June 12, 2011. It’s a date Mark Wiebe won’t soon forget.
You’ve heard of win-win situations. Well, June 12 was Wiebe’s variation on that theme.
The Aurora resident and longtime tour player had the honor of being inducted into the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame on that day. But because he was competing in the final round of a Champions Tour event in Conover, N.C., that Sunday, he couldn’t attend the induction ceremonies, sending son Gunner to accept the honor on his behalf.
Not going to his Hall of Fame enshrinement at Denver Country Club turned out to be very fortuitous for Wiebe as, on the day of his induction, he won the Greater Hickory Classic, marking his first Champions Tour victory since April 2008.
Wiebe (pictured) out-dueled James Mason in a three-hole playoff to earn his third Champions win overall. It was the highlight of a year in which Wiebe finished a career-best 16th on the Champions money list.
“It’s crazy how things work,” Gunner Wiebe noted. “Being inducted and winning on the same day is pretty special.”
Mark Wiebe’s “win-win” leads our list of 2011 highlights for tour players with major Colorado ties.
Here’s the rest of the rundown:
2. Martin Laird had won a PGA Tour event before, but claiming the title in the Arnold Palmer Invitational in late March put the former Colorado State University golfer in a different league.
Since his first Tour win, in October 2009, Laird had had trouble adding to his title total, finishing second twice — both in playoffs — as well as third, fourth and fifth. But in the Palmer Invite, Laird closed the deal, making birdie on two of the last four holes and earning $1.08 million for the victory.
“That was a hell of a day,” Laird said afterward. “That was a tough fight out there, a battle out there, but you know, it makes it even sweeter at the end when I got this trophy.”
Laird finished 2011 a career-best 23rd on the PGA Tour money list.
3. Former University of Colorado athlete Hale Irwin didn’t add to his record 45 Champions Tour victories in 2011, but rarely in golf history has a player over 65 years old performed so well on one of the top tours.
Irwin, who turned 66 in early June, finished in the top 10 seven times on the Champions Tour in 2011, a record for a player his age. And his best finishes of the year — two fourth-place showings — came in Champions majors, the U.S. Senior Open and the Senior PGA Championship.
The three-time U.S. Open champion shot his age twice and placed 27th on the 2011 money list, marking his best season-long performance since 2007.
4. Colorado Golf Hall of Famer Brandt Jobe lost his PGA Tour card early in 2009 and didn’t regain it until he finished sixth in Tour qualifying at the end of last year.
That time off the big Tour apparently made the Kent Denver High School graduate extra determined once he regained his card. The result was Jobe, who turned 46 this year, earned more than $1.6 million — the second-best season of his career.
Jobe’s best performance of the year came at the prestigious Memorial, where he posted the fourth runner-up finish of his Tour career, which has yet to include any wins.
5. Former CU golfer Matt Zions only recorded one top-10 finish on the European Tour this year, but he made the best of that one.
In mid-June at the Saint-Omer Open in France, the Denver resident won the tournament by seven strokes. The victory was worth 100,000 euros for the native of Australia.
“I feel like I’m dreaming,” Zions said afterward. “The last four holes I was wondering when I could start thinking about winning, and when would be too soon that it tempted fate. I had a lump in my throat a couple of times. This is a huge day. It’s hard to believe.”
6. Steve Jones didn’t win on the Champions Tour this year — in fact, he didn’t even come very close — but the fact that the former CU golfer finally returned to competitive golf was a big feat in and of itself.
The oft-sidelined 1996 U.S. Open champion hadn’t competed in a Tour-sanctioned event since August 2007, in large part because a severe case of tennis elbow. But at age 52 he rejoined the PGA Tour at the Bob Hope Classic in January. The Colorado Golf Hall of Famer missed the cut there, but made his Champions Tour debut in the spring and eventually competed in 10 official-money Champions events in 2011.
Jones’ best finish came in one of the major championships as he placed 16th in the Senior British Open.
7. Longtime Coloradan Kelly Jacques made her first cut ever on the LPGA Futures Tour in 2011 — she made three, in fact — but that wasn’t the main reason the year was memorable in a professional sense.
The two-time Colorado state high school champion will remember 2011 as the year she was chosen to compete on Golf Channel’s “Big Break Ireland”, where $50,000 in cash and a couple of significant tournament exemptions were on the line for the winner among the 12 contestants.
Alas, Jacques was eliminated in episode 4 of the show, in an “elimination challenge” against Mallory Blackwelder, daughter of former LPGA Rookie of the Year Myra Blackwelder.
“I had a great run here,” Jacques said of the popular Golf Channel program. “I had an absolute blast.”
8. Colorado Springs native R.W. Eaks has won four Champions Tour events over the years, but managed to get in just one Champions tournament in 2011.
That wasn’t the highlight of his year, but his victory in the HealthOne Colorado Senior Open probably was. Though he lived in the state for decades and is an outstanding player, the Senior Open marked Eaks’ first professional victory in Colorado.
And for good measure, Eaks set the Colorado Senior Open scoring record in the process with a 15-under-par 201 total. It marked his first tournament victory of any sort since 2008.
9. Former University of Denver golfer Stephanie Sherlock posted one top-20 finish and ended up 101st on the money list in her rookie season on the LPGA Tour.
But just as important, Sherlock didn’t end up being a one-and-done player on the LPGA Tour. Though she didn’t finish high enough on the money list to keep her card, she regained her playing privileges by finishing 20th in the finals of LPGA qualifying earlier this month.
