With its long history and vast geography, Canada boasts many strange and spooky tales. There are haunted coal mines in Cape Breton, poltergeists in Calgary and even a pair of haunted boots in St. Vincent’s Newfoundland. It is no wonder, therefore, that golf courses across the country are rumoured to be home to some extraordinary spirits.
Winning the award for the Canadian golf course with the spookiest name is Haunted Lakes Golf Club in Alix, a town east of Red Deer, Alta. It is here an ancient drama plays out every winter along the third fairway, where Haunted Lake hugs the front right of the green.
Before Europeans arrived, native groups camped on the lake’s eastern shore. One winter, seven hunters camped there for the night. In the morning, they looked out across the lake and spied the magnificent head and antlers of a deer caught in the ice.
The seven headed off and upon reaching the creature, they started to chip away at the ice. The mighty animal, which was very much alive, gave a great heave and smashed through the ice. It swam for shore, breaking a path before it. The deer made it to shore and the safety of the woods, but the men were not so lucky. They plunged through the ice and all seven drowned.
It is said the seven hunters have haunted the lake ever since, giving the spot its name. Locals also claim that every winter a mysterious phenomenon can be observed as each year a huge fissure appears in the ice along the path the deer travelled to the shore.
Several provinces east of Alberta you will find Glen Abbey Golf Course in Oakville, Ont.
The story says there is a house on the property which was built in 1937 by a mining engineer as his weekend retreat. The engineer, Andre Dorfman, was a leading figure in the Canadian mining industry at the time.
In 1953 Dorfman sold the house to the Jesuit Fathers of Upper Canada as a retreat. The property was sold again in 1963 to businessmen who opened a golf club. In memory of the Jesuits, the course was given the name Glen Abbey. Soon after the club opened, reports of a specter began to surface.
Within 10 years, they started talking about a ghost in the building. The story is that the ghost lives in the old mansion and walks up the back stairs and down the main hallway towards the library.
The mansion is a good example of the stately homes built in Oakville in the early twentieth century. It is constructed of stone with a red clay tile roof and features a wood-lined library on the second floor. Originally known as RayDor Estate House, the building has been designated as a heritage property. Prior to 1975 it served as the golf course’s clubhouse and currently is home to an investment company.
One of the rooms in the basement is actually made to replicate the ship in which the original builder came over from Switzerland.
The ghost in the old mansion is said to be male, and eyewitnesses agree that it resembles a Jesuit father.
Victoria Golf Club in Victoria, B.C., boasts both an impressive course history and a ghost or two of its own. The club is beautifully situated on a rocky point at the southern end of Vancouver Island.
The club dates back to November 1893 when local golf enthusiasts negotiated for permanent rights to play the rough fields of Pemberton Farm. Originally, golfers were prohibited from using the grounds over the summer, when cattle grazed what would become today’s fairways.
Like Haunted Lakes, the Victoria Golf Club may be haunted by early aboriginal inhabitants. One researcher suggests that some of its phantoms may be the souls of native warriors killed in battle centuries ago. However, these spirits pale beside the club’s other resident, the late Doris Gravlin, possibly Victoria’s most famous ghost.
John Adams is an expert on Doris, as she’s affectionately called by locals. A historian and author, Adams is best known as the proprietor of the “Ghostly Walks” tour, which explores historic courtyards and spooky places where spirits like Doris make their presence known.
“Doris Thomson was born in Blackburn, Lancashire in 1906 and immigrated to Canada with her parents,” recounts Adams. The Thomson family settled in Victoria where Doris’s mother worked at a private hospital. Doris became a nurse as well, until 1930 when she married Victor Gravlin.
Victor was a sports reporter for the Colonist newspaper, spending many happy hours golfing with his brother Walter, head pro at the Uplands Golf Club. The hours Victor spent with Doris would prove to be much less happy.
“When her husband began to drink heavily, Doris left him,” explains Adams, adding that Doris found work as a private live-in nurse.
“In mid-September of 1936 Victor delivered a letter to Doris,” Adams says. “Its contents were unknown, but are believed to have been a request for her to meet him to discuss reconciliation.”
Doris stepped out for a walk at about 7:45 pm on September 22, 1936; Victor left his parents’ house shortly thereafter. One observer saw them together on Runnymede Avenue, but after that, neither was seen alive.
Doris and Victor were reported missing. A search ensued and days later, Doris’s corpse was discovered. Her body was later discovered amid the driftwood on the beach near the 7th green by a caddy looking for lost balls. She had been strangled and her shoes, belt and felt hat were missing.
