As the first African-American player to earn induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame, there is no questioning the mark that goaltending legend Grant Fuhr made on the ice.
Inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2003 and included among the NHL’s 100 Greatest Players in 2017, Fuhr was a six-time NHL All-Star who won five Stanley Cups with the Edmonton Oilers after being the eighth overall selection of the 1981 NHL entry draft. Fuhr was known as a money goalie who was at his best in the biggest games.
That mentality also served him well on the golf course. While he certainly wouldn’t have been your first choice if you were placing a bet on US Open golf, Fuhr was able to play with the best golfers in the world, teeing it up in 10 PGA Tour events.
Golf has always proven to be a natural fit for pro hockey players, since their season is generally concluding just as the warmer weather and golf season is arriving.
“You don’t lose your competitiveness,” Fuhr explained to theDesert Sun. “I’ve always liked golf. I’ve always had friends who played professional golf. That’s the great thing about golf. You can be competitive with it.
“So it’s something that you can do in the off-season, and hockey is geared for it. You’re in the winter, you are in Canada, it’s cold, it’s snowy, you can’t play golf. And then it gets nice out and hockey season is over, so we always played a lot of golf.”
Taking Challenging Step To Pro Tours
Fuhr didn’t just know professional golfers, for a brief time, he would prove talented enough to join their ranks. He would earn his Canadian Tour card.
“After you have done your career, when you first retire, you are looking for things to do,” Fuhr said. “So (golf) fits really well. Now you have something to occupy yourself so your wife doesn’t shoot you. Because if you are home, you are going to get shot.”
Many hockey players are excellent golfers, but that’s much different than being of the caliber to be able to tee it up alongside the elite, the absolute best players on the planet. As much as Fuhr was able to make that grade, playing in Web.com Tour and MacKenzie Tour events, he was never able to earn a single penny in competition during his 10 appearances in PGA Tour-sanctioned events.
“On a given day, you can compete with them,” Fuhr said of the world’s top golfers. “Mind over matter. I mean, as a professional athlete, we still think pretty well. Whether or not your body allows you to do it is another story. But your mind still works.”
Battling against players who have dedicated their lives to the game was a challenge that Fuhr found to be daunting. He quickly would learn that much like hockey, it would be little nuances that made the difference between becoming a champion and remaining an also ran.
He came the closest to making the cut at a Web.com Tour event hosted by his close friend and longtime teammate Wayne Gretzky.
“The first year of Gretz’s Nationwide (now Web.com) event, I think I missed the cut by two shots,” Fuhr said. “I wasn’t a good putter at the time. If I had putted any good, I could have made the cut.”
Another factor that Fuhr sees evident among athletes looking to move into competitive golf is that they aren’t anxious to start at the bottom and grind their way to the top – the same journey that most every PGA Tour player must traverse before making the big time.
“Something a lot of guys don’t want to do is play mini-tour stuff,” Fuhr said. “They want to just jump right in. and it’s different. You can go play for a few dollars, I can still do that, but that’s what you’ve got to do.
“Those (mini-tour) guys aren’t good enough to play regularly, but they are a lot better than you think they are. You’ve got to put the time in to play those events.”
A Celebrity Golf Icon
It proved to be a different matter on the Celebrity Tour. There, Fuhr was an elite performer when taking to the links against other athletes, musicians and actors for whom golf was a passion, but not their main career choice.
Fuhr was a regular competitor and title contender at the American Century Championship, an annual competition to determine the best golfers among American sports and entertainment celebrities. The tournament is played at Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course along the edge of Lake Tahoe.
Having run with the top dogs of golf, Fuhr gets a kick watching other celebrities as they find out that as good as they are at the sport, they’re nowhere near the level they need to be to compete with professionals. Recreational golf and competitive golf are two completely different realms.
“I know where they are going, and I know what they are trying to do,” Fuhr said. “It’s just it’s a bigger step than people think.
“You just don’t realize the work and the effort that goes into it. It takes a lot more work than people realize. I know when I tried to compete, you’re at the golf course from 7 in the morning until dark, whereas regularly you could go out and hit balls at 7, go out and play nine holes at 7:30, 8 o’clock, come in and have lunch and maybe go back, practice for a couple of hours, then go out and play another nine. But to compete, you’ve got to be at the course and working all the time.”
These days, Fuhr still keeps one foot in hockey as an analyst on AHL broadcasts of the Coachella Valley Firebirds. He’s also a coach in 3ICE, a summer pro 3-on-3 hockey league.
And the other foot is still firmly planted in the world of golf. Fuhr even hosts his own celebrity event, the annual Grant Fuhr Celebrity Invitational at Desert Willow Golf Resort.
