Banana ball kills Horn’s hopes

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/07/2009 (6236 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LOCAL golf history will record that Ryan Horn finished second in the 2009 Players Cup.

And the boisterous 100 or so friends, family and fans who walked the loop at Pine Ridge on Sunday as the kid from Dauphin made his way around, will forever talk about what might have been. About that missed four-footer on the 12th. About the banana off the 17th tee into the trees.

Take those two back and Horn would have been the first Manitoban to win the jewel on this province’s annual golf calendar since Rob McMillan did it back in 1996.

That story — McMillan winning as an amateur 13 years ago — was unlikely. Horn winning Sunday would have been darn near impossible.

On a day where 59 of the 60 golfers on the course were from somewhere else, where the man Horn was paired with, George Coetzee, hailed from South Africa, Horn not only represented the local hopes — he represented the idea that everything is possible on a golf course.

Because if a guy from Dauphin had won on Sunday, then that would mean a guy from Dauphin would have claimed the exemption up for grabs into next weekend’s RBC Canadian Open in Oakville, Ont.

And that would have meant that among the likes of PGA greats like Fred Couples, John Daly, Mark Calcavecchia and Mike Weir would have been a guy from a town where the only thing shorter than the golf season is the local course at Dauphin Lake.

“You can get around there with a driver and a wedge,” Horn laughed. “That’s pretty much the only clubs I needed.

“I’d just go round and round as a kid. That’s one good thing about rural Manitoba, you can get out there in the night time and there’s nobody there. You can try different shots.”

Guys from places like that don’t win major golf tournaments. At least not normally.

But on a day when Horn finished just one stroke out of first place, the winner came from a place only slightly less inhospitable to the breeding of a pro golfer than Dauphin — Graham DeLaet replaces author W.O. Mitchell this morning as the pride of Weyburn, Sask.

The cheque Horn will cash today for finishing in a three-way tie for second at 7-under will be $13,600 — more than twice the $6,000 cheque he cashed at a tour event in Mississauga, Ont., two years ago that was, until Sunday, his biggest payday.

Horn did it the old-fashioned way — rising to the occasion on a Sunday, firing a 69, tied for the lowest score of the day.

He hit long drives — reaching the fringe on the 308-yard 13th. He got up and down — back-to-back 12-footers on the 14th and 15th had him atop the leaderboard as he turned towards the clubhouse.

But the lip-out on the 12th hurt.

And the unplayable lie in the trees on the 17th proved to be the tiny difference that separates the best in golf from the rest. “When I walked up there everyone was still looking, so I got a little worried,” Horn said with a laugh. “But 50 guys were helping. We found it.”

It didn’t help. And the bogey he took was the difference.

But if there was a win to be had on a day when the big plum — the Open exemption — only went to the winner, it was this:

“I built some confidence this week,” Horn says. “I can’t wait to get going again, to get out east and start playing again.”

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca