Top Alberta golfer rarely practises, plays.
Royal Mayfair associate pro Belbin holds 10 course records
Mike Belbin is a freak.
The Royal Mayfair Golf Club associate pro hardly ever practises. For that matter, he hardly ever plays the game. Yet, he could probably still par most golf courses with a ball retriever and a six-iron.
“It’s not fair,” said Royal Mayfair’s head pro Robb James. “He’s a real anomaly. He’s the most natural golf athlete I’ve ever met. Most guys need months of rust to shake off, but Mike, even if he hasn’t touched a club in six months, can still go out and shoot a 65. “It’s just not fair.” No. Not at all. It’s so unfair that Belbin should have to apologize and explain to all the weekend hackers who spend hours and hours hitting balls at the driving range and still can’t break 100.
Yet Belbin isn’t just good. Or even very, very, very good.
“You’d have to say that he’s the best player in Alberta; maybe the country,” said Brett Burge-son, head pro at Calgary’s Country Hills and easily one of the other best players in Alberta, along with the likes of Glendale’s Blair Buttar and Calgary’s Darryl James and Jamie Kureluk.
“After all, he’s won the Canadian assistants championship two years in a row. Nobody has done anything close to that in Alberta.”
Then again, nobody has done a lot of things that Belbin can do. For starters, Belbin collects course records the way a philatelist collects rare stamps. He’s already got 10 course records and seems to add a new one to his collection every year.
When he won last year’s Canadian assistants championship at Jasper, he shot a 64 in the second round. While The Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge director of golf Alan Carter and former NHL player turned golf pro Doug Lecuyer both shot 61s there, Belbin’s 64 is the official course record because it came in a tournament.
When he won last year’s Alberta PGA Tour championship, which brought together the top 50 players on the APGA’s Order of Merit at Blackhawk Golf Club, Belbin shot 65 — another competitive course record.
And when he won last year’s Waskesiu, Sask., Pro/Am — a tournament his late father, Ron, started nearly 30 years ago — he shot back-to-back course records of 64 while hitting 35 of 36 greens in regulation.
Belbin’s other course records are a 63 at the Glendale Golf and Country Club — shot in the 2006 Telus Edmonton Open, Country Hills Golf Club (67) on the tough Talons layout, Cardiff (63), Leduc (63), Carstairs (63), Mill Woods (61) and Broadmoor (62).
Again, this is all with very little practice.
“I might practise once every two weeks. And, if I’m not playing with members at Mayfa i r or in a tournament, I’m just not playing,” Belbin said. “Last year, I played seven times at Mayfair and that was it. Fun rounds? They just don’t happen.
“Would I be better if I played and practised more? Probably. But it might be worse, too,” he said, laughing.
The reason Belbin doesn’t play or practise more is simple. It’s called life.
“I’m married with four young kids,” he said of sons Jack, 8, Josh, 6, his three-year-old twins, Tess and Riley, and his wife, Leanne.
“Play on my days off? Not happening,” he says. “I’m probably at the park throwing balls and pushing kids on the swings.”
While a lot of people assume golf professionals just play golf and hit balls, Belbin said that’s far from the reality.
To illustrate a typical day at Royal Mayfair Belbin takes the day of this interview.
“I arrived at the course at 9:30 in the morning. I taught my first lesson from 10 to 11. Another lesson from 11 to 12. I had lunch. Taught another lesson and then started work at 2 p.m. And I’ll be here until I close up at 10 p.m.”
“So when would I get a chance to play or practise?” he asks. “It’s just not happening. I’d like to play a lot more. But there just isn’t time.”
The big question then is how can he play as well as he does.
“I think it’s because of everything my dad taught me and all the time I put in with him, whether it was five minutes here or an hour there,” he said. “I literally can still hear the lessons my dad and Darren Ross, who used to work for my dad at Broadmoor, used to give me. I literally fall back to the lessons I had 15 years ago.
“Whether it’s muscle memory or what … I just don’t know. But if I hit three warm balls, I feel like I am going to drill it right down the middle of the fairway.
“I used to hit a lot of balls, especially when I played the Canadian Tour,” he said of the five years he spent on what is now the PGA of Canada Tour.
Belbin turned pro after he won the Edmonton Open in 1996.
“My days of playing for trophies were over. I won by four or five shots and the guy who was second, and was a pro, won $2,000. I won a pair of golf shoes.”
Life — spelled M-O-N-E-Y — is also why Belbin isn’t still on Tour.
“Unless you’ve got a lot of money behind you, starting off as a professional also means living on the cheap. Lots of fast food. Plenty of cheap motels. And about the only frills are ordering cheese with the hamburger,” he said. “It’s expensive to play on Tour. Entry fees. Rental cars, airplane tickets, food, hotels … . It’s probably an $80,000 bill a year. And when you bring family into the equation, it’s even riskier. What happens if you play bad for a month and you’ve got mortgage payments?
“I’m happy with my life. I still get a chance to play some competitive golf. I work at the best place in the city and with the best membership by a mile. Let me put it this way. When I come home and my two twins come running at me when I come through the front door, what could be better?”