DUNCAN MUSCROFT may be exiled in Italy but he's as Yorkshire as they come and he makes the trip from his base at Montecchia to the scene of a past triumph at Moortown where tomorrow the 72-hole Glenmuir PGA Championship, the flagship event for club professionals, gets under way.
As a teenager, the son of Leeds legend Hedley Muscroft, carried off the PGA North Region championship at Moortown on ending a brief amateur career that saw him win the British Boys championship.
His biggest success as a professional came two years
ago when he tied with Midlander Paul Wesselingh in the PGA Championship, losing in a play-off to the former European Tour member, a status Muscroft has held in the past.
That earned him a place in the PGA Cup team that lost by a point to the United States in Georgia last year.
He would love another experience of that in the next match, in Scotland next season, and Moortown, the first course in the UK to host a Ryder Cup, in 1929, will be offering qualifying points for that this week on top of a £10,000 prize.
The winner will also earn the use of a top-of-the-range Peugeot car for a year, a five-year exemption from Glenmuir qualifying, a place in the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth next May and exemption from regional qualifying for the 2009 Open Championship plus a place on the PGA Europro Tour.
One added plus: the winner at Moortown is almost certain to line up against the Americans in the PGA Cup in Scotland even if he fails to make the cut in the 2009 Glenmuir PGA championship.
Twenty Yorkshire players start in a field of 155 from the UK and Ireland, among them Lindrick's Yorkshire champion John King, Yorkshire match-play champion Adrian Ambler and John Wells, the Leeds Cup holder.
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