A Christmas Gift to Remember In the mid-1980s, my father gifted our family with a membership to Westmount Golf & Country Club. Before teeing it up at this private club in Kitchener, Ont., I had never golfed. Despite the difficulty of learning this new game compared to all of the other sports I played competitively such as tennis, hockey and soccer – I fell in love immediately. For the next decade, my summers started and ended at Westmount. There was a core group of us juniors who played together regularly; some days, we even played 36 holes. When I was not playing with my friends, I made golf memories with my father. He enjoyed most of these rounds, except for the annual Parent & Child event which he detested because the rounds stretched to five-and-a-half hours and – as an alternate shot event – I often put him in spots on the golf course which he had never seen. One of the best rounds I ever played occurred on June 25, 1989 with my dad on a Sunday morning coming down the night after attending my first-ever rock concert (The Who) at CNE Stadium in Toronto. I still have the handwritten note filed away somewhere all these decades later that my father left on the floor outside my bedroom. In it, he riffed on where I had been the previous evening: “I hope you had fun at the WHO concert last night. Guess WHO is going to beat WHO’s ass on the golf course today …,” you get the picture. I had the last laugh that day thanks to a hot putter. In retrospect, I was also probably still dazed and confused from riding the “magic bus” to and from the show the night before. It was the only time I ever beat my father at golf, but that’s not the point. What matters is the lifelong bonds which golf formed between us. I’ve had many memorable games with my dad since then, such as an afternoon at Cherry Hill Golf Club in Fort Erie prior to attending a Jackson Browne concert in Buffalo. If not for my dad, and this generous gift that keeps giving, I might never have picked up a golf club. More than any other sport, golf is a game that you can start young and still play long after your hair turns grey. Whether or not you can still shoot your age does not matter. Just playing golf is what does. It’s good for your mental and physical health and you can spend quality time making memories with your father, as I did, along the way. As Golf Canada proclaims: “golf can be played from age 4 to 104.” Golf All Photos: Bernard Brault/Golf Canada CSANews | SUMMER 2025 | 43
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