Els, Ernie

• Els, Theodore Ernest "Ernie"

Theodore Ernest Els, known as Ernie Els, is a South African professional golfer, golf course designer, and winemaker. He was born on October 17, 1969 in Lambton, Germiston, South Africa. As a child, he played rugby, cricket, tennis, and, starting at age 8, golf. He was a skilled junior tennis player and won the Eastern Transvaal Junior Championships at age 13. Els first learned the game of golf from his father, Neels. Els first achieved prominence in 1984, when he won the Junior World Golf Championship in the Boys 13–14 category. Els won the South African Amateur in 1989 and turned professional that year. Els won his first professional tournament in 1991 on the Southern Africa Tour (today the Sunshine Tour). He married his wife, Liezl, in 1998 in Cape Town, and they have two children, Samantha and Ben. A former World No. 1, he is known as "The Big Easy" due to his imposing physical stature (he stands 6 ft 3 in (1.91 m)) along with his fluid golf swing. Among his more than 70 career victories are four major championships: the U.S. Open in 1994 at Oakmont and in 1997 at Congressional, and The Open Championship in 2002 at Muirfield and in 2012 at Royal Lytham & St Annes. He is one of six golfers to twice win both the U.S. Open and The Open Championship. Other highlights in Els's career include topping the 2003 and 2004 European Tour Order of Merit and winning the World Match Play Championship a record seven times. He was the leading career money winner on the European Tour until overtaken by Lee Westwood in 2011, and was the first member of the tour to earn over €25,000,000 from European Tour events. He has held the number one spot in the Official World Golf Ranking, and, until 2013, held the record for weeks ranked in the top ten with 788. Els rose to fifteenth in the world rankings after winning the 2012 Open Championship. He was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2010, on his first time on the ballot, and was inducted in May 2011. When not playing, Els has a golf course design business, a charitable foundation that supports golf among underprivileged youth in South Africa, and a winemaking business. He has written a popular golf instructional column in Golf Digest magazine for several years. His main residence is at the Wentworth Estate near Wentworth Golf Club in the south of England. However, the family also splits their time between South Africa and their family home in Jupiter, Florida, in order to get better treatment for his son, Ben's, autism.

Lambton, South Africa
Wentworth Estate, Runnymede, Surrey, England
Jupiter, Florida

Professional golfer
Winemaker
Golf course designer

RAD, July 2008 version. Canadian Council of Archives.

Catalogued March 2022.

1) Archival material
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_Els
3) https://ernieels.com/
4) https://www.pgatour.com/players/player.06522.ernie-els.html