Gossips maintained that Victor had escaped. But they were wrong.
“One month later a fisherman found Victor’s body floating in the kelp beds off the ninth fairway,” describes Adams. “A length of rope was found in his coat pocket, along with Doris’s missing attire. The police concluded he had murdered his wife then committed suicide by walking into the water.”
The discovery of two bodies on the grounds gave rise to the notion the club was haunted, and many sightings have been reported since.
“Typical manifestations are a fast-moving figure in white, a feeling of doom, a cold wind and a globe of spectral light,” says Adams. “Doris also plays havoc with motorists along Beach Drive, sometimes flying through open windows and even penetrating windshields as a cold mist.”
The World Amateur Team Championship was held in Australia, Bob Charles is the first left-handed golfer to win the Canadian Open and the only New Zealander, and Sandra Post wins LPGA Rookie-of-the-Year Award as well as the 1968 LPGA Championship in a playoff. Bob Goalby won his only major championship, one stroke ahead of Roberto De Vicenzo, the reigning British Open champion.
Sandra Post celebrates Canada’s first LPGA major on 70th birthday
UNSPECIFIED - CIRCA 1978: Women's golfer Sandra Post in action during tournament play circa 1978. (Photo by Focus on Sport/Getty Images)
Canadian Golf Hall of Fame member Sandra Post turns 70 this week and celebrates another milestone this month as well – the 50th anniversary of her first LPGA Tour win.
Reflecting back, Post, who has had a lengthy list of accomplishment in her career including winning the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s athlete of the year, twice winning the Canadian Press Female Athlete of the Year, and appointed to the Order of Canada, says winning the LPGA Championship, a major in her first try, is what’s been the focal point of her on-course legacy.
But with 50 years now passed, Post realizes she had a greater mission off the course to help promote and advance the status of women in sport.
“It wasn’t just sport,” she says. “I knew that early on. I knew there was other issues to it.”
Post says she hasn’t grasped how monumental her major win was until this anniversary has come up. She won a couple of tournaments later in her career that have since become majors (Post won the ANA Inspiration twice, when it was known as the Colgate-Dinah Shore Winner’s Circle and not yet a major) but didn’t realize then that majors really define one’s career.
“Those moments live with you,” she says. “If you’re a U.S. Open champion or an LPGA Champion… it really is fabulous.”
Post was just 20 years old when she teed it up in the 1968 LPGA Championship at Pleasant Valley Country Club, about an hour outside Boston.
She finished at 2-over after 72 holes, tied with Kathy Whitworth – one of her idols and who, up to that point, had won 27 times on the LPGA Tour (she would go on to win 88 times in her career, the most ever) – and there would be an 18-hole playoff to decide the champion on the Monday.
Post remembers calling her father back in Toronto to say there was going to be a playoff the following day and he caught the last flight to Boston on Sunday along with some members of the Canadian press corps who had just finished covering Bob Charles win the Canadian Open at St. George’s.
Post wasn’t able to sleep that night, so she jumped in her car and drove to Boston to pick up her dad. The members of the press who were also on the flight couldn’t believe Post, who was about to play the biggest round of her life, was there at midnight to drive the two-plus hours back and forth from Boston, but she says she had nothing else to do so decided to make the trip.
At a dinner earlier that night, she remembers sitting with Mickey Wright (World Golf Hall of Fame member and 82-time LPGA Tour winner) and Susie Berning (four-time LPGA Tour major winner) and asked what would she need to do in order to beat Whitworth the next day.
“I remember Susie saying, ‘fire everything you’ve got at her, right off the top. And I go, ‘Really? Ok.’ I’ll never forget those words,” says Post.
“I didn’t really have a strategy but I was thrilled to death I was going to finish second at the LPGA Championship,” she continues with a laugh.
Huge crowds had showed up for this David vs. Goliath match-up, Post says. She remembers her caddie being a young teenager, maybe 14, and their combined ages barely eclipsed Whitworth’s age of 29 at the time.
Post started the day with three straight birdies, but Whitworth made an eagle and a birdie in the first four holes and they were tied.
“I looked up on the hill after the fourth hole and I saw Susie and I said, ‘That’s all I got! Now what do I do?” says Post. “She just put her hands up.”
As the day chugged along, it looked like a foregone conclusion that Post was going to be the champion, extending her lead to five shots at one point.
