In an amateur golf career that has seen him win a dozen club championships and register 13 holes-in-one, Jim Halliday never imagined that his stroll down the fairways of local golf courses would one day lead him to the Kingston and District Sports Hall of Fame.
Halliday didn’t take up golf until he was 27 in 1967. Over the next 30 years, Halliday would operate his milk delivery business in the day’s early hours and then play golf with a relentless passion for the balance of the day.
Halliday, 68, was the club champion at Cataraqui Golf and Country Club six times. He was also a six-time men’s champion at Glen Lawrence.
He didn’t join Glen Lawrence until 1969, two years after he had won a pair of club titles at Kingston Fairways, the short executive course where he first took up golf.
“My good friend, Wink Wilson, and I were sitting down enjoying a pop after winning the Kingston District hockey championship,” Halliday recalled.
“All Wink talked about was golf. I had enough of that and told him I could beat him. We made a $20 bet.”
Halliday began dropping into the driving range at Kingston Fairways, hitting balls day after day. He started out with rented clubs and by the end of the summer declared himself ready to take Wilson on.
“We had our game and I beat him. I was 72 and Wink was 73,” Halliday said.
“I probably owe this all to him. If it wasn’t for Wink I may have never started.”
Wilson was also an integral part of what Halliday calls his most satisfying accomplishment. He won the 1998 men’s club title at Cataraqui – his – while going in and out of hospital for dialysis.
With the slashing style of Arnie Palmer, Halliday put together rounds of 70, 60 and 70 in foul weather and then finished off the victory with a 4-under-par 66. At age 58, he became the first golfer to win the club title with a four-round under-par total.
“Wink caddied the last round for me. It was great the way it ended. The guy who got me started was with me in the end,” Halliday said.
“That was probably my most memorable and satisfying win. They are all satisfying, but that had to be the most.”
Halliday’s accomplishments, which include more than 100 tournament wins and a seventh place finish in one of the few Ontario championships he contested, came from a player who developed his own style from reading about golf and watching the tour pros on television.
“It just came natural to me, I suppose,” Halliday said. “When I started I really liked Lee Trevino. I tried to copy his swing. The only thing was I used to draw [the ball] from right to left and [Trevino] used to hit left to right.”
Halliday recalled a moment in the 1979 Ontario Open when Keith Thomas, then the pro at Cataraqui, introduced him to his friend, golfing legend Moe Norman.
“I ended up getting a lesson from Moe. It was after the first round and Moe was playing behind me. I was having a little trouble with my long irons,” Halliday said.
“Moe came up to me after we were done and said, ‘Jim, come with me for a minute.’ He changed one little thing and went out and I beat him the last two rounds.”
Halliday’s one regret over a career that allowed him to meet the likes of George Knudsen, Norman, Nick Weslock, Warren Sye and Graham Cooke, is that he couldn’t play in the Ontario Amateur.
“I just couldn’t take the time,” he said. “I couldn’t take a week off because I was in business for myself. The milk had to go.
“I would have liked to [play in the Amateur] in my heyday to see how I sat up with the top amateurs in the country. I didn’t have that opportunity, which I was sorry about.”
While he has reduced the number of tournaments he plays, Halliday still gets out for regular rounds of golf with friends like Ron Brown and Kent Lloyd.
“I enjoy the game and play it for fun,” Halliday said.
Halliday will become only the fourth golfer in the local hall of fame, behind Dick Green, Caroline Mitchell and Brown.
The other inductees, who were feted yesterday at the 13th annual inductee luncheon at the Memorial Centre, come from hockey, cycling and speedskating and from the builder category.
Hockey players Scott Arniel and Ron Plumb, who combined had more than 30 years of professional play, join the biggest group of hall members.
Arniel, represented by his mother, Barb, yesterday, is coaching the Manitoba Moose in the American Hockey League. Plumb was in attendance. He was drafted by the National Hockey League’s Boston Bruins but went on to play in the World Hockey Association for seven years, then in the AHL and in Europe.
Builders Ken Matthews and Roy (Scotty) Martin were present and longtime football and rugby coach, the late Berkeley Brean, was represented by his wife, Mary, and son, Michael.
Bob Tysen, who has won numerous age-group titles in speedskating and cycling, was away in competition
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