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Maybe Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman should open a golf course in Edmonton... because of all the rain, man.
They?d be taking a hit in the cash register just like all the other courses in town.
After late-April snow put them behind schedule before they even started, courses in Edmonton watched even more money go down the gutters in a wet and windy June.
?All in all, in the big picture, we?re down,? said Lewis Estates General Manager Jerry Linquist. ?We lost two weeks in April because of the late melt, we actually opened with a little bit of snow on the golf course, and obviously June was only so-so.?
So so wet.
If it seemed like the first three weeks of June was a tribute to the worst of British Open weather, it?s because it was.
Environment Canada says there were 22 days of rain, nine days when wind gusts were over 50 km/h and five days when the daytime high didn?t even hit 16 C.
Nice.
?It seemed like every day there was a thundershower sometime during the day,? said Linquist. ?We?d have a full tee sheet, then a little thunderstorm comes by and it?s empty.?
The hard-core golfers will brave some fairly adverse conditions, but the fair-weather guys, which make up the majority of green-fee players, have been staying away in droves.
?We?re down about 1,000 rounds from last year, when June wasn?t great either,? said Jagare Ridge head pro Tyler Rumpel.
?When you?re not starting until the first week of May and you get 21 days of rain in June, it?s not going to bode well for any golf course, but we keep chipping away at it and hope we can make some hay in the last couple of months.?
At least the courses are still here. Some layouts in and around Calgary were wiped off the face of the earth by floods.
?We?re pretty fortunate that we didn?t get what Calgary had,? said Linquist. ?A friend of mine is the GM at Kananaskis and it?s devastating, they?re wiped out. Totally demolished. It?s really sad. Holes that aren?t even there any more, they?re down the river somewhere.?
Sunny days on Tuesday and Wednesday, and a decent forecast into next week, certainly help the bottom lines in Edmonton.
?We?re sold out and it?s a Wednesday,? said Linquist. ?Tuesday was crazy. We had 304 players. Hopefully we can have a warm dry rest of the summer.?
?We?ve been booked solid the last couple of days,? added Rumpel. ?I can?t believe how busy it is today.?
And with spring and summer moving down the calendar, there is hope that the courses will be able to keep their doors open late into the fall and make up some of their lost revenue at the other end of the season.
?Definitely the months have changed on either side of the calendar,? said Rumpel. ?As opposed to starting April 10. We?re a month later at the start of the year and a month longer at the end.?
They?ll play until the snow closes their doors again.
?I?ve been here for 10 years and eight of the 10 years we we?ve been able to play into November,? said Linquist. ?We?re usually one of the first to open and one of the last to close. If you want to play golf in November, there?s usually a pretty good chance you can do it at Lewis.?
robert.tychkowski@sunmedia.ca
@SUN_TYCHKOWSKI
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