But Wright was already one of the winningest golfers on the LPGA Tour, and Post wasn’t going to count her out. However, late in the round it was all but settled Post was going to win.
Post had dunked her approach from 90 yards out on the par-4 15th for a birdie to get to 7-under for the day. When they got to No. 17, Whitworth ended up in the trees with her tee shot. She couldn’t make it out, made quadruple bogey, and Post would go on to win by seven, finishing at 5-under to Whitworth’s 2-over.
Post won a “whopping” US$3,000 in first-place prize money, the most she had ever won at one time. She says she still has a copy of that cheque.
“I had a bonus with Spalding too. I got in my car and went down the road to Baltimore (where the next event was) thinking I was pretty rich,” she says, laughing.
Looking back on that victory 50 years ago, Post says there were a ton of great memories on the course, but it was off the course where she really learned her place in the world.
She knows they were playing for money and needed money to make a living, but all the women on the LPGA Tour at the time were trying to elevate the status of women in sport, and says they were all very conscious of their role in that.
Post says the voting for the Lou Marsh Trophy in 1968 was a big point in her realization that she needed to do more for the advancement of women in professional sport. She finished fifth in the voting that year.
“I took that very seriously. I was Rookie of the Year, I had won a major, and I was the first Canadian woman to really play golf professionally and get to that level. For a woman to play any sport professionally, and to see I was ranked fifth… I didn’t ever think it wasn’t fair, but I knew I had so much more work to do,” she says. “I had to get the message across to our country.”
Post says it was an honour to pass the baton in Canadian professional golf to Gail Graham and Dawn Coe-Jones, and then to see them pass it along to Lorie Kane and A.J. Eathorne, who then passed it to Alena Sharp and Brooke Henderson.
She’s happy to see there has been more done in women’s golf on the scholarship side and with purse increases on the LPGA Tour, and has no doubt Henderson is going to end up passing the baton sooner rather than later, given the talent on the LPGA Tour is getting younger and younger each year.
“I see the social issues and I see so many things we’ve been able to achieve. Absolutely we have a lot of work to do with the disparity of the purses and all that, but I tend to look more on the positive side,” she says.
At 70 Post remains as sharp as ever. Her victory half a century ago was the turning point for Canadian women’s golf and opened the door to many others who followed. And although she was a “young 20” when she found the winner’s circle, she says being a part of that group of women was something she’ll never forget.
“When I look back I have such admiration for those founders of the LPGA Tour and what they accomplished. Talk about pure pioneers of not only golf, but of women. To help move the needle for women,” she says. “I would not trade my time for any other time.”
Gail Graham and the late A.V. Macan to be inducted into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame
The Canadian Golf Hall of Fame and Museum is proud to announce former LPGA Tour player Gail Graham and renowned golf course architect, the late Arthur Vernon (A.V.) Macan, have been elected as Canadian Golf Hall of Fame’s 2018 inductees.
Graham will be inducted in the player category while Macan will be inducted as a builder for his career accomplishments in golf course architecture. With their inductions, the pair become the 80th and 81st honoured members of the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame.
“The Canadian Golf Hall of Fame recognizes the accomplishments of outstanding individuals and their tremendous impact on the game of golf and it is an honour to welcome Gail Graham and the late A.V. Macan as our newest honoured members,” said Sandra Post, Chair of the Hall of Fame’s Selection Committee. “Gail was both an accomplished player who transitioned to a successful post-playing career as a tournament and LPGA administrator while Macan’s deep contribution to golf course design including notable redesign efforts have become synonymous with excellence in golf course architecture.”
“I am, to say the least, blown away, excited and humbled,” said Graham. “I admire and respect all of the Hall’s members and to join these amazing people who have contributed so much to Canadian golf is an absolute honour.”
With his induction, Macan, who was affectionately referred to as “Mac”, becomes the 5th golf course architect inducted into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame.
“Mac was my grandfather and although I never had the pleasure of meeting him, I feel he is a part of our lives even today,” said Matthew Macan, one of Macan’s seven grandchildren. “This is a tremendous honour for our family and we look forward to making the trek from Britain to join you in Canada for the ceremony later this year.”
The induction of Gail Graham and the late A.V. Macan into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame will take place on Tuesday, July 24th, 2018 during Hall of Fame Day and Opening Ceremony of the 2018 RBC Canadian Open on the grounds of Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ont.
Gail Graham
Born January 16, 1964 in Vanderhoof, B.C., Gail Graham (nee Anderson) was an accomplished amateur and professional golfer who went on to succeed off the course as an executive and broadcaster.
