Despite a lifelong love of golf, a sport that has provided him a career for the past 40 years or so, Vic Whissell has never, ever taken a lesson to work on his swing.
Really never needed to, in the mind of the main man (owner / operator / instructor) at the Valley Family Golf Centre in Valley East.
His approach all dates back to a fairly innocuous start on the driving range of the old Fairways Golf Course (located somewhere near Cambrian Heights in those days).
“I would be at the driving range eight, nine hours a day on the weekends, hitting my own balls from this side of the field, there and back,” said Whissell, who figures he picked up his first club in his early teenage years. “It was trial and error. I always liked to get better. Every time I would practice, I wanted to get better.”
For as much as Whissell loves the game, he never pursued it as a serious option — at least not in looking to turn pro as a player — foregoing any of the junior events and basically limiting himself to competitions that existed in and around Greater Sudbury. Off the course, he worked at the Dominion supermarket for seven or eight years, and then in finance and banking through until the mid to late eighties.
On a local level, Whissell would win his share of tournaments, though that wasn’t his driving force.
More so, he was driven by a deeply rooted desire to learn, to understand everything that would cause the golf ball to travel the way that it would.
Given that this experimentation took place long before the advent of the internet or technology that measures every single aspect of a golfer’s swing, Whissell’s laboratory was the great outdoors. And repetition of several hundred thousand movements.
“I could hook a ball, I could slice a ball, I could hit it straight – and I could call my shot before I hit it,” he said. “With every shot that I hit, I figured there was a reason the ball did what it did. I tried to figure out what caused this to occur. That’s how I learned.
“And when I looked at someone else (swing a club), I could see it readily.”
Let’s come back to that in just a minute.
While still working in banking but watching his five children gradually hitting their teenage years, Whissell opened a driving range on Main Street in Val Caron some time in the eighties, not all that far from where École publique de la Découverte currently sits.
“I tied it in to my kids needing summer jobs,” Whissell said. “In those days, we didn’t have machines to pick up the balls after they were hit – so we picked them like blueberries, one by one. That was tedious.”
It was also the genesis of important lessons for the entire family, who quickly came to understand that, both in business and in life, the need for thriftiness when it comes to building a brand.
“It was a tough beginning, but it was a good learning curve,” said Whissell. “If you can do that, you can do anything. That’s what I tried to impart to my kids.”
Within a few years, his passion was now his career, with the man who is blessed with equal amounts of ingenuity and common sense expanding his horizons within the landscape that covers the entire spectrum of golf.
“I built my own (golf) clubs, nine clubs, all built by me,” Whissell noted proudly of the process that began just after the turn of the millennium and a handful of years after he made the move across the old Highway 69 to his current location in Blezard Valley.
“You have to get the right flexes, the right weight, the right angle on the face of the club — and everybody is different,” he continued.
In much the same way he approached the building of a nine-hole course on the same property in 2012, Whissell mastered an understanding of that piece of equipment that avid golfers hold so dear.
“I think that when you’re self-taught, you do more research than the guy who just attends a course,” he stressed. “I research what I want to learn. I read a book, try it and do it again.”
The marvel of the man is the manner in which he has tied all of this together. As much as one might want to make a case for some higher levels of learning, it’s very difficult to dispute his logic.
Consider his approach to teaching golf.
“You build a reputation based on your ability to improve somebody’s game,” said Whissell emphatically. “That, to me, is teaching. If what I tell you works, how can you deny that?”
Though he would love nothing more than to spend his remaining years stationed at the venue he calls home, the recent news of a pending sale of the land by the property owner might throw a fly in the ointment.
If this is the end of this chapter, Vic Whissell will have few if any regrets.
“I loved golf, worked hard at it and still enjoy the game today,” he said. “It’s been a lifelong love. It was never, ever a job for me to come to work in the morning.”
Randy Pascal is a sportswriter in Greater Sudbury. Pursuit is made possible by our Community Leaders Program.
