Long-time Southwest Florida instructor and trick-shot artist Mike still relishing on-stage showmanship, here and abroad
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| Trick-shot artist Mike Calbot participated in a photo shoot at the Pyramids at Giza to help promote golf in Egypt. The long-time Southwest Florida instructor is not slowing down just yet. / Special to news-press.com |
At first, Egyptian tourism officials had Mike Calbot hitting fluttery plastic golf balls a good 1,500 yards from the sacred Pyramids at Giza. Even with the balls’ unspectacular flights, kids scurried off to retrieve them.
Told where to stand and where to aim, Calbot switched to regular golf balls, launching them toward the Pyramids from what was still a safe distance.
“I’m the only golf professional to hit balls in front of the Pyramids,” Calbot, a golf instructor and trick-shot artist in Southwest Florida for more than 40 years, said of his promotional photo shoot in Cairo in December.
At first, Egyptian tourism officials had Mike Calbot hitting fluttery plastic golf balls a good 1,500 yards from the sacred Pyramids at Giza. Even with the balls’ unspectacular flights, kids scurried off to retrieve them
“They’re trying to promote golf in Egypt. They’re trying to promote history and golf. (It) was fabulous.”
It also was beautifully symbolic. The over-the-top event underscored the career of an affable, all-world talker who seems more a product of golf’s barnstorming past than its buttoned-down present.
Following his photo shoot at Giza, Calbot relocated to Soma Bay Resort on the Red Sea to perform a trick-shot routine so familiar it’s a wonder he doesn’t do it in his pajamas.
Hooks, slices, high balls, low balls — all struck on command — were mixed with shots from his knees, off elevated tees, with bent shafts and balanced on one leg on a chair, among others.
“I don’t want to stop,” said Calbot, who added Egypt to the list of international locales where he has made his most-lasting mark. “I’m trying to go eight years. I want to do another world tour.”
OLD SCHOOL
Born into a “very very poor family” of Italian and Irish immigrants in Philadelphia sometime after World War II but of a charmingly dubious time frame — “I’ll give you what’s on my current license,” he said. “It says 1952” — Calbot is far from the originator of golf trick-shot displays.
But his longevity, perseverance and diligence — not to mention stories that string together like links on a Rolex — make for fascinating listening, which is good considering his trick shots don’t travel the distances they once did.
