Grey Owl finally celebrating 60th anniversary

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This article was published 09/06/2022 (1364 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was $6 to play the first Grey Owl golf tournament: Four bucks for two green fees and the toonie went into the prize pool.

Just over 100 golfers headed to Clear Lake Golf Course for the inaugural tournament in 1961, unaware of how rich the tradition they started would become.

The COVID-19 pandemic has meddled with celebrations twice now but from Friday to Sunday, the Grey Owl celebrates its 60th anniversary with 255 players vying for one of three trophies, just out for the fun of it or a little bit of both.

“For the competitive golfer, it’s no big deal. The competitive golfer likes the Manitoba amateur … but the Grey Owl is kind of neat because it’s on a super golf course,” said Bruce Penton, former Brandon Sun sports reporter who started playing the tournament in 1969.

“To the non-competitive golfer, it’s a weekend of fun and frolic, renewing old acquaintances, enjoying the Howl … at the end of the Grey Owl Howl, my voice is just gone. My throat’s sore because you talk to people who you see once a year and only see at the Grey Owl and that’s where they gather.”

“Everyone’s just ready to do it,” added Grey Owl president Tyler Thompson. “We’ve been ready the past couple of years but cancelled last minute so a lot of the efforts and planning was done all for nought so just a general excitement to get back doing it and you can see it in the entries too.

“We had to raise entry fees quite a bit this year (to $260) just to keep up with a lot of our costs … we’ve got entries at or above the most recent years.”

This year, the main trophy is Russell native Jay Thiesen’s to defend after a 4-under 140 in 2019.

In the Grey Owl’s heyday, the most competitive part might have been the race to enter. Entries were on a first-come, first-serve basis and Penton recalled a lineup at the post office on 11th Street as hopeful participants waited until midnight to throw their entries in the mailbox, hoping that’d be the edge they needed to get in the field of 300-plus players.

The same happened in Winnipeg.

“I taught school in Winnipeg and we anxiously awaited for the word you could now enter the Grey Owl,” said Jack Matheson, who has hardly ever missed the event since its second running. “I would enter for three or four guys. I’d take the entry forms right down to the central post office in Winnipeg so I didn’t miss the deadline.

“If you waited around a day or two, you were SOL.”

These days it’s an online entry and 255 players are set to play their first round either today or Saturday. Anyone who wants a shot at the title has to play their second round on Sunday.

It all started when Bill Bell, proprietor of the Idylwylde Cabins in Wasagaming, and former Sun sports editor Laurie Artiss came up with a way to kick off the golf season and boost business in the park.

Ron Fiddler won the first one with a two-day total of 10-over 154 that would have captured precisely zero future titles. Scores improved over the next few years, notably when Matheson brought his Saskatoon buddy Jim Scissons in and he fired the first sub-70 round, a 69 on Sunday to win the 1965 Grey Owl.

Terry Hashimoto shot 65-73 to win in 1985, then Brian Clark went 65-69 two years later, becoming the first player to break 70 in both rounds.

COULTER’S COURSE RECORD

But there’s never been a better round in course history than the one Grant Coulter opened the 1990 Grey Owl with.

He didn’t make a bogey or a five all day in a ball-striking and putting clinic to shoot 9-under 63.

“It was spectacular,” said Penton, who watched pieces of the round from the group ahead. “It was great and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Grant’s one of the finest people I know. He was modest and sort of sheepish about the whole thing but he was just striping it that day and obviously knocking in putts. It was fun to watch. I can’t see anybody ever touching that record at the Grey Owl.

“… The greens weren’t that good that year either. It was one of the most amazing rounds I’ve seen.”

Ask anyone that played in 1990 and the first thing they’ll tell you is how rough the greens were. The tournament employed a hand-span rule, allowing players to move their balls the width from their outstretched pinky to thumb to avoid the worst of the winter kill and animal tracks that decimated usually terrific greens.

“Nobody was too optimistic about shooting any low rounds so this one just jumped out of the bag,” said Coulter, adding his playing partners, Grant Foster, Grant Fowler and Paul Murray helped.

“They were really excited for me, especially on the back nine and were just trying to stay out of the other guy’s way because he’s having a great round and you don’t want to do anything to slow him down or change the momentum.”

Coulter started hot a birdie, then three in a row on the third through fifth holes. Once he added a circle to his card on the tough par-4 10th and added fours on the 13th and 14th, he knew it could be a special round. At the same time, he knew there was another day to play and didn’t get carried away. He rolled one more birdie in on the short par-4 16th and “for some crazy reason” chased his 10th birdie on the finishing hole.

“I hit a driver in the left trees, chipped it out then chipped it on and made a 15-foot, five-foot breaker, granted that was probably one of the worst greens on the course,” Coulter recalled. “It was one of those days when everything was going right.”

