My Journey to Augusta National

There is a photograph somewhere of a twelve-year-old kid on the first tee at Meadowlands Golf and Country Club in Chilliwack, British Columbia. He is holding a borrowed club, standing over a ball he has absolutely no idea how to hit, and he is completely, permanently hooked. That kid is me. And everything that follows, leads to the spring of 2026 in Augusta, Georgia. This is my story.

Where It Started

I was twelve when Dennis Ast, my best friend Doug's father, cobbled together a set of clubs and an old bag so I could play golf with Doug. I can still picture the mismatched set and that old black leather bag. Growing up, we had no money, and neither did Doug and his dad, but Dennis found enough clubs to put together a set for me. My older brother Darryl, at the encouragement of my mother, paid for a junior membership at Meadowlands Golf and Country Club, and that was it. Doug and I played almost every day that summer. I was not good and I did not care. I fell in love with the game almost immediately, and I have never fallen out.

That devotion came at a cost early on. In 1986, I was riding my bike to the course with my clubs slung over my back, the way you do when you are a golf obsessed fourteen year old. This was the only way I could get to the course, as I was too young to drive and my mother worked during the day so she wasn’t able to give me a ride. I’m not sure how or why, but somehow I went down. I remember the ground coming up fast and a wrist that was very clearly broken. It was my first golf-related broken bone. As you will read later, it would not be my last.

Golf ran in the family in ways I only appreciate today. My uncle Jim was a serious player, genuinely good, winning tournaments in the Chilliwack area through his teens through into his thirties. I caddied for him at the Meadowlands Open one year, I'd say it was 1985, and he won. Afterwards he handed me fourteen dollars and said, with a straight face, "that's the going rate, isn't it?" It was ten percent of his winnings. I have never forgotten that. Later on in life, we played the Old Course twice together on one trip. That was a very special trip for me.

My grandfather also played golf, most days in his retirement and well into his eighties, getting his first hole-in-one at eighty years old. He always walked. He never seemed particularly focused on his score. What I learned from him was something I have carried ever since: golf is less about the number on the card and more about the fresh air and the company you keep. I was lucky enough to play with him a number of times. Those rounds have stayed with me.

In high school, I played two years on the senior golf team at Chilliwack Senior Secondary. We were not exactly a powerhouse, but we got to play courses I never would have seen otherwise, and that felt like everything at the time. And yes, my best friend Doug was also on that team.

The Game Grows With You

Golf followed me through my twenties the way good habits tend to, imperfectly but persistently. I played less during the university months, but summers kept me connected to the game. When I graduated from UBC and went to work for Coca-Cola, the weekends opened up and I was out on the course whenever I could manage it. Most of my golf in those days was local to Chilliwack, including what I consider my home course, the Chilliwack Golf and Country Club. Any return there is always a nostalgic one.

Calgary and Ninety Rounds in a Summer

After two years with Coca-Cola, I decided there was more to me and to life, and moved to Calgary to complete a Master's degree in City Planning. That move would make Calgary my home for the next twenty-five years. After graduation, and in the early years of building my career, I continued chasing the game at courses in and around Calgary. With a new career, I had a little money for new clubs, new golf clothes, and the ability to get out and explore new courses. I joined a private club where I was a member for fifteen years before eventually moving back to BC.

In those years I was also playing regularly with a good friend, Scott Scoville, at a course called the Canal at Delacour. It was the kind of course that wasn't much to look at when you drove up but was, in my opinion, one of the best tests of golf in the Calgary region. We were both playing to around a three index at the time so we always had good competitive rounds. It was the kind of golf friendship and ongoing rivalry that sharpened my game and made me love it even more.

While living in Calgary, I was also travelling back to BC to see friends and attend events. In 2003, I was one of twelve who gathered in Kamloops for what was then called the Briscoe Stag Championship. My friend Doug, yes that Doug, showed up with a green jacket embroidered to mark the occasion. It was Andy's stag weekend, in recognition of his (first) marriage. That jacket became a trophy. That tournament became the Hackers Tournament, and this summer in Vernon, British Columbia, we will play our 25th edition. Many of the same attendees will also be attending Andy’s second wedding this August!

