of the guys who do can’t still play. Seymour, for one, looked all the world like an elite player this week. He blitzed the Barrie Country Club’s difficult opening nine with five birdies — a few of its members thought they were reading his scorecard wrong as he made the turn — before carding a tidy one-under on the back side to sign for a six-under-par 66. That score, along with the 68 he shot a day earlier, gave him a two-shot win over Brian Hadley.
Defending champion Alan McLean was one of three players in a tie for fourth, while Danny King, Seymour’s former coach, finished solo-seventh.
After a brief speech and a frosty beverage, Seymour was soon heading back to Kirby Links.
For McLean, the field’s most accomplished player, the next stop is much farther away. He is heading to Scotland, where he was born, this week to qualify for the Senior British Open.
McLean, who has won on both the old Canadian Tour and in South Africa, where he grew up, has spent most of the past three decades in Canada shuttling between London and Thunder Bay, when he’s not shuttling around the world.
Now 53 and with a golf resumé that has seen him regularly compete at virtually every professional level below the PGA Tour, McLean holds Monday-qualifying status on the PGA Tour Champions.
It can be a poisoned chalice. It gives McLean the right to tee it up every Monday to compete for one of three spots but no guarantee of a cheque. To wit, after Scotland, he flies all the way to the Pacific Northwest to pick up the senior circuit.
“It doesn’t get you much,” McLean said of his fleeting status on a tour that sees many former greats compete week in, week out on a sort of working annuity platform that rewards them for past service but not always for present-day results.
Naturalized Canadian Stephen Ames is one of that circuit’s most successful players, winning eight tournaments and more than $10 million (all figures U.S.) over the past decade.
McLean, who has twice lost out in a playoff to tee it up this season, has earned $100,000 in prize money since breaking on to the fringes of the Champions tour a few years back. He expects to hear any day whether he gets a special sponsor’s exemption into the senior event in Calgary next month, the lone Canadian stop.
“It’s a grind,” he said.
McLean was referring to his upcoming schedule after a brief two-day stop in Barrie. He may as well be referring to his decades chasing a dream that never totally goes away.
