It looks like the 2011 golf season in Estevan is a washout, literally.
Just as Estevan Woodlawn Golf Club and Hidden Valley Golf Resort were getting back on their feet from two earlier rounds of flooding, the waters knocked them down again and this time it might be a while before they get up.
Outflows from Boundary and Rafferty were jacked up on Saturday and continued through Monday, and it didn't take long for the impact to be seen at Woodlawn, with virtually the entire course under water and the bridge on Highway 47 damaged.
Local golfers probably won't be able to get back on the fairway until sometime in July.
Coupled with shutdowns and tournament cancellations earlier this spring, that makes for a big financial headache.
It's not clear how much the damage will be, but both courses will need help from volunteers with pumping water and maybe even more sandbagging in order to get through the crisis.
Communities need to rally together when confronted by disaster, and Woodlawn and Hidden Valley will be relying on that in the coming weeks.
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While no one could get out to play on the weekend, golf fans were kept entertained at home by a spell-binding performance from Rory McIlroy at the U.S. Open.
The 22-year-old phenom from Northern Ireland tore up the course at Congressional in Bethesda, Md., breaking or tying 12 Open records in the process.
McIlroy blew away the field with a finish of 16-under, a whopping eight strokes ahead of second-place Jason Day and the lowest score ever at the Open.
McIlroy slowed down a bit on the weekend after shooting 11-under through two rounds, but he still broke 70 in all four rounds, only the third player in U.S. Open history to do so.
That the feat came just two months after a monumental collapse at the Masters, where McIlroy shot 80 on Sunday to fall from first to 15th, makes it more impressive.
Teeing off with throngs of people watching your every move can't be easy, to begin with.
McIlroy had people constantly asking him about his meltdown at Augusta, the last time he was in a situation like this.
Yet he shrugged it off, stayed in the zone and walked off the 18th green to give his dad, Gerry, the best Father's Day gift a dad could imagine.
It's not hard to see why many people see McIlroy as the next big thing on the PGA Tour.
On a related note, I want to thank Rory, as well as Lee Westwood and Y.E. Yang, for vaulting me to the top of the Mercury office pool.
Josh Lewis can be reached by phone at 634-2654, by email at [email protected], on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joshlewis306 or on his Bruins blog at http://bruinbanter.blogspot.com. He's going to the NHL draft this weekend in Minnesota and hopes his Leafs can snag Matt Puempel at 25th overall.