During her accomplished playing career, Graham, a member of the LPGA Tour for 15 years from 1990-2005, amassed a pair of LPGA Tour victories—the 1997 Alpine Australian Ladies Masters and the 1995 Fieldcrest Cannon Classic. Other professional victories included the 1988 Manhattan Futures Classic on the (former) Futures Tour along with the 2016 Wendy’s Charity Classic on the Legends Tour. Graham also won the 1988 PGA of Canada Women’s Championship and competed in Canada’s National Women’s Open (now the CP Women’s Open) on 17 occasions, her best finish a tie for 4th in 1998.
Internationally, she helped Canada win the 1987 Commonwealth Championship and represented her country at the Handa World Cup (2009-2013) and Nations Cup (1999-2000).
As a standout amateur with ties to British Columbia and Manitoba, Graham got her start in golf at the St. Charles Country Club in Winnipeg. She won the 1982 Manitoba Junior Women’s Championship, a pair of Manitoba Women’s Amateur titles (1983 & 1985) and was named Manitoba Amateur Golfer of the Year in 1983. She also represented Manitoba on several junior and amateur interprovincial teams during her amateur career. In 1986, her family moved to Kelowna, B.C. and she would later be named to represent Canada on the 1986 World Amateur Team. She also represented BC on provincial amateur teams in 1986 and 1987 and was named an All-American in 1986 playing for Lamar University in Beaumont, TX (where she was teammates with fellow Canadians Jennifer Wyatt and the late Dawn Coe-Jones, a fellow honoured member of the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame).
Aside from her playing career, Graham also achieved success as a golf executive, administrator and broadcaster having served on the LPGA Executive Committee (1994-1997 & 1999-2002) including a two-year term as President (2001-2002). She also worked as President of the LPGA Tournament Owners Association (2007-2013) and has served on the Board of the Legends Tour since 2016, being named their 2018 President. Graham has also worked with various outlets as a broadcaster and greenside reporter for the LPGA Tour.
In 2002, she was voted by her fellow LPGA Tour members as the recipient of the William and Mousie Powell Award as the player who whose behavior and deeds best exemplifies the spirit, ideals and values of the LPGA. She was also elected to the Manitoba Golf Hall of Fame in 2009 and British Columbia Golf Hall of Fame in 2015.
A.V. Macan
Born 1882 in Dublin, A.V. Macan’s contribution to Canadian golf is deeply rooted in defining excellence in Canadian golf course architecture. Macan learned golf at a young age and soon developed into one of Ireland’s top players. While studying law at Dublin’s Trinity College, Macan competed in top-flight championships throughout the British Isles. It was during this time he would visit many highly touted golf courses in England, Scotland and Ireland, gaining inspiration for the much-admired courses he would later design.
In 1908, he emigrated to Canada with his young family. By 1910, he had settled in Victoria and joined the Victoria Golf Club. Macan won the B.C. Amateur in 1912 & 1913. In 1913, he also won the Pacific Northwest Amateur and the Washington State Amateur Championships.
Macan’s architectural career was launched in earnest when his 1913 design at Colwood (now Royal Colwood), in Victoria hosted the 1922 Pacific Northwest Golf Association championship. Reportedly, Colwood was a hit among competing golfers and soon after, Macan was accepting offers to design courses throughout the region.
In his early 30s, Macan volunteered for service in World War I in 1916 as an officer in the Canadian Expeditionary Force of the Canadian Army. He was wounded by a shell casing fragment in 1917 at the Battle of Vimy Ridge in France. Blood poisoning in his left foot resulted in the amputation of his lower left leg. After the war, he returned to Canada and continued to play competitive golf and design golf courses.
Macan revolutionized golf architecture in the Pacific Northwest region over a career which spanned five decades. In addition to Royal Colwood, Macan’s distinguished designs in Canada include Shaughnessy Golf and Country Club (Vancouver), Marine Drive Golf Club (Vancouver), University Golf Club (Vancouver) and Richmond Country Club (Richmond, B.C.), among others. He also renovated several notable golf course layouts as Vancouver Golf Club, Victoria Golf Club, Capilano Golf and Country Club and Point Grey Golf and Country Club.
Macan also invented the Herringbone drainage system which eliminated the accumulation of water around, on and under the putting surfaces which was an important development in dealing with the west coast rainy weather.
