Canada is fired up for the Presidents Cup.
Regardless of how many Canucks make the International team, the Presidents Cup’s return to Royal Montreal Golf Club from September 26-29 coincides with Canadian golf having a moment.
This PGA Tour season, Nick Taylor won the WM Phoenix Open and Taylor Pendrith the CJ Cup Byron Nelson. As of this writing, Mackenzie Hughes has three top-10s and Corey Conners two, including a T-9 at the US Open. Throw in Adam Hadwin and Adam Svensson, and that’s six Canadians in the top 100 of the Official World Golf Ranking. On the women’s side, we have 13-time LPGA Tour winner Brooke Henderson. Beauty, eh?
For a country of just 39 million (the population of California) with a short golf season, Canada is punching above its weight. Our pandemic bump is real. Canadians played 74 million rounds in 2023, up from 57 million in 2019, but the real shift goes back two decades. The impact of Tiger Woods’ 1997 Masters triumph for golf culture is immeasurable, but Mike Weir’s 2003 Masters win was comparably forceful in Canada.
“We were so proud, and it was so inspiring,” says PGA Tour veteran David Hearn, now 45. “Mike became the model for how to practise, prepare and play.” Says Graham DeLaet, who retired in 2022 to become a golf analyst for Canadian sports broadcaster TSN, “Weir’s Masters win was the biggest factor in me wanting to turn pro after college.”
Crucially, Weir’s win spurred the nation’s golf governing body, Golf Canada, to launch a formal objective: to help 30 Canadians reach the PGA Tour and LPGA Tour by 2032. The organisation created a year-round performance program that combined fitness, nutrition, psychology, technique and international competition. This included a structure for identifying promising juniors plus housing and training facilities in the United States for pro players.
Canadian golfers play practice rounds at most PGA Tour stops together and often share accommodation. When Ontarians Conners and Hughes play practice rounds with Hadwin and Taylor (both from Canada’s western provinces) it’s usually an east versus west match.
“I give a lot of credit to Golf Canada for helping me get to the next level in my career,” Conners says.
“Setting up the correct environment and culture has been key over the past 15 years, along with getting the right people on the bus to take advantage of those opportunities,” says Derek Ingram, head coach for Team Canada’s National Men’s Amateur and Young Pro Teams, who coaches Conners and Pendrith.
Of course, you can’t talk Canadian team spirit without mentioning ice hockey. Conners played competitive hockey during his formative athletic years, and Pendrith was an avid hockey player who took up golf only at 12. Henderson was a standout goalie on her local junior travel team. The mettle a netminder requires no doubt helped her ability to perform under pressure, and the parallels between the kinematic sequence of a high-net slapshot and a 300-yard drive are well documented.
A recent study by a Queen’s University kinesiology professor, specific to ice hockey but that can apply to golf, said athletes from small towns are statistically at a greater advantage to succeed in professional sports – dubbed the “birthplace effect”. The basic theory is that in small towns, early specialisation in a single sport is less common because communities often focus on training and development as opposed to winning. Many of Canada’s best golfers grew up in small or medium-size towns. Hughes is from Dundas, Ontario (population 24,000), Conners is from rural Listowel (7,500) and Henderson is from Smiths Falls (9,200).
There’s a fair chance that more than two Canucks will tee it as members of the International team. With Weirsy as captain, maybe he’ll flip a Toonie or Loonie to finalise his picks, or, between sips of a Tim Hortons double double, simply say, “Sorry, bud,” to various golfers ranked higher than his compatriots and add more homegrown talent to his squad. O Canada, we stand on the tee for thee.
