It’s all Ryan Reynolds fault!

My Summer 2023, £100K Charity Golf Challenge is all Ryan Reynolds’ fault, YES that Ryan Reynolds!

I know the headline sounds like Clickbait, but it is 100% true. So how is my ‘1906 Club’ Challenge Ryan Reynolds’ fault? Let me explain…..

The Inspiration

Near the end of 2022, my Step Mum (Pru Moore) lost her battle with Cancer. Despite being given just 18 months by the Doctors she approached the diagnosis with her typical grit & determination and put up an amazing fight for just short of 4 years. This was typical Pru and her hometown benefited greatly from these character traits for many years as she served on both Town & District Councils. Such was her nature, she was still helping others in her community right up until being admitted to St.Peter & St.James Hospice for her last few weeks.

Those final weeks were especially hard for the whole family, seeing a loved one’s health decline so dramatically before their passing is heartbreaking and it had a real impact on me. I took it as a stark reminder that life is finite and should be lived to the max; that adventures & bucket list items need to be had and not constantly put off to a future date that may not be there.

You Only Live Once

I love golf and exploring new places, so I decided I should go on a Summer 2023 golf adventure (although I wasn’t sure how that would look yet). Then one night I stumbled upon an article titled ‘Hollywood’s Biggest Stars on the Golf Course’. As I was scrolling through the picture slides, I thought to myself…

As I am currently living in the UK, Hollywood and all its Stars are effectively a million miles away, but then I got to slide 34 of the post…… and there he was….. Ryan Reynolds!!!

What was special about Ryan? Well let’s just say that he and his mate Rob McElhenney were getting a lot of press in the UK at the time due to their ownership of Wrexham football club who were pushing for promotion back into the English Professional Football League (which they have since achieved – Congrats Wrexham AFC ⚽️🏆👏).

So in my optimistic mind I thought ‘Well Ryan does spend some time in the UK now and he is an awesome guy and we have so much in common (well we both have 🇨🇦 passports and have both lived in Vancouver 😜) so maybe….. just maybe…… I could somehow make it happen 🤔

What A Guy!

In case you are in any doubt, I present to you Exhibit A for ‘Ryan Reynolds Is An Awesome Guy’ it shows exactly why the whole of Canada is so proud of him [see video below].

Anyway back to my blog post…….

Discovering The ‘1906 Club’

Next I googled “Wrexham + Golf” and came across the Wrexham Golf Club website and that is how I discovered something called the ‘1906 Club’.

The 1906 Club is a group of courses all established in…. you guessed it…. 1906 and to celebrate their centenary years they agreed to do a reciprocal agreement that would allow members of each club to play the other clubs on a complimentary basis (subject to a few rules).

The Challenge Is Born

That is when I had the idea for my 1906 Challenge, I thought ‘How awesome would it be to play all 45 of the courses in one Summer and visit loads of parts of the British Isles that I have never been to.

[By now it should be very clear, if it wasn’t for Ryan Reynolds, I would not have discovered the 1906 Club and my idea for the 1906 Challenge would never have come about, so YES it is totally Ryan Reynolds fault that I am on this crazy journey this Summer!]

The idea of doing all the 1906 clubs in 1906 hours popped into my head a few days later, it sounded catchy and when I worked it out (1906 hours is 79.4 days) it seemed like a perfect amount of time to play 4-5 courses per week, do all the driving in between and have weekends to explore (and get me laundry done😜).

So that is how the ‘idea’ for ‘The Challenge’ came about, now I just had to see if I could make it a reality. Read my next blog post ‘How ‘The 1906 Challenge’ Went From Idea to Reality’ to find out how I did it.