Gibson’s hometown game picks up steam
It’s a stretch to call Rick Gibson a hometown player in the Shaw Charity Classic this week.
He was born here in 1961 but moved away to the west coast when he was a preschooler.
His formative years were spent in Victoria where he learned to golf on classic muni Cedar Hill.
As for Calgary, his enduring childhood memory: “I learned how to skate.”
Regardless of his birth certificate and the fact he has family on his mom’s side in Calgary and Lethbridge, Gibson definitely feels at home in his first trip to the local Champions Tour event. One could call it home cooking. “I feel very welcome here. The facility’s great. The food’s outstanding,” he says, marvelling at the cuisine at Canyon Meadows G& CC. “By far the best food I think I’ve had at a tournament.
No surprise his game has picked up steam at Canyon Meadows, too.
“I just started to feel much more comfortable with my swing the last couple of days,” he confides.
“I got a feeling some of it’s got to do with being on home soil. Getting into the mindset of just being a little more relaxed and letting things happen, which in golf is extremely important.”
It hasn’t been a great year for Gibson — he’s missed the cut in three of five events, although he did finish T20 in June’s Senior Players’ Championship.
He only has to go back a year, though, to find some evidence of solid play. Last July, he went wire- to- wire to win the Bad Ragaz PGA Seniors Open in his first foray onto the European Seniors Tour.
“I kind of came out of the blue,” he notes of a tourney win he dedicated to his late mother, who passed earlier in 2014. “To be honest I hadn’t been playing very well leading up to it, but it was early in the season on the European Senior Tour and all of a sudden everything clicked the one week in Switzerland and I ended up winning by five. It was just one of those weeks.
“A couple of weeks after that I played quite well at the Senior Open in Wales and finished tied for third. Then I had a second place in the Russia Senior Open as well. So that was a good season for me in Europe.”
It led to finishing 10th in Champions Tour Qualifying school, which secured conditional status for this campaign.
Gibson is not a household name in Canadian golf, mostly because he had most of his success outside of North America and the fact he has now lived in Manila for 25 years after marrying Filipino actress Josephine Garcia, whom he met at the 1987 Philippine Open.
He won twice on the Japan Golf Tour ( 1991, 1995), once on the Asian Tour ( 2002) and also claimed victories in the Malaysian Open and Philippine PGA Championship. He did represent Canada at the World Cup six times, though, and went to three Dunhill Cups, winning in 1994.
Still, he may be forgotten by some in Canuck golf history, even if the B. C. Golf Hall of Fame is inducting him this fall.
“I wouldn’t say forgotten,” he corrects. “Certainly some of the stuff ( I did was) before the Internet. Right now it’s quite a bit easier. I’m tracking a tournament in the Philippines right now with a young fellow I’ve worked with.
“It’s so much easier to keep track of things no matter where you are on the planet. Back when I was playing some of my better golf, it wasn’t so easy to keep track.”
Calgarians can track Gibson in Friday’s opening round when he tees off at 11: 20 a. m. with Americans Frank Esposito and Doug Rohrbaugh.