FA I R W I N D S P R O F I L E
Meet Jeff Dinn by Jen Groundwater
this page Jeff Dinn at Fairwinds above with Fred Couples, 2010 opposite with brother, Barry Dinn in 2007
16 PASSIONS | SPRING 2020
Starting in the summer 2020 issue of Passions, we will bring you regular golf tips from Fairwinds’ amiable Assistant Manager of Golf, Jeff Dinn. You wouldn’t have expected young Jeff Dinn to become a golf professional. Nobody in his immediate family played golf; his dad was a keen runner who participated in many marathons and his mom wasn’t particularly into sports. And until the age of eleven, Jeff, like many other Canadian kids, enjoyed playing team sports like hockey, basketball, and baseball. Olympic View Golf Club acted like a key that unlocked the world of golf for Jeff, who grew up beside this well-known Victoria course. Reflecting on it now, he says, it was “the beauty of the course, the green grass, the trees all around, the challenge of it” that attracted him to the game. He got his first set of clubs for Christmas when he was 11 (“back when woods were actually made of wood,” he laughs), and began playing at a nearby nine-hole course the following summer. He joined Olympic View as a junior the summer after that—“Fun times… it was like Christmas when I got there,” he says—and spent the next several summers haunting the course, often playing 36 holes a day with other juniors and whoever else would let him join them. By doing this, he “really learned how to play with and talk to adults,” and he enjoyed being around lots of different types of people, which, although he didn’t know it at the time, was excellent training for becoming a golf pro all these years later. As a young player, he was awe-struck by Tiger Woods’ golf skills and inspired by the humanity and personalities of players like Fred Couples and Mike Weir, for whom he felt a particular affinity: “As a junior, I worked really hard and practiced a lot,” he says, just like Weir, renowned for his work ethic. At 15, Jeff got a summer job on the grounds crew. He would mow the dewy