What began as a golf weekend with twelve guys to celebrate a close friend has evolved into an event with its own logo, team formats and an invite list that ranges from six to twenty participants each year. In recent years, we even established a Hackers Hall of Fame, which I joined in 2024. The Hackers, and everything associated with it, remain a constant in my life, and I take pride in every outrageous year we've shared.

The Old Course, The First Time

In 2012, the idea of a trip to Scotland became a regular topic of conversation. I did the research and entered the advance ballot for the following summer. That fall, I received an email from the St. Andrews Links Trust confirming I had secured the first tee time on July 1st. Canada Day. I spent the next eight months learning everything I could about golf in Scotland.

My group and I landed in Edinburgh on a Friday and had two days to take in the sights before travelling out to St. Andrews. Edinburgh was worth the time, but there was one thing nagging at me and keeping me awake those nights: I needed to get to St. Andrews and see the Old Course with my own eyes.

Once the rest of our group arrived, we made the hour-and-a-half drive out to the home of golf. It was a Sunday and there was no golf being played. Many people don’t know that the Old Course is open to the public on Sundays and it becomes a public park. For those who have been there, seeing it for the first time is one of the great unrepeatable moments in the game. As you turn the corner from Golf Place, the course is just … there, and it is more amazing than you could imagine. I walked the 1st and the 18th holes that Sunday with tears in my eyes.

The Old Course, 2013. My caddie (blue hat) was named Willie. I met him and his wife at the Keys Pub later that night and bought them a drink. He was the best caddie I had on the Old Course. On return trips to St. Andrews I would ask about him and learned he passed away from cancer not long after we met.

That first Scotland trip introduced me to authentic links golf. The wind, the fescue, the blind shots, the way the courses seemed to have grown rather than been designed. It became my favourite style of golf to play. We played at Kingsbarns, Crail, Carnoustie, the Castle Course, and I was lucky enough to play the Old Course twice that trip.

I’ve been back to Scotland many times since that first time. I’ve played the Old Course ten times in total. The first tee shot never gets easier. The nerves never go away. But the 18th tee shot, a fairway so wide that almost anyone can find it, with the town of St. Andrews framing the green and the Rusacks Hotel crowd cheering from above, that shot never gets old.

Another Broken Bone

A broken leg in one of the most historic spots in golf. 17-17-17.

I want to be careful here because this story sounds made up but it is not. In 2022, I organized a trip for eight players which included 2 days at 150th Open Championship at the Old Course. We were watching the final round from behind the stone wall at the Road Hole, the 17th. Anyone who watched the 150th will remember it was a battle to the end, with Cam Smith fending off Rory McIlroy and the rest of the field. As the final group finished 17 and teed off on 18, a crowd of people jumped the wall to get onto the course, and I went with them. I navigated that wall quite poorly, landed badly, fracturing my tibia in the process. I spent the rest of the week at the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary waiting for surgery. We quickly realized that the tournament finished on July 17th. I was watching from the 17th hole, and during surgery, I was given seventeen screws (and two plates) in my lower right leg. I often say I am not the only person to break their leg watching golf, but I am fairly confident I am part of a very small group. A broken wrist on a bike in Chilliwack in 1986 and a broken leg over a stone wall watching the 150th Open at the Old Course in 2022. Golf has given me so much over the years, sometimes even more than I wanted.

The universe, to its credit, made it right. The following year I returned to St. Andrews and I revisited the spot behind 17. At Dumbarnie Links, a course I missed the year prior, I was having a perfectly ordinary round until something happened on the back nine. I made six birdies coming in, including four consecutive birdies to finish. My score was 71. I choose to believe the universe knew what it owed me.

How Golf Became a Way of Life

Day after Bethpage Black (first walking round post break and recovery), 1 block from Times Square.

After that first trip to Scotland, golf stopped being something I did and became something I organized my travel around. It feels genuinely strange now to go to an airport without my clubs. Since 2013, the game has pulled me to Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, across Canada and around the United States. I’ve dragged my clubs through Times Square and up the Passeig de Gracia in Barcelona, and through more airport terminals I could not name if I tried. More courses than I can count, more early mornings than I should probably admit to, but all worth it. That is what love for the game looks like when it has had forty years behind it.

