On behalf of all of us from the Etobicoke Sports Hall of Fame, we are saddened to hear the news of Gord’s passing. He was a Canadian golf icon. A Legend.
And I am truly honoured that I was able to present Gord with his induction award last year” says Joanne Noble, President Chair of the Board of the Etobicoke Sports Hall of Fame.
Lorne Rubenstein called him a legend. Arnold Palmer counted him as a friend. And his children cherish him as an extraordinary parent and mentor. No matter how you slice it, Gord De Laat can rightly be considered a gentleman of Canadian golf.
De Laat, who turned 99 on April 11, 2016, is famous for his dedication and love of the game, a passion that has only grown over the decades. “Dad has both lived and witnessed a very large part of Canadian golf history,” De Laat’s son Chris told Rubenstein, the Globe and Mail’s golf columnist, in 2012.
De Laat’s early years did not lack for drama. He was born in the Netherlands in 1917 as the Battle of Vimy Ridge raged on in northern France. Seven years later, his family sailed for Canada, landing at Halifax’s Pier 21, virtually penniless. “He had to use sports as a vehicle to get out of his situation,” Chris De Laat said. “That’s where golf came in, because that’s where he excelled.”
The slender De Laat was a junior hockey teammate of Punch Imlach’s and no slouch himself on the ice, once scoring nine goals in a single game. He played on the Toronto Maple Leafs practice squad with stars like Charlie Conacher, Busher Jackson and fellow Etobian Joe Primeau. But it was on the golf course that De Laat would distinguish himself, despite not starting out with the most natural ability. “He was persistent,” said Chris. “If there’s anything you can say, it’s his willingness to attack a situation. He never gave up.”
On July 1, 1927, De Laat got his big break when A.B. Fisher, a member at Lambton Golf and Country Club, needed a caddy, and head pro Willie Lamb tasked the 10-year-old Dutch kid hanging around the pro shop with the job. “I told Mr. Fisher all I could do is carry the bag, and that’s what I did,” De Laat told Dave Perkins of the Toronto Star, adding that Fisher paid him 20 cents for his trouble. “He played nine holes and I don’t think I impressed him too much. But my career had started. I’ve enjoyed every single day of it since.”
De Laat did any job he could at Lambton, becoming an A-list caddy and then the club’s junior assistant professional. He would go on to win the 1938 Ontario junior championship and compete in the Canadian Open ten times. At the 1944 Millar Trophy Match-Play Tournament at Islington, the local press called De Laat the “giant killer” after he outplayed what Chris called “the royalty of golf at the time—people who had played at the Masters. He came to that tournament in the back of his father’s pickup truck, while the other kids were coming in the back of their father’s Buicks.”
Though he lost the Millar Trophy final to his good friend Bill Kerr, De Laat parlayed his strong showing into the head pro job at Etobicoke’s Pine Point Golf Club, where he witnessed road engineers driving stakes into the second fairway for what would become Highway 401. His next move took him down the road to the Weston Golf and Country Club near Royal York and Dixon, where De Laat was head professional for 30 years.
He settled in the Kipling and Burnhamthorpe area with his wife Mary, a university-educated, third-generation Canadian from the well-to-do High Park neighbourhood. Mary and Gord, an uneducated immigrant, met at a golf clinic Gord was leading at St. Cecilia’s Church, and the unlikely couple hit it off. “My Dad gave my Mom a ride home, and the next thing you know they’re building a house together,” Chris said.
The De Laats and their nine children could be found in the pews of St. Gregory’s Roman Catholic Church at Rathburn and Kipling every Sunday. Gord hosted parish groups at Weston, while Mary mentored young mothers through the Catholic Women’s League.
Weston hosted the 1955 Canadian Open, where a rookie named Arnold Palmer won his first of 62 PGA tournaments. “De Laat wisely took down the hole-by-hole accounts of Palmer’s four rounds,” Rubenstein wrote. “He kept the scorecards in the Weston pro shop for more than 25 years, and later sent them to Palmer,” a kindness for which “the King” was most grateful. De Laat finished the open at two under par, holding his own in the first round against none other than golf legend Sam Snead. While that result was respectable, De Laat realized his destiny was to be a career club pro. “He was always competitive, always posting good results, but he was never going to be a Tour pro,” Chris said. “But he was good enough to be in those circles.”
De Laat rubbed shoulders with top golfers and frequently welcomed celebrities like actor Bob Hope to Weston. But he never forgot his roots, or his experience growing up with eight siblings in a small wartime house. Ever humble, De Laat would write to sports reporters, thanking them for their coverage—a rarity among pro athletes. “His mother (Antonia) was very influential in reminding him that he always had to be a gentleman,” Chris said. “He was always kind, considerate and even-tempered, and always fair.”
The week after the ‘55 Open, motivated by a desire to provide a good life for his family well into the future, De Laat bought a parcel of land in Caledon East on which he would later build Mayfield Golf Course. De Laat said he designed Mayfield, which opened in 1978, to be an everyman’s course. “It’s the type of club I think people like to play, that the ordinary person likes to play, something they can afford to play.”
Today, De Laat’s children run Mayfield, though Gord remains a fixture on the links and in the clubhouse, sharing his stories. “I can remember my father coaxing us to play with him in the summer twilight,” Chris recalled. “Even now, in his 90s, Dad is often the last player to leave the course.”
Even after the family moved near their new golf course, Mary returned to Etobicoke to buy groceries and get her hair done, and she and Gord often visited their many friends there. “Etobicoke is still part of how we define our family,” said Chris, a family that has grown to include 19 grandchildren and three great-grandkids.
Gord De Laat is widely considered to be Canada’s oldest golf pro, likely of all time. His 81 years as a pro golfer are the longest anyone has ever been a pro in Canada. He won an Ontario PGA Seniors title back in 1972 and is still at it, playing in an exhibition at the Canadian PGA Seniors Championships on September 2, 2016, at Tangle Creek in Barrie, alongside longtime friends John Henrick and Bill Kosak. “He’s a competitor, and he hasn’t changed—he still talks about how he has to make improvements,” Chris said admiringly. “He knows he can’t necessarily perfect it, but he has to do the best he can.”
As a golf instructor, de Laat stressed the game’s strategic side, teaching his many students—among them 2016 Canadian Golf Hall of Fame inductee Warren Sye—how to adapt to whatever situation they encountered.
ScoreGolf magazine noted that de Laat’s career began when golfers used clubs made of hickory wood and continued into the age of steel and graphite. “He’s nearly 100, and he’s still hitting the ball,” Chris marvelled.
“The clubs have changed, the balls have changed and certainly the calibre of players has changed a lot,” Gord de Laat told the Brampton Guardian in 2012. “It’s even tough trying to earn a spot on the Canadian Tour now because there are so many good players coming up.”
Speaking about his own longevity on the links, de Laat drew a simple conclusion: “There’s no better game than golf.”
