AFTER winning her 57th honour board event at Headland Golf Club, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, evergreen Josie Ryan is quick to downplay her remarkable achievement.
Instead, she apologises for having a handicap of 16, a mark she seems to find embarrassing for somebody who once played off four. She claims she hasn’t broken 80 in years and puts her success down to the notion there aren’t a lot of low-handicappers amongst her club’s female membership.
Perhaps she isn’t quite in the form that twice won her the Australian Women’s Senior Championship, but she’s still one of Queensland’s fiercest competitors, and a legend at Headland, where she’s been club champion 20 times.
She’s now 73, is an asthmatic and, for the past few years, has been battling multiple myeloma, an incurable form of cancer which she keeps at bay with regular chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
When we spoke she’d just left hospital after a four-hour chemo session that she says will keep her going for a month, and was at home looking after a busy two-year-old grandchild.
“I do get tired at times and have to lie down, but I’m just grateful that I’m still able to play golf,” she said. “I enjoy the competition.
“The strength of my game has always been my competitive instinct,” she said. “Not my technique or swing – more my attitude on the golf course.”
In late March those fighting qualities were on display when she teamed with 27-year-old Jack Hourn, a relatively new Headland member, to win the club’s mixed foursomes championship.
Jack Hourn and Josie Ryan after winning the Headland mixed foursomes championship.
The pair shot rounds of 81 and 77 to win by three strokes. It was Josie’s ninth mixed foursomes title, achieved with her fifth different partner.
“Josie was excellent,” Hourn said. “She saved us countless times and drained some vital putts.”
Hourn, a Fly In Fly Out miner, hails from Kingaroy where his famous father Geoff is a 16-time club champion at Kingaroy Golf Club.
“I played in the Queensland senior team with Geoff,” Josie said. “He’s a lovely man, and so is Jack. It was a pleasure to play with him.”
Not long after adding her name to Headland’s honour board for the 57th time, Josie flew to Central Queensland to compete in the Queensland Country Women’s Stroke Championship, as she does most years.
She shot rounds of 91 and 92 – she’s been an A-grader for so long that she still doesn’t keep track of her net scores – which placed her 20th in the field, against competitors many years her junior.
Josie, who in May won Headland’s midweek and Saturday Monthly Medals in the space of three days, regularly competes in state and national Senior Amateur Championships, and last year won the 70+ division of the Australian title at Sydney’s Monash Country Club.
Josie says she appreciates the support she receives from friends, family and the members and staff of Headland Golf Club.
“That’s the great thing about a golf club,” she said. “There’s always somebody checking up on you, making sure you’re okay.”
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