Anthony Whiting prevailed in a playoff despite an earlier shot that dare not speak its name.

Greg Moody presents the Ed Lex Trophy to Anthony Whiting

You’re a student wrapping up the 11th grade at North Vancouver’s Carson Graham Secondary and you’re standing on the fairway on the 15th hole at Richmond Golf and Country Club. It’s the final round of the Zone 4 Junior Championship, and thanks to an even-par first round 72 at Squamish Valley and steady play in general, you’ve got a two-stroke lead—definitely not the time to hit a screaming hosel rocket.

But that’s just what Anthony Whiting did. “It was hot and my grip was sweaty,” the Seymour member says, with the same degree of concern he appears to have shown on the course, because after taking his double he rolled in a 55-footer on the very next hole, ultimately leaving him tied at 144 with Marine Drive’s Jeevyn Lotay after 18.”

On the first playoff hole Lotay missed from 10 feet while Whiting made from six, and a few minutes later Zone 4 Junior chair Greg Moody was presenting him with the Ed Lex trophy. Defending champion Max Osten, a Richmond member, made six on the Par 4 17th after driving it into a greenside bunker. That most unlikely double gave Osten the low score of 70 on the day but he missed the playoff by a single stroke.

Whiting follows in the footsteps of other recent Junior winners as an early devotee of the game. “At seven I went to a pitch and putt camp,” he says, and not long after he had a sheet laid out in his backyard for short game practice. At 13, he enlisted noted North Vancouver teaching pro Bryn Parry as his coach, a relationship that continues today. Parry, as well as his parents, get lots of praise from the 17-year-old, and so does his Seymour club. “Three of the past five Junior winners,” he notes.

With another year of high school still to come, our new champion has yet to pursue college options, but golf teams and scholarships are definitely part of the plan. More immediately he’ll be joined by Aiden Liu and Tiger Zhao on our Zone 4 team at the provincial Junior Boys Championship to be held in July at Quilchena Golf and Country Club in Richmond. It took a score of 82 for the 49 of 72 players who made the cut at Squamish; a two-day total of 156, or 41 Order of Merit Points from the Zone’s nine-tournament Spring Tour, to advance to the B.C. Junior. Good luck to all.

- Jim Sutherland