Coulter coasted to his first Grey Owl title with an even-par 72 on the Sunday. It would be 18 years before he’d etch his name on the historic trophy again, and presumably the last. But he walks past it often these days, sitting in the Clear Lake pro shop’s trophy case. He retired and sold his home in 2017, moved up to the park and bought a membership.

Coulter still recounts the record round regularly.

“It’s pretty hard not to think about it,” he said. “It’s a situation I pretty realistically am not going to shoot again.

“Other people remember it as well and have a lot of positive comments to me about that.”

MEDIA FLIGHT

A more unusual division has been around since the start: Press.

Scribes, TV and radio personalities and more have competed while some doubled as reporters bringing attention to the tournament. Penton became the first five-time media-flight champ between 1970 and 1978. He started the unofficial rule that five graduates you to the main field.

Since then, his son Kirk and Mark Hamm, both of the Winnipeg Sun, have matched the mark, doing so over six-year spans.

Back then, the winner of both divisions took home a sport coat and pair of Hush Puppies shoes from Frank O’Gradnick’s Canada West Shoe Manufacturing Inc., in Winnipeg.

In 1976, Jimmy King of Elmhurst fired 144, even par to win while Artiss edged Penton in a playoff for the media title after shooting 165. Penton won the 1975 media title with a 157.

Bruce Penton looks back at those days and admits it was a little imbalanced.

“I played terribly by my standards … not even close to the winning score of the whole tournament,” Penton said. “Jimmy King shot 144 or something and he and I got exactly the same prize. We both got a sport jacket, a pair of shoes and a nice trophy. He said to me the next Monday at the golf course, some smart-ass remark and it was very legitimate. ‘Why the hell am I getting the same prizes as you when (you) were 13 strokes worse?’

“I kind of felt sheepish about that because it was absolutely true.”

But it’s one of the quirks that make any event special. And it’s fitting when the course the event takes place on is equally quirky — with gongs and bells on several holes due to all the blind shots.

LONGTIME LEGEND

In the meantime, Garth Collings cemented an untouchable legacy in the tournament.

The Winnipeg native played his first Grey Owl in 1983 and lost a playoff to Minnedosa’s Jamie Stone in 1991. He stayed out of the winner’s circle for five more years.

Then he went on an absolute tear. Collings took the last three crowns of the century, then six of nine between 2003 and 2011.

He fired a ridiculous 13-under 133 with a 68 and 65 in 2006, only to match the total with rounds of 69 and 64 three years later. His 11 victories — to go with two Greyer Owls in 2018 and 2019 — almost surely won’t be touched. He’s not done either. He’ll chase win No. 14 this weekend.

“I was a pretty good player then but it’s been a couple of years now,” Collings said. “We’ll get up there, see what happens and no matter what we’re going to enjoy the day.

“I was fortunate enough to play with (Matheson) and Bob Cornell and Orville Vickars and guys that played there all the time, so you learn the ins and outs of the golf course.

“Bob and Matty knew the reads of the greens backwards so it’s fun playing with them because you watch where they’re putting and realizing … ‘That breaks a long way the other way.’”

The first thing Collings will tell you about the Grey Owl has absolutely nothing to do with golf. It was Matheson’s shuffleboard tournament on the Saturday evening, which he won with Cornell in 1992.

“We did that for years,” Collings chuckled, “sitting around Matty’s house after golf, drinking beers and having fun with the boys, laughing then trying to get ready for the shuffleboard tournament. We had a lot of fun up at Clear Lake.”

Matheson got the idea to build a cement shuffleboard court at his parents’ cabin near the golf course from hanging out with his friend Darcy MacKay in Winnipeg. MacKay was one of the Sons at the “Curly MacKay and Sons” sporting goods store in Brandon and the top floor of his house had a shuffleboard court patterned into the linoleum.

Matheson contacted Pappy Madill, a long-time contractor who worked in Riding Mountain National Park, to bring a cement truck down and make it happen in the late 1950s.

“We poured it,” Matheson said, “then we had a great time.”

Anywhere from 10 to 15 guys would stay at the Mathesons on Grey Owl weekend. Unfortunately, he isn’t able to make it this year.

“I’m 82 now and I won’t be playing in the Grey Owl. I’ll really miss it,” Matheson said. “(It means a lot) to be on the ground floor, so to speak, of something that’s really flourished over the years and kept getting bigger and bigger.”

BIRDIES: Golf Canada’s NextGen Prairie Championship starts at Quarry Oaks Golf Course today. Westman natives in the girls field in the 54-hole event include: Brandon’s Payton Oakden, Killarney’s Cala Korman, Binscarth’s Clara Peake, Swan River’s Crystal Zamzow and Clear Lake members Jeri and Jewel Lafleche. On the boys side, it’s Brandon’s Zostrianos Giordani-Gross and Scotty Miner, Dauphin’s Eric Prokopowich, Thomas Scott and Jackson Delaurier and Neepawa’s Hayden Delaloye.