Ten years ago this summer, former Battlefords News-Optimist sports editor Jim Humphrey and I began a golf adventure, and got paid to do it.
Jim had come to us from southern Ontario, breaking a streak of increasingly short-lasting sports reporters with the News-Optimist. If he had continued the trend, his stay would have been hours. Instead, it was over a year.
Jim and I hit it off famously, more so than I have with any other co-worker before or since. But Jim was sad.
You see, Jim had recently become a USGTF-certified golf professional, with a low single-digit handicap. But he wasn’t getting many bookings for teaching golf lessons he offered on the side, and he frankly wasn’t doing much golfing.
In the newspaper business, the summer doldrums can be tough. Everyone is on holidays, most organized sports beside senior baseball are wrapped up, and you’re digging desperately to find something, anything, to write about.
So in June I cooked up a hell of an idea. I was a rank amateur golfer. I think, to that point, I had put in about seven rounds in my entire life. If Jim’s handicap was four, mine was four dozen, give or take.
After the paper was put to bed at noon on Thursday, there was usually very little to do in the newsroom except get caught up on things. It was almost always a dead day.
Here was my idea: Jim and I would spend every Thursday afternoon of the summer going to different golf courses in the region, play a round, take pictures, and write a full-page review on it. The story would be the front page of the second section of the paper and lead sports story. Sales would sell an ad to that golf course, they would let us golf, with a cart, for free, and we would have something to write about, filling a page with decent content. Win-win-win.
Jim would write about all the technical stuff – things like slope and the like. (What the hell is slope?). I would write from the perspective of someone totally new to the game. It was an odd-couple take on each of these courses.
In the meantime, we would spend a whole summer golfing for free, and getting paid to do it. Advertising even got to make sales on it, too.
Thus we headed out at noon each Thursday to a different course. We went to Maidstone and Spiritwood, Jackfish Lake and North Battleford. Some were quite nice, others wouldn’t have got much love from hoity toity golfers. I think we went to 10 in all.
I borrowed my wife’s clubs, because I didn’t have my own.
That summer golfing was among the best times of my life.
While we took many picturesque pictures, by far the best one was the photo Jim got of me getting my first, and I think only, birdie. I was about 18 inches in the air. I see from the photo info that took place July 26, 2007.
A funny thing happened along the way. After years of writing about politics, city hall, cops and courts, I found out that our golf series was one of the most appreciated works of journalism I had ever done. People would come up to us, out of the blue, and talk to us about it. I was filling up my car, with Jim in the passenger seat, at the local Co-op and a man came up to us saying, “Hey, you’re the two golfers, aren’t you?”
All my life, I never really got sports. I never understood the passion people put into doing it, or watching it. But that summer, I got a brief glimpse into how much people truly loved golf.
After a year, Jim abandoned me, moving back to the Big Smoke to work in Toronto and live in its suburbs, working in the newspaper business there. He got married to a girl named Michelle (just like me) and they have twins who seem great, from what I gather from Facebook.
I don’t know if I’ll ever capture that lightning in a bottle that we had that summer, two friends, coworkers, golfing on company time and having a blast doing it.
But every time I take out my clubs, I think about it.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.
