Carman golfers ace national tourney

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This article was published 09/10/2019 (2503 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Some buddies from the Carman Golf and Curling Club can forever boast about a worst-to-first story that will, indeed, be tough to top.

Local golf pro Dean North and a quartet of amateur players — Bobby McNair, Jared Aubin, Josh McCharles and Brett Maloney — are returning to the southern Manitoba community as champions of the 2019 RBC PGA Scramble.

They grabbed the crown Tuesday at Canada’s golfing kingdom.

Playing 54 holes split between spectacular Cape Breton sister-courses Cabot Links and Cabot Cliffs, the crew finished with a net score of 59.4 under par to prevail by seven shots over a group from the Landings Golf Course in Kingston, Ont.

In all, 21 fivesomes — each comprising four amateurs and one PGA of Canada professional — participated in the tournament at the stunning tracks near Inverness, N.S. The Carman team posted a combined gross score (actual number of strokes played) of 44 under and shaved off another 15.4 strokes based on a formula to determine the team handicap.

“It still hasn’t sunk in yet. Maybe it will start to sink in when we get home and put the trophies up in our rooms,” said McNair, 24, a University of Manitoba medical student originally from Roseisle. “It’s been a whirlwind, but really an awesome experience.”

Last year, a different version of the team finished last in a local qualifying event. McNair and Aubin gave it another shot in May with a pair of new players, McCharles and Maloney, and narrowly won at their home course to push ahead. Four months later, they ripped it up at Elmhurst, going 18 under in the scramble format to punch a ticket to the national championship in the Maritimes.

McNair maintains the group headed east with “zero expectations,” just hoping to soak up the rare experience of playing the two jaw-dropping, oceanside courses. Cabot Cliffs is rated the country’s top golf course and is ranked ninth on Golf Digest’s World’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses, while nearby Cabot Links is ranked fourth in Canada and 43rd in the world.

“We were just excited to go. To us, that already was the grand prize. We had lots of fun on the course and off the course, every chance we got. We just had a wonderful time,” said McNair, a member of the U of M Bisons men’s golf team. “Each guy has his own thing he brings to the team, and it just worked out.”

McCharles, who plays to an eight handicap, bombed some 300-yard drives. McNair, a two-handicapper, and North, the pro at Carman for a decade, worked the ball as close to the pins as they could to give the team birdie chances. Aubin, a 12 handicap, kept his drives in play and made some huge putts, while Maloney, a 22 handicapper, also sunk some key putts and was, in McNair’s words, “an awesome glue guy. Thorough entertainment all the time, lots of laughs, keeps us loose. Just so fun to be around.”

The team led by two strokes going into the final round. North said he advised the group — short on competitive experience — to refrain from checking the leaderboard Tuesday at Cabot Links.

“I saw one of the guys looking at his phone on the last hole and said, ‘I’m assuming we’re winning,’ because we’d been playing great. And he said we had a five-shot lead or something. On that last hole, we hit three nice approach shots — one was 1½ feet (from the pin), one was two feet and one was four feet, on a 420-yard par 4,” he said. “We got some nice applause for that.”

North is hoping there’s a party in the near future for the four amateurs to celebrate the accomplishment.

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“This is a pretty big deal and I’ve gotten a lot of texts from people, but I don’t know what to expect when we get back. I’m going to try to promote it to bring some publicity to the club,” he said. “This started out all for fun, and then next thing you know, we’re winning the thing. This is just amazing. It was wonderful to be on the green with them getting a trophy.”

North said his favourite hole of the Cabot courses was the par-3 16th at Cliffs, an eye-popping shortie at just 176 yards, but perched on the edge of the rocky coast. There, at least one ball took the long plummet to the churning waves below, while several more went to a watery grave at other spots on the course.

“A fun thing we did each day was we had a bet on the number of lost balls we would have, so I think we had two guys lose balls (on the 16th). And for the day, we lost 17 golf balls on Cabot Cliffs,” North said, laughing. “Every time someone lost a ball, we were cheering. We had so much fun with it.” 

jason.bell@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @WFPJasonBell