His radiant, frank and perennial smile is a sign of identity of Miguel Preysler, a 65-year-old phenomenon with a 0.4 handicap who wins almost everything in amateur golf. The life of this gentleman of Filipino and Spanish nationality, famous surname (he is a cousin of the famous Isabel) and remarkable spiritual and physical youth has always revolved around a sport that has given him more than 800 trophies, countless satisfactions and a couple of frustrations, the ones he suffered when he wasted his chances to become a professional.
Happily married to a wife who fully supports him and understands his golfing ‘vice’ (she also plays, of course), he is in love with Spain and Sotogrande, where he arrived almost 40 years ago.
His arrival in this Andalusian macro-urbanization was curious. In 1970, Miguel played at the Puerta de Hierro Club in Madrid the World Amateur Golf Championship, the Eisenhower Trophy, representing the national team of the Philippines. It was then that he was told he had to visit Sotogrande because there was a wonderful golf course there. It was not the first time he came to Spain, as his parents had family in this country. Even Miguel’s brother was born in Madrid. The twists and turns of the world: three years after that World Cup, he started working for a company that four years later, in 1977, assigned him to Sotogrande. The founder of Sotogrande, Joseph McMicking, was also at that time the main shareholder of the company, Ayala Corporation Philippines. In order to maintain the continuity of the Sotogrande project, McMicking decided to sell Sotogrande to Ayala.
In September 1977, on his birthday, Miguel arrived at his new job in Spain. From 1978 to 1983, until the shares of the company known as Financiera Sotogrande, S.A. were sold, he served as general manager of Sotogrande. In 1983 when Ayala sold out and disassociated himself from Sotogrande, he did not want to return to the Philippines because of the political problems that existed during the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos.
He went to the United States, where he stayed for two years, and in 1986, just after the Spanish border of Gibraltar was opened, he realized that Sotogrande was going to experience a great development and decided to move back to Spain, “and besides I didn’t like the United States”.
His professional life embarked on a new journey, together with the person who had been the director of Sotogrande hotels when Miguel was the company’s general manager. This person had set up a real estate agency and offered Miguel to enter the business because he could not cope on his own. Later, in 1995, he would obtain Spanish nationality because his mother was Spanish (his paternal grandparents were born in this country).
The courtship with one of his two great loves, golf (the other is his wife to whom he has been married for 40 years), began at the age of 10 in a very peculiar way. Miguel practiced many sports until he saw a TV program about golf and decided to take a bat and a baseball and tried to put the ball in a hole he had made with a shovel in the garden of his house and in this way he took his first strokes of something similar to golf.
Seeing that he was interested in learning the sport, his father bought him some clubs, this time real golf clubs. His father, who had stopped playing golf ten years earlier, began to give him daily lessons of about 20 minutes at home after work and made him make swings without a ball, taught him how to hold the club, the posture and the swing. And when he bought him plastic balls to hit in the backyard, Miguel designed his own hole using a tree in the backyard to mark the dogleg of his par 4 and as a hole he took a can of canned pineapple, cut the lid off and buried it in the backyard. Around this can or hole he mowed the lawn every day and when the plastic ball reached the green he would change it for a hard golf ball and then kick it. He even set his own records for his peculiar golf course. However, at that time his favorite sport was sailing and in 1966 he was the winner of the Far East Yacht Racing Championship, an Olympic class Finn (single-handed boat) competition that included participants from Surasia, Australia and New Zealand. Miguel was chosen to represent the Philippines in the Mexico Olympics and had been training for seven months to do so. But when push came to shove, there were no funds to get his boat to Mexico. “I got pissed,” he recalls, “I quit sailing and decided to take up golf.”
His golfing baptism on a real course, in Manila, came more than a year after he started his peculiar home practice and after hitting countless balls on a practice tee for six months. His first handicap, when he was only 11 years old, was 12. Two years later he had lowered it to 3, “but then I stagnated because I didn’t play enough”.
