'Refreshing' break for Selkirk's PGA vet
By PAUL FRIESEN -- Winnipeg Sun
He's got his first summer off in years, so what does Glen Hnatiuk do? He piles his wife and kids into a motor home in Florida and heads for Canada.
Hey, it's not often a PGA Tour pro can make like the rest of us and go on a July vacation.
But Hnatiuk, the pride of Selkirk, has all kinds of time on his hands these days, after undergoing season-ending elbow surgery in May.
Plagued by a worsening case of tennis elbow, the six-year Tour veteran finally decided to take care of it, hoping that by throwing in the towel on this golf season he can wring out a few more good years on the other end.
"It might be the start of the back nine of my golf career, I guess you could say," Hnatiuk, here for his annual charity tournament, was saying yesterday. "I actually expect to come back better."
It'll be a while before he knows.
Hnatiuk doesn't expect to swing a club until early September, nearly four months after the procedure. That's when he hopes to start gearing up for his first tournament, likely in January.
That'll be eight months out of competition.
"It's tough to sit and watch everybody else winning tournaments and making all that money," Hnatiuk admitted. "But I realized when I got into this that it was going to be this way."
The procedure Hnatiuk had done sounds like something out of PSI Factor.
Instead of cutting the tendon and reattaching it to the bone, the surgeon used a radioactive probe to poke holes in it.
"I guess the radioactive frequency does something to repair the tendon," Hnatiuk said. "He said the recovery period is quicker and there's not as much soreness. It's relatively new ... I was the guinea pig."
The success rate, though, is high, so there's no reason to think Hnatiuk won't be back.
Of course, the golf swing has a mind of its own, so who knows what the thing is going to be doing in the meantime.
Hnatiuk hasn't actually hit a shot since mid-May. For all he knows, his swing is staying out late and getting sauced every night, planning to come back with a serious hangover.
But the 39-year-old is taking a novel approach to the mental aspect of the game.
Instead of visualizing his swing when he goes to bed at night or watching a ton of golf on TV, he's turned the whole golf mindset off.
"I'm leaving it," he said. "And I think it's going to be good for me. I've always been pretty laid back. But there comes a time when it doesn't matter how low-key you are, you need some time off. I'm not saying I needed all this time off for my mental state, but it can't hurt. Being refreshed is one of the best things."
It's not like he's had nothing to do.
His two little girls -- eight-year-old Aileen and Morgan, who's six -- needed a ride to and from school every day. And being home allowed his wife, Julia, an opportunity to have a normal life for a while.
As far as retaining his Tour card, Hnatiuk has received a medical exemption, allowing him to add the earnings from his nine tournaments earlier this year to about 20 events next season in an effort to crack the magical top-125.
So for the first time since he reached the game's big leagues, Hnatiuk won't spend the summer fretting about his place on the money list.
He'd probably rather talk about his vacation.
"We went to Mt. Rushmore -- that was a blast," he said of the drive up. "It's pretty cool. And we're going to be doing some visiting on the way back to Florida ... that's our big trip. It's pretty neat. We wanted to do something different, now that I have all the time."
