1 January 2023|Thoughts about
When my daughter was diagnosed with leukaemia, she was learning to play golf and taking lessons with the excellent Wellsgreen Tigers and my friend Henry Wong. Despite being weak from treatment, she remained determined to carry on with her golf lessons. I think the act of smashing the ball was quite therapeutic at times. She also wanted to complete her Tiger “badges”. A good example of her determination! I’ve always been a keen golfer too so while she was at Tigers I would get some practice time too.
In early 2018 I read the inspirational story of the professional golfer, Jigger Thomson. Jigger, now standing at an impressive 6'9", obtained his European Tour card at Q-School in 2017 at the age of 21. You should search YouTube for an interview he gave about that event to understand just how much of a challenge Q-School really is. If that’s not remarkable enough on its own, the thing that brought him to our attention was that he also had leukaemia at the age of 7. The story was quite an inspiration for my daughter so we decide that we would like to try to contact Jigger.
That wasn’t particularly straightforward though as we didn't really know where to start. Stewart Whiteford, who runs Wellsgreen driving range, is the brother of former European Tour player Peter, so I started there, but with no luck. I tried my club pro, but no luck there either. Fortunately, I also had a fitting appointment booked with SGGT and asked Scott Gourlay if he had any ideas. SGGT has many connections with current tour players and a few weeks later Scott got back in touch to say he had contact details for Jigger. So we composed a short email to Jigger to introduce ourselves and say how inspirational we found his story. Bearing in mind he was only 22 at the time and busy on tour, we never really expected to hear anything back, so it was a real delight when he did reply. Not only that but he made the extra effort and sent some gifts through too.
We followed his first year on tour (2018) with great interest and were totally gutted when he just missed out on winning the Made in Denmark tournament that September. What a life-changing result that would have been. The following he was due to play in the Dunhill Championship in St Andrews and we agreed to meet at that if he had time. What better place than Janettas Gelateria on South Street. Jigger (and his then fiancé Olivia) were fantastic. There was no awkwardness, we had a great catch-up and agreed to keep in touch in future.
And keep in touch we have done. We continue to follow Jigger every time he’s playing and quite regularly exchange WhatsApp messages and photo updates. While golf has recently taken a lower priority for my daughter, now we are living in St Andrews there’s more opportunity to pick it up again as the facilities and opportunities for kids to get into golf are excellent. Hopefully my wife and both daughters will all give it a go. That would be a dream fourball. Covid lockdowns obviously had a massive impact on golf over the next couple of years, but it was great to be able to catch up with Jigger and (now wife) Olivia again last July when they came to stay with us during the Hero Championship at the Fairmont. It was our pleasure to host them in our new home.
We will always continue to follow Jigger’s progress, wish him all the very best of success and hope to have many more chances to catch up in future. p.s. I would like to write some more about childhood leukaemia, but I'm just not sure of the right way to go about it yet.
Comentarios