Tourney features fairway’s finest
Rockway Vineyards hosts Champion of Champions Saturday
The 69th edition of the Walt McCollum Niagara District Champion of Champions will be held Saturday at Rockway Vineyards, but the start will be a little different than in past years.
Instead of teeing off on either the first or 10th tee, this year’s tournament features a 12:30 p.m. shotgun start. All participants are urged to arrive at Rockway by 11:30 a.m. at the latest to register, find out which hole and tees they will be starting on and to go over local rules.
The shotgun start marks the second one for the Champion of Champions. In 2008 at Twenty Valley Golf & Country Club heavy rain cut short play on the scheduled date and only the junior boys division completed its round.
As a result players from the other five divisions returned the following weekend and a shotgun format was used.
This year is the third time that Rockway has hosted the Champions. The first time the 18-hole layout catered to the event was 1994 and in 2013 they hosted the 64th edition.
There are 108 players scheduled to play representing 24 clubs.
Only two winners are back from last year when the tourney was held at Sawmill Golf Course: Kham Vong of Rockway, who won the men’s title, and Sandra Billyard of Port Colborne Country Club, who claimed the senior ladies honours but will play in the ladies division Saturday.
Both Vong and Billyard have also won in past years. Vong won the men’s crown in 2011 representing Queenston Golf Club and Billyard won four ladies titles 1995-96-99 playing out of Peninsula Lakes and in 2003 for Hunters Pointe.
There are five other players in the field who have won multiple Champion titles. Betty Divok, of Rockway Vineyards, has won five championships including three ladies in 2004-05-08 representing
Hunters Pointe and two senior ladies crowns 2015-16 also playing out of Hunters Pointe. This year she is competing in the ladies division.
Right behind Divok is Bridgewater’s Robin Wilson in the senior ladies division with four championships.
Her victories all came in the ladies division in 1993-94 and 2000 and 2002 representing Port Colborne.
Another multiple winner is Port Colborne’s Matt Graham with three men’s titles 2010-12-13. His last two were under the Lookout Point banner.
Graham is eyeing his fourth having won at Rockway the last time the St. Catharines course hosted the regional championships.
Jim Briggs of Cardinal Lakes and Karen Debenedet of Willodell round out the multiple winners in the field with two each. Briggs won the men’s honours in 2002 and the senior men’s championship in 2016. Debenedet won back-to-back senior ladies titles in 2009-10. Both represented Peninsula Lakes when they won.
There are six other players who have made it to the Champion winner’s circle once. They include Jim Brown, Rolling Meadows, men’s, 1996; Andy LaBelle, Willodell, men’s, 2005; Riverview’s Tony Ravenda, senior men’s, 2014; Theresa Holmes, International, senior ladies, 2014; Sharon Greenwood, Lookout Point, senior ladies, 2007; Kayla Burke, Lookout, junior girls, 2014.
Brown, LaBelle and Ravenda are all in senior men’s division while Holmes and Greenwood are competing in senior ladies. Burke is still a junior.
This year’s tournament field also includes one provincial champion, Nolan Piazza of Grand Niagara. The 15-year-old was one of the youngest players in the field but finished with a 72-hole total of 282 to capture the Ontario Junior Boys under-19 championship by four strokes last month.
By winning the provincial honours Piazza became the ninth junior boy from Niagara to have his name inscribed on the Ontario championship trophy. The last one to win it was Jack Gibson
of Fort Erie in 2009.