Burlington's Grant Fraser changed the role of the golf professional

Hamilton Spectator

17-05-2025

You would be hard-pressed to walk into any golf pro shop in Ontario that has PGA of Canada staff and not find one who was either taught by Grant Fraser or at least took a course he had a hand in developing.
Fraser, a Burlington resident, was inducted into the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame last week for the role he played in changing the role of the golf professional.
Joining Fraser in the hall are builders Charles Blair (C.B.) Macdonald and Archie Berube, along with golfer Alena Sharp of Hamilton. Photographer Doug Ball won the Lorne Rubenstein Award, presented to a member of the media for their contributions to golf in the province.
Sharp, who plays on the LPGA Tour, was unable to attend the ceremony and will be inducted later this summer.
Fraser founded the first professional golf management program in Ontario at Humber College and started the Golf Management Institute of Canada, now at the McMaster University Centre for Continuing Education. He also taught at Niagara College's golf management program.
'Golf professionals 25 or 30 years ago, a lot of them were pretty good players who went through an apprenticeship program working in the shop and learned the business that way,' says Fraser. 'Today, the playing side isn't nearly as important as it used to be and the focus has become the business of golf.
'Now, golf professionals have to learn how to read financial statements, put together a marketing plan, understand the governance of a club, learn about food and beverage, and have to be able to talk to the course superintendent about grass.'
He who sees the need should do the deed — it's an old proverb, but Fraser lived it.
By 1993, Fraser had left his job in banking and was teaching part-time at Humber College. But he really wanted to get into golf in some fashion.
He called the PGA of Canada, the CPGA at the time, and they recommended he enrol in one of two professional golf management programs that had just started up in Alberta.
Fraser asked why he couldn't go to one in Ontario. When they explained it was because there wasn't one in Ontario, Fraser knew what had to be done.
He set up a meeting with Humber president Dr. Robert Gordon — who, as luck would have it, was an avid golfer — and pitched the idea of the school having the first professional golf management program in the province.
Fraser was given the go-ahead several meetings later.
'I had a business background, so I knew what a business curriculum would look like and it was a matter of incorporating golf into it,' said Fraser.
'I talked to the guys who were running the two programs in Alberta and they were great. They invited me out and they shared their curriculum with me.'
The process of getting it up and running took about a year. In September 1995, Humber's golf management program welcomed its first 54 students.
'And the program took off,' says Fraser. 'Within three or four years, we had 150 students.'
Fraser ran the program for six years before leaving to foster another idea: The Golf Management Institute of Canada.
The online program — which works with the PGA of Canada, as well as golf course owners, superintendents and club managers — launched in 2000 and is still going.
And, after a 20-year partnership with Niagara College, the institute is now based at McMaster.
Long before he became the executive director of the PGA of Canada, Kevin Thistle ran the bustling 36-hole Angus Glen Golf Club.
'Back then I wondered, wouldn't it have been nice to go to a golf management program and learn accounting and marketing,' he says.
'And when those programs started, I would hire as many of Grant's students as I could because they were getting educated about the business of golf.'
In addition to his teaching, Fraser has covered golf and taken photographs for a number of magazines.
He's a past-president and current board member of the Golf Journalists Association of Canada.
Macdonald has been in the World Golf Hall of Fame since 2007, but hasn't been recognized in the country of his birth until this year.
Macdonald was born in 1855 in Niagara Falls, Ont., in the same Lundy's Lane house in which his mother, a member of the Mohawk First Nation, was also born.
His father was American, and the family moved to Chicago. Eventually, Macdonald was sent to the University of St. Andrews in Scotland where he discovered golf. He met and played with Scottish pro 'Young' Tom Morris, and worked in the pro shop of Morris's father, 'Old' Tom.
Macdonald later returned to the U.S. and in time designed the country's first 18-hole course, the Chicago Golf Club.
He was a successful stockbroker, but was enamoured with growing the game, which was still in its infancy in North America.
Macdonald helped found the United States Golf Association and was a strong enough player that he won the first official U.S. amateur championship in 1895.
That same year, he won the Niagara-on-the-Lake Golf Club's first international championship.
Macdonald is perhaps best known in the U.S. as the father of golf course architecture. During his life, he studied the great golf holes in Great Britain and Europe and included them in every course he designed.
Virtually every golf course architect in the U.S. or Canada has copied this format.
Whole-in-one:
Aces in the area include two at Burlington Springs: Matthew Misa on the 183-yard 17th hole with a six iron and Connor Way on the 151-yard eighth hole with a nine iron … Rick Morrison aced the 155-yard seventh hole at Twenty Valley with an eight iron … There were four singletons at Willow Valley: Aron Reppington on the 122-yard 17th hole with a 54-degree wedge, Len McDougall on the 148-yard 13th hole with a seven iron, Xabier Ross on the 105-yard 15th hole with a pitching wedge, and Dinh Doan on the same hole from 122-yards with a nine iron.