Pursuit of the Majors

It started the way a lot of things do, locally and innocently. The Greater Vancouver Open at Northview was the first time I understood what professional tournament golf actually felt like. The pace, the silence when someone is over a putt, the way a great shot travels. I was sold. From there it became the WM Phoenix Open, which I have been to many times. There is nothing else quite like it in professional golf.

Then the majors. I was at Oakmont for the 2016 U.S. Open, and if you’ve never watched a major at a course that plays genuinely hard, you have not seen the full version of the game. I went back and played Oakmont myself in 2017, which remains one my more memorable rounds. I was at the 144th Open Championship at St. Andrews and went back for the 150th, which I remember for reasons that had nothing to do with Cameron Smith.

Somewhere in there a quiet goal formed: see all four majors in person. I never said it out loud. It did not feel like something that required announcing. It just became part of how I thought about the game and where it might take me next. The Open, done. The U.S. Open, done. The PGA Championship was only a matter of when and where. The Masters was always the one I held differently, the one that felt genuinely unreachable, less a goal than a dream. The hardest ticket in sport. The ballot, every year. The rejection, every year. Polite, punctual, and expected.

The Invite

Every year for the past fifteen years, I’ve flown to Phoenix to visit my parents, who retired there some time ago. My mom turned 76 this February. It is a trip I look forward to every year. One evening we were having drinks before dinner at the home of their friends Jackie and Geff. The conversation was relaxed, the way those evenings tend to be, and somewhere in the middle of it Geff casually mentioned that he might have an extra ticket to the Masters and asked if that was something I might be interested in.

I want to be honest about what happened inside me in that moment. The answer was obviously yes. The challenge was that I did not know if the offer was real, or whether it would actually come to anything. I did not want to seem pushy or too excited. Later that same evening he brought it up again, this time in the context of potentially including my parents. He said that if they were not able to join, there might still be a ticket available for me. I said that if there was a spot, I would make it happen. We left it there. The topic did not come up again that evening, or after dinner, or in the weeks that followed. I assumed he had made other arrangements. I let it go. Then on March 10th, a text arrived. It was Jackie asking me if could join them in Augusta in April. It was actually happening.

The Booking

It took me less than an hour to find a flight, reserve a car, and confirm a room with Geff and Jackie at their Airbnb in Augusta. I want to note that I also checked whether I could get time off work, which I realize I listed after the flight and the car. I stand by my priorities.

I have been fortunate in my life to do a lot of things I am proud of and grateful for. I do not say that to seem indifferent to good fortune. I say it only to give context to what I felt when I finished booking that trip. I was shaking a little. Writing about it now, I still can barely believe it is true. Thursday to Monday. Masters weekend 2026. Augusta, Georgia.

It is actually happening. I am going to walk the grounds of one of the most famous golf courses on the planet. Everyone I have spoken to who has been there says the same thing: it is more extraordinary than you can possibly imagine. The colours are different. The scale of it is different. Everything you think you know about it from television does not prepare you for being there. I do not tend to lose sleep over things that have not happened yet. This is the exception.

What Golf Is To Me

I love hitting a good shot. I love making a putt. I love shooting a score I am proud of. But if I am being honest, those are not the reasons golf has been part of my life for more than forty years.

Golf is the reason Dennis Ast cobbled together a mismatched set of clubs so a twelve-year-old kid in Chilliwack could play. It is the reason my grandfather walked eighteen holes well into his eighties without once caring what he wrote on the card, and taught me, without saying a word, that the number matters less than the company. It is the reason a stag weekend in Kamloops in 2003 became a tournament that is still going strong twenty-five years later. It is the reason I have stood on the Swilcan Bridge, walked Carnoustie, hobbled around Bethpage Black (the first walking round after my broken leg) and played in Atlantic and Mediterranean winds that made every shot feel earned. It is the reason my mom took up the game in her late sixties and now plays several times a week. And it is why some of the best hours I have spent with my friends and family have happened on a golf course, usually with birdie juice involved and no agenda beyond the next hole.

When I am on the golf course, the other noise in life goes quiet. Not permanently, but reliably. For four hours or so, the things that are weighing on me have to wait their turn. Sometimes I come off the 18th with a great score and a great story. Sometimes I come off with just the story. Either way, I add it to the memory bank.

The Masters is the next deposit. A big one. I will tell you how it goes.

CE, EMC Golf

Epilogue coming in April.

My Journey to Augusta National