Gary Player - The Legend

Left Speechless at Francis Ouimet Banquet

May 30, 2008 | Filed Under: The Player Foundation | Comments: 1

By Jim McCabe
The Boston Globe
May 22, 2008

Throughout his illustrious career, Gary Player never backed down from a challenge, even when it brought him up against the likes of Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. But Monday night before a crowd of 1,400 inside Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, Player faced perhaps his most formidable task - follow Ryan Durkin to the stage.

Durkin, an Andover native and recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts, was the student speaker at the Francis Ouimet Scholarship Fund’s 59th annual banquet and you would have been hard-pressed to find a dry eye in the house. If it is the thrill of a 7-iron struck pure or a birdie putt that falls in that keeps bringing us back, it is the presence of a Ryan Durkin that reminds us just where the glory of our greatest game rests.

His father died of cancer when Ryan was just 5, but with the guiding hands of his mother, Nancy, and club members at Indian Ridge CC in Andover where he worked for eight years, he talked of lessons learned. His story gave new meaning to inspiration.

Recalling those days when he would go on scavenger hunts for golf balls in the woods and resell them, Durkin said he’s always had a passion for entrepreneurial endeavors and that followed him to Amherst, where he ran a T-shirt business out of his dormitory.

While he said his years surrounded by golf and golfers helped shaped his life, Durkin pursued his passion for track and cross-country at UMass (no surprise, he was voted team captain), though it hardly kept him away from academic achievements. He graduated as a finance major with a 3.9 grade point average and earned two of the university’s most prestigious leadership honors.

There is a desire to go to graduate school for business, said Durkin, but he told the audience that he first must fulfill a burning need to pay back his country and offer his thanks for all it has blessed him with. A younger brother has recently been deployed to Iraq and Durkin said he would follow him into the Marine Corps, “because I owe a service to my country.”

Eloquent and emotional, Durkin was greeted with a standing ovation that lasted minutes. If the folks who volunteer a tireless amount of hours at the Ouimet Fund wanted vindication for their efforts, they had it in the young man from Andover. On a night when Ouimet organizers announced that a record $1.5 million would be distributed to more than 300 students for the 2008-09 academic year, Durkin was front and center as a shining example “of where your money is going,” said Richard F. Connolly, a Ouimet scholar who remains unquestionably the MVP behind the organization.

So moving was Durkin’s speech that even the great Player was admittedly unsure as to whether he could follow such a script. No surprise, but he handled the challenge brilliantly. Evoking an exuberance for golf specifically, and life in general, that is commendable given his age of 72, Player first gave praise to Durkin and cited him as an example “of the America I have come to know.”

Looking as fit as he did 51 years ago when he made his debut in America, the man from South Africa accepted the 13th Francis Ouimet Award for lifelong contributions to golf. Like Durkin, Player lost a parent at a young age - his mother, Muriel, died when he was 8 - and with his father working long hours in a gold mine 12,000 feet underground, a sense of loneliness and fear often embraced the youngster. But to “flourish in adversity” has always been a rallying cry for Player, whose passion for golf was ignited on that first trip to the golf course with his father, Harry.

Providing the Ouimet Fund with a sweep of the “Big Three” - lifelong awards have now been accepted by Palmer, Nicklaus, and Player - was enough of a coup for the local charitable organization, but then the man they call “The Black Knight” blew organizers away. So moved by Durkin’s speech and the jam-packed house, Player pledged a $100,000 contribution to the Ouimet Fund from his Gary Player Foundation.

His reason? “God has loaned me a talent to do something other than to play golf,” he explained.

A short time later, Player and Durkin shook hands and bid each other farewell, the prime players in a night that once again did mountains of great work. But while there was good reason to rest and absorb the evening, it should come as no surprise that Durkin did otherwise. The next morning he followed through a sort of joke of a promise that he had made as a freshman, that he would end his collegiate career by running a marathon inside the famed UMass cage.

“We made a big event of it,” Durkin wrote in an e-mail, explaining that he did 262 laps, each one .1 miles, and he said it took him 3 hours 10 minutes.

Somewhere in South Africa, just such a story would bring a smile to Player’s face.

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