THE WAY THEY WERE

Jim Miller and Ian

Grant, Brora's best

golfing sons

By ROBIN WILSON
Sifting through the pages of the Kirkwoodgolf.co.uk website submissions about female mult-club champions reminded me of features on the same subject I submitted many years ago to the former Highland Football and Sport publication and featuring Kingussie's John Gunn and the Morayshire kingpins, Norman Grant and Bryce Milne, of Lossiemouth and Elgin. At the time I remember being asked why I had not featured Jim Miller from my own Brora club. The answer was simple. Jim was still setting records and winning the Brora championship.
Scanning the club honours board again last weekend it showed that Jim was winning the championship from 1962 to the last year he entered, 1993, missing out on on only seven years in a record total of 26 club title wins.
In the seven years Miller's name is not inscribed six of them he did not play and in only one year (1976) was he beaten over 72 holes. Arguably the next best golfer to come out of Brora at the same time as Miller was Ian Grant and in 1976 Grant scored 284 against Miller's 294.
Ian Grant (pictured above by Robin Wilson at the Brora champions' board) was at home from Edinburgh University that year and when discussing this with him last weekend on a visit to his mother he believes he played his best golf in 1976.
“I got an Edinburgh University blue for winning all my matches in the university championships that year as well as the Brora championship, although the weather was not too good that week hence the higher than normal scoring," Ian told me.
Personally I think 1979 was his best year. After winning the North District championship at Nairn in May, he followed up with the Sutherland county championship in June and then returned to Nairn in August to become the first player in the North to hold both district and 72- hole North of Scotland titles in the same year.
Elgin's former member, Walker Cup player Scott MacDonald is the only other player to have equalled this.
Grant now works and stays in Edinburgh and will be 55 in November, just a couple of months too late to reform as seniors the Brora team that he was a member of when winning two Northern Counties Cups in 1977 and 1985 for this year's senior cup at Inverness Golf Club in September.