Winning the Idylwylde Men's Invitational Golf Tournament is something that runs in the Brewer family.
Bruce Brewer has won the tournament on four different occasions between 1965 and 1977. His son Mark, who spent a decade as his father's caddy, eventually started competing himself. He has captured the title three times now, and is last year's defending champion.
While the younger Brewer said his season got off to a rocky start this year, his game has started coming around in the last couple weeks.
“I'm feeling a lot more confident then I did at the start of the year about coming back to defend,” the Pickering resident said.
Close to 100 of the top amateur golfers in North America will join Mark Brewer on the Idylwylde golf course July 23-25, vying for the championship title of the 63rd edition of Canada's longest running match play golf tournament.
“There's a good mix of the veterans and a new group of young kids coming up,” Brewer said of the competition. “It's a nice mix between the old breed and the new breed.”
Matt Bortolotto, from Sudbury, has been competing in the tournament for the past five or six years. As the Idylwylde's 2010 club champion, the 22-year-old is looking to improve on his previous years' results.
“I've made the championship flight twice but lost in the first round each time,” he said. “I'm looking to improve on that this year and make it past the first day, and hopefully play well.”
After playing in the tournament for the past 25 years and acting as the tournament chair for the past 12, Rob Coe said the storied tournament continues to draw some of the best players at the amateur level.
“The reason why we attract such good players is because there's not a lot of golf tournaments that run in the format of match play,” he said.
Many of the younger players participate in the Idylwylde tournament “to play very high level competitive golf to practice up for the Canadian Amateur,” which follows the match play format, Coe explained.
Earlier this month, the Idylwylde also hosted the Men's Ontario Amateur Championship, which Coe said helped the club draw more high calibre players to this year's Men's Invitational.
“We have a real strong field this year, probably a little stronger than last year,” he said. “We had some of the best players across the province come up (for the Ontario Amateur), and were able to recruit three young players that played in the U.S. under scholarships.”
The tournament runs July 23-25 at the Idylwylde Golf and Country Club on Walford Road. The public is invited to come out and watch the competition, free of charge.