At the age of 17, when he was going to participate in the Olympics as a sailor, he happened to finish twelfth in the Philippine National Golf Championship. The first twelve went to a playoff for the national team, and Miguel, in order to get that place, had to beat five rivals in a play-off. He managed to win the playoff and spent six years in the Philippine national team. At the age of 23 he started working and quit golf because when he left the office it was almost dark and not being able to maintain his level of golf, he decided to quit and return to sailing.
When he came to Sotogrande four years later, in 1977, his handicap had risen to 8 (“I couldn’t hit the ball”, he exaggerates remembering those times). Miguel was fortunate to receive help from Bob Toski, one of the best golf teachers in the United States and former number one in earnings in the American Tour, who took groups of golfers to Sotogrande every year in September. Thus, from 8 he gradually reached handicap +3.2. Since then he competed as much as he could.
His extensive victorious background is attested by the more than 800 trophies he has in a room (it must be very big) in his house. He won the Junior National of the Philippines two years in a row, the Absolute National also, five times with the Philippine national team the championship of Surasia, second individual in the Hispanidad Cup (all Spanish-speaking countries), already in Spain he won five National mid-amateur (he could not participate in national championships in Spain until he got his Spanish passport in 1995), he was runner-up in Europe in the aforementioned amateur category of over 35 years old. He began to play much more when he joined the senior category, at the age of 55. And new triumphs came: four Spanish singles championships and one in doubles, all of them RFEG, and four national championships of the Seniors Association. He won the gold and bronze medal of the European Seniors Individual in 2006 and 2007, being the only Spaniard to date to achieve it. He came third in the British Senior Amateur in 2007, the best result achieved so far by a Spanish senior.
Becoming a professional golfer is something that crossed his mind more than once. But life circumstances made him give up that endeavor. He has no regrets. When he was part of the Philippine national team, he was proposed twice to become a professional in the United States and was offered to pay his expenses to start the American ‘adventure’. However, Miguel decided that he wanted to finish his studies in economics and business. After finishing his degree, he embarked on the world of work and got married. Professional golf was definitively parked in his life. Several years later, when he was already 48 years old, Miguel wanted to get rid of that thorn of his youth and considered the possibility of becoming a senior professional. He spent a year preparing conscientiously for it, working hard with the physical trainer who coached the Spanish national team. But then his life/work circumstances put him at a crossroads again.
He had a real estate agency, the brick market started to go through the roof and, trying to combine golf and business, Miguel suffered so much stress that his heart started to palpitate. The cardiologist warned him that he could not go on with so much hustle and bustle. So he had to make a decision, and opted for the stability and good prospects of his business over the adventure of embarking on the world of professional golf. What also helped him decide was that his wife, who is very much a homebody, would have to make a great sacrifice to accompany him on his golfing trips from hotel to hotel. He admits that, after a year of preparing thoroughly to make the big leap to professionalism, he found it hard to change his plans. In any case, he says he does not regret his decision at all, among other things, because those years were magnificent for his business.
He started competing very strongly in the senior category until 2008, but in 2009 he had to have knee surgery and his performance -and his vital optimism- plummeted. His +1.9 handicap dwindled to 3.8. He began to despair. Fortunately a couple of years ago he decided to take lessons with Juan Antonio Marín, whom he met as a child, a teammate on the club team and to whom he gave his first set of clubs and later became an excellent amateur and eventually the professional at Real Club de Golf Sotogrande. “I was very unmotivated. First I lost the long game, then I started with yips on the approaching and putting and two years after a lot of work with Juan Antonio, I am seeing my game improve and my confidence resurface. There’s still a lot of room for improvement, but I know I’m on the right track.” The best proof that things are back on track is that he has won the national senior again eight years after his last triumph in that tournament, and also this year he won the European Senior Championship for the over-65s.
Miguel is a very dear person in Sotogrande, and especially in the Real Club de Golf, of whose Board of Directors he has been a member for 21 years, almost half of them as vice-president. He confesses that he has been asked several times to opt for the presidency of the prestigious club, “but I resist, because if not, I could not play and compete as before.
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