Darren's good friend and ex-bagman Billy Foster did a marathon charity walk from The Barclays Scottish Open at Loch Lomond to The Open Championship at Turnberry in July came to fruition at St Andrews when he presented a cheque for £67,288 to Darren Clarke for The Darren Clarke Foundation.
Foster – who was Clarke’s caddie for 12 years – raised nearly £135,000 in total following the 88 mile hike and decided to split the money raised equally between Clarke’s Foundation – which supports a variety of breast cancer charities – and the Candlelighters Children’s Cancer Trust in his native Leeds.
“I actually enjoyed the walk and it meant a lot for me to do it,” said Foster, who began his walk from Loch Lomond on Thursday July 9 and arrived at Turnberry the following Monday having stopped at four Scottish golf clubs – Helensburgh, West Kilbride, Prestwick and Prestwick St Nicholas – along the way.
“I had been planning to do something like that for about eight or nine years and I finally got round to doing it. The Scottish weather was brilliant to us which made it probably easier that it was going to be. I tried to do 25 miles a day and I had a couple of bad blisters on my feet on the last day but it was worth it and it was great to be able to raise that amount of money for two very worthy causes.
“It is great to be able to present this to Darren for his Foundation here in St Andrews during the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship and it will give me an equal amount of pleasure when I walk into the Children’s cancer unit in Leeds in December and give them their cheque too. I promised them I’d do it and I did it.
“Everyone rallied round to help me, the players out here on Tour along with the caddies and even people I had never met before donated some money to me which meant a lot. So I’d like to thank them all for their generosity.”
Darren Clarke, who lost his wife Heather to breast cancer in 2006, said: “It really was a truly fantastic effort by Billy. He was on my bag for 12 years and obviously he was very close to Heather and knew the whole story. His mum died of cancer as well so the whole Foundation is very close to his heart.
“To raise this amount of money is sensational and it will go towards helping people live – you can’t ask for more than that and you can’t say more than that. I am proud of the work the Foundation does and but it is people like Billy, and what he has achieved, that makes the Foundation special.”
