Golfers Out In Increased Numbers

Enville is once more the setting early next month for the second staging of the They Wore The Shirt charity golf tournament.

And there will be more participants and more former Wolves players this time, with the pledge from chief organiser Steve Plant that the Molineux representation will increase further in future.

Nine club favourites are due to tee off on the championship course at 10am on Friday, June 2 – more than double the number who attended for the inaugural event early last summer.

Last year’s 70-strong field had Kenny Hibbitt, Phil Parkes, Steve Daley, Mel Eves and Phil Nicholls as the star turns and all but Nicholls from that quintet are due to compete in three weeks’ time.

Also on the starting sheet are John Richards, Colin Brazier, Willie Carr, Terry Wharton and Dale Rudge, along with Sky Sports presenter Johnny Phillips, the Wolves fan who compered the club’s Player of the Year awards night on Tuesday and who attended last October’s launch of the book from which the tournament takes its name.

“We have a slight increase on last year in the number of teams and have a much more local flavour to it,” They Wore The Shirt entrepreneur and editor Steve Plant told us.

“I was very grateful this time last year to my friend, Dave Foster, who secured part-sponsorship for it through a nationwide company. But that meant we had a sizeable representation of players from well outside the area.

“We didn’t contact seven or eight of the teams from 2016 because we knew there was plenty of interest around here and the outcome of that is that there will be a lot more Wolves fans taking part.

“We are also sure we can pull in more former players from next summer onwards because we hadn’t realised the ex-players tournament was taking place in La Manga at the same time.

“That always seems to take away two or three of our lads but we will do our homework and make sure these two dates don’t clash. Our aim is to develop the event with 18 teams and 18 former players.”

The whole They Wore The Shirt story has been a stunning triumph, with the successful first staging of the golf tournament followed by a spectacular launch at Molineux in October and then the selling-out of this quality hard-back publication in double-quick time.

An amazing £24,000 has already been raised for the Birmingham Children’s Hospital cancer unit and hopes are high that the June 2 get-together, complete with dinner, raffle and auction, will bring in another £3-4,000.

Details about an associated event, with the same cause in mind, will be released in the coming weeks.