Pegasus Post: September 09, 2021

PEGASUS POST Latest Canterbury news at starnews.co.nz
Thursday September 9 2021 3
Talented golfer with a lot of time on his side
• By Chris Barclay
COOPER MOORE isn’t the first
sportsman to be put off his game
by the garish neon lights of the
Las Vegas strip or Fremont St,
downtown.
On his first visit he stayed in
the MGM Grand, where Mike
Tyson made a relatively meagre
living in Brad Garrett’s Comedy
Club.
He’d bare his soul throughout
“Undisputed Truth”, a cautionary
tale for boxing fans as the
heavyweight champion of the
world detailed how he squandered
millions of dollars worth
of purses.
A prodigiously talented golfer,
Moore made his most recent trip
to Nevada’s desert oasis in 2018,
and three years on, until recently,
he has been whiling away his afternoons
teeing off against painting
ground sheets suspended in a
Christchurch garage.
Fortunately this is not a story
of unfulfilled potential, of opportunity
squandered – it’s quite
the opposite as Moore has been
walking the fairways of Clearwater
and Waitikiri since the
downgrade to alert level 3.
While global sport’s household
names have been impacted by
the Covid-19 pandemic – Tokyo’s
Olympians had anything but an
authentic Games experience –
PHOTO:
GEOFF SLOAN
STOKED: Talented junior golfer Cooper Moore could return to Waitikiri, one of three clubs
he plays out of once Covid-19 alert level restrictions allowed; Pegasus (right) is currently
his favourite course. Here he plays for a Canterbury junior team against China in 2019.
aspiring athletes have also had
to live with measures required to
contain the virus.
Moore, who turned 13 in June,
still has time on his side though,
elite golfers, like tennis players,
tend to start very, very young in
this day and age.
After all, he swung his first
club right-handed as a four-yearold,
and by the time Moore was
eight he had made the cut for an
International Junior Golf Association
tournament.
He was 10th on the leaderboard,
and the Marshland
School pupil learned his lesson,
ditto dad.
“Being in Las Vegas we made it
a family holiday as well, it wasn’t
just about golf,” said Jayden
Moore.
“We were playing golf and going
to the strip and seeing what
was happening there. By the
time we got to the third round,
Cooper was pretty tired, the 40
deg C heat took it out of you.”
When the Moores returned
in 2018, they adopted a business
before pleasure approach for
the World Stars of Junior Golf
tournament.
“We had a detailed plan. We
stayed 25 minutes from the strip,
close to the course. After eight
days of golf, we had the holiday,”
Jayden Moore said.
Work before play paid off as
Cooper, a member at Clearwater,
Russley and Waitikiri, won the
boys’ nine-10 years grade at the
extra hole at Paiute Golf Resort.
“That was a really good experience
for us to see where he was
at. It was also an eye-opener to
understand what golf was like
on a world stage,” Jayden Moore
said.
• Turn to page 4
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