Golden Golf Club’s longest hole

A 33-kilometre golf game to raise money for the new golf course

Roger Ross remembers it like it was yesterday. It was a chilly Saturday morning in the fall of 1984, and the Golden Golf Club’s front nine holes were less than a year away from construction. (The back nine wasn’t built until 1996.) Along with his son Mike, Lil Dewar (a friend and passionate golfer) and the colourful Muzzi Greco, Ross had a plan to set a Guinness World Record for the longest hole of golf ever played. The real goal, though, was to raise money and awareness for the forthcoming new course.

The idea was to golf along Highway 95 all the way from Parson to Golden, a distance of about 33 kilometres. The fences enclosing the highway on each side would act as the fairway markers, and if a ball landed in the fairway (the pavement) after being hit, the golfers would be allowed to put their ball on top of a mat. If a ball was hit outside the highway’s fences, the rule was play it as it lies, as anything outside the fence lines was considered to be the rough.

“Thankfully,” said Ross, “eight dozen golf balls were donated to our group by the Bank of Montreal in Golden.”

The golfers had an RCMP escort for traffic control and were cheered on by a group of eager supporters. The Revelstoke Golf Club’s head pro also tagged along to ensure adherence to the Guinness rules for setting a world record.

“We started at 7:30 in the morning and played for 10 1/2 hours,” said Ross. “Near the end, ol’ Muzz was staggering down the highway centre line imploring oncoming vehicles to run him over for a ride into town.”

Ross credits the perseverance and efforts of a very large and diverse group of local citizens for bringing the golf course project to life. After a lengthy, laborious and impressive volunteer-driven effort to find and acquire a site, fund the project and deal with a million and one other complications, raising awareness through publicity was one of the more fun things of the many to-dos leading up to the actual course construction.

And after 50-plus lost balls, 571 total strokes between the foursome—and an equal amount of laughs—the group paraded into the Golden rodeo grounds, where they holed out on a temporary green. The impressive sum of $5,000 was raised towards the golf course construction. To celebrate, a dance was held later that evening for everyone to cut loose.

The only disappointment of the day was that due to a minor technicality, the people at Guinness did not award the foursome’s efforts with a place in their record books. With a late change in the rules, the Parson to Golden hole was not deemed to be on a real course and thus ineligible.

Ross still frequently plays at the Golden Golf Course. If you join him for a round and find that on one hole (there’s always that one hole) scoring 571 seems inevitable, take pleasure in knowing that you won’t be the first.