Winners took different routes to same goal
Men’s victor started young, while for women’s champ, game is a recent passion
Golfers come in all forms – just look at the winners of this year’s 19th annual Toronto Star Amateur golf championship.
There is Mike Kray, 47, who took home the John Honderich trophy as the winner of the men’s tournament. He took up golfing young, dragged out onto the course around age eight by his dad.
Then there is Marion Reed, 53, the recipient of the Ruth Atkinson Hindmarsh trophy as the winner on the women’s side. A late bloomer, Reed began playing the game at 40 years old, when she got hooked during a charity event.
“The gal that taught me created a monster,” Reed said with a laugh on Wednesday, after the three-day event at Markland Wood Golf Club in Etobicoke came to a close. “If I could, I’d play every day.”
Reed, of the Islington Golf Club, started day three of the tournament two shots behind challenger Joanne Noble, before her closing round of 70 earned her a 14-shot win.
“Everyone was grinding out every shot to win this,” Reed said, despite an ultimately convincing victory.
Kray, a lawyer who plays out of Rattlesnake Point in Milton, wrapped up his tournament with a two over par day. But, after leading over the first two days, he finished four shots ahead of Jean-Henri Lavoie.
“I’ve been working hard this summer on trying to make good course management decisions and picking targets and trusting the game plan which I stuck to pretty religiously for the entire first round, almost the entire second round and pretty much all (Wednesday) so I was really hap- py that I was able to stick with the game plan and commit to the shots I wanted to hit,” Kray said. Between them, Reed and Kray — who began golfing competitively as adult “just because he didn’t like to be bad” — have dozens of club championships to their names.
Coming in to this week, though, neither had won the Toronto Star Amateur despite years of participation.
“It feels fantastic,” Kray said. “I’ve won club championships before but never won anything of this magnitude. These Toronto Star (tournaments) are up there with all big (Golf Ontario) type events and things like that so it feels pretty good.”
Reed, who credited work on her short game and getting longer drives off the tee as the difference for her this year, is a “sparkplug” who spends the time she’s not playing cheering on women around her, said longtime tournament organizer Glenn Goodwin.
“It is a joy to watch,” Reed said. “They are competitive golfers, but it is so nice that they are legitimately nice people. It’s nice to play with caring people that want everybody to play their best and beat the course. It’s outstanding to play with that caliber of women that play that well.”
Wednesday’s win signaled the end of this year’s golf season for both Reed and Kray, who were already planning how to improve in order to defend their respective titles next year.
“Nobody can take away the win so I’ll look forward to returning, no matter how poor or well I play going forward,” Kray said.
Both were happy to go out on a good note.
“Perfect ending to the year,” Reed said.
Kray agreed: “Awesome way to end the year.”