Outside of Canada, Macan’s design work includes Fircrest Golf Club (Tacoma, WA), Columbia-Edgewater Country Club (Portland, OR), California Golf Club (San Francisco, CA), Broadmoor Golf Club (Seattle, WA) and Overlake Golf and Country Club (Bellevue, WA).
In 1964, at the age of 82, A.V. Macan succumbed to a heart attack while redesigning Sunland Golf Course in Washington. In 1989, he was Inducted to the Pacific Northwest Golf Association Hall of Fame.
Canada’s Rubenstein named recipient of 2018 PGA Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism
PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. – Lorne Rubenstein, who spent 33 years as a golf columnist while writing 14 books and contributing to magazines around the world, has been named the recipient of the 2018 PGA Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism.
Rubenstein, a native of Toronto, will be honored on April 4 at the ISPS HANDA 46th Golf Writers Association of America (GWAA) Annual Awards Dinner at Savannah Rapids Pavilion in Augusta, Georgia.
Rubenstein, 69, is the 29th recipient of the PGA Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism, which recognizes members of the media for their steadfast promotion of golf, both locally and nationally.
“We celebrate Lorne Rubenstein’s outstanding career, a study in gracefully capturing the joy of the game while connecting readers to many of golf’s often underappreciated players,” said PGA President Paul Levy. “Through his work, Lorne also strengthened a bond with our extended golf family in Canada – home to an association born five years before the PGA of America. Together, we work to make golf the best game and we welcome Lorne among the most honored journalists in our sport.”
Rubenstein’s work spans more than 50 major championships, Ryder Cups and Presidents Cups as well as some 40 Canadian Opens.
Born in Toronto, Rubenstein began playing golf at 12 while continuing to compete in hockey, football and baseball. A graduate of York University in Toronto in 1970, Rubenstein earned an M.A. in psychology from the University of Guelph (1974). He worked as part-time curator-librarian for the Royal Canadian Golf Association (RCGA, now Golf Canada), while pursuing a doctoral degree in psychology. He withdrew to focus on writing about golf. In 1980, Rubenstein became the first editor of SCOREGolf Magazine and a weekly columnist for The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper.
Personal golf experiences enriched Rubenstein’s work, including caddying in the 1970 Canadian Open for former U.S. and British Amateur Champion Bob Dickson, with whom he developed a long friendship that led to more connections with professional golfers. He caddied on tour part-time for Dickson and then for two-time Canadian Amateur champion Jim Nelford until 1982.
During that period, Rubenstein led the club championship at the Uplands Golf Course in Toronto after 54 holes. He was unable to fend off multiple swing thoughts and struggled to a 78 in the final round. He lost and went home to write about the experience, and sent the article to Golf Digest.
The editor was encouraging, but didn’t publish his offering. Still, the encouragement kick- started his writing career. Two years later, in 1979, he previewed the Canadian Open for Toronto Life magazine – “Psychology of the Swing,” focusing on Canadian great George Knudson.
After publication, Knudson left a voice message, “You have your foot in the door. Just keep writing and good things will happen.” One of the “good things” was The Natural Golf Swing, the book he co-authored with Knudson, an eight-time PGA Tour winner.
“I’ve made many friends around the world because of golf,” said Rubenstein. “Forty years have come and gone since my club championship debacle at Uplands. But the experience led me to write, and a world opened up. Even now I can hear George Knudson’s voice on my answering machine. I am most grateful for this honor. I join a group of past recipients, many of whom I have known as friends and long respected.”
Rubenstein is a four-time award-winner for magazine features/newspaper columns in the Golf Writers Association of America (1988, ’93, ’94, and 2003); won the 1985 Canada National Magazine Award; and has three first-place awards from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada (2009, ’16, and ’17). He was inducted into the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame (2006), the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame (2007), and is a recipient of Sports Media Canada’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2009) and the PGA of Canada’s Distinguished Service Award (2013).
From 1992-2005, Rubenstein was TSN television host of “Acura World of Golf,” and hosted “Looking Back” from 2014-15 on SiriusXM. His books include A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands; Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters; and Moe & Me: Encounters with Moe Norman, Golf Mysterious Genius. He collaborated with Nick Price on The Swing: Mastering the Principles of the Game, and with David Leadbetter on The Fundamentals of Hogan. His most recent work, published in 2017, is a collaboration with Tiger Woods on his memoir, “The 1997 Masters: My Story.”
Rubenstein lives in Toronto and Jupiter, Florida, with his wife, Nell.
