CANADIAN OPEN:
Amateur lives his dream
OAKVILLE, ONT. — Eric Banks, a 20-year-old amateur golfer from Truro, N.S., sent the final drive of his practice round safely down the left side of the 18th fairway.
He was preparing for his debut at the RBC Canadian Open — and his first PGA Tour event — but after a year of forced detours, he decided to take a diversion of his own on Tuesday, just for fun.
Banks walked to the right side of the fairway, to the bunker where, in 2000, Tiger Woods hit perhaps the most famous shot in Canadian golf history to seal a victory at Glen Abbey Golf Club.
Banks sized up the impossible shot from close to where Woods was standing and he smiled, like a tourist visiting a monument.
“Last summer, I could barely even walk,” Banks said, blond hair curling out from under a black cap. “So to be here today, it’s pretty awesome.”
Last summer, he was recovering from open-heart surgery, struggling to climb the stairs at his family’s home, restricted to walking 15 feet at a time.
His recovery was a descent into misery; it was also, he would later learn, a stroke of incredible good fortune.
Banks had always been athletic. He played hockey when he was younger, even though he would occasionally have to shorten his shifts because he was short of breath. Doctors told him it was probably the result of asthma and prescribed a series of inhalers. They did not work. In August 2011, he finally learned why.
Banks had accepted an offer to golf and study at the University of Florida and underwent a standard physical before the semester began. A cardiologist heard something during the examination. Banks alerted his parents with a text message.
“I have a hole in my heart,” he wrote.
“It’s beyond words,” his father, Hazen, said on Tuesday. “It’s your worst nightmare, to say that something’s wrong and it needs to be fixed — and it needs to be fixed sooner, rather than later.”
The family was told the hole meant the blood was flowing to one side of the heart, which meant that side had expanded to three times larger than normal, which was a problem.
Banks said his surgeon told him if he did not have the surgery when he did, he would have been at risk of dying of heart failure by the time he was 40.
His father remembers that discussion differently.
“She basically laid it out: ‘You wouldn’t be here in a short period of time and it would be a slow, painful death,’ ” Hazen Banks said. “Those are the quotes that I remember.”
Banks finished his freshman year at Florida and returned home to undergo surgery in Halifax in June 2012. His father said the anesthetist asked to listen to his son’s chest, just out of curiosity, to see how something so serious could evade detection for so long.
“She said, ‘That’s amazing — I know it’s there and I can’t hear it,’ ” Hazen said.
Banks said the surgery lasted about five hours. He does not remember waking up, but he remembers the tubes that seemed to be pouring out of him.
He can remember the struggle it was just to walk.
A wire was spooled into his sternum, “like a spiral staircase,” to help close the incision and it will remain with Banks the rest of his life.
He said he began walking two weeks after the surgery, for a minute at a time at first. He was back in school by August and was hitting a golf ball again by October. He played in every tournament of the spring semester and was named comeback player of the year at Florida.
Cardiac surgery has, in an odd way, provided a valuable perspective on the golf course.
“I think about that pretty much every day,” Banks said. “I kind of remind myself daily that it could be a lot worse.”
He said he has been driving the ball further, post-surgery.
Banks secured one of the final berths to the Canadian Open after a three-man, three-hole playoff in qualification on Monday.
And now, a little more than a year after his surgery, he will make his PGA Tour debut in his national tournament, in a field with the likes of Mike Weir, Ernie Els, Jim Furyk and Luke Donald. (Banks and Weir are among 19 Canadians scheduled to tee off in the first round on Thursday, a group headlined by Graham DeLaet, the highest-ranked Canadian on tour at No. 67.)
Banks’ parents scrambled to catch a flight into Toronto. They are expected to arrive in Toronto Wednesday night.
“We can’t even put it into words,” Hazen said. “This is his dream come true.”