After Nick Taylor broke a 69-year drought at this year’s Canadian Open — becoming the first Canadian to win his home country’s PGA Tour event since 1954 — and after the pomp and circumstance, a teary FaceTime chat with his wife and a few cold beers, he left the course with a group of friends and stopped at McDonald’s.
And then Wayne Gretzky called while he was in the drive-through.
Taylor’s win in June was a record fourth by a Canadian on the PGA Tour over the past 12 months (although it was the only one to merit a celebratory phone call from the Great One), coming after he nailed a 72-foot eagle putt — the longest putt of his career — on the fourth playoff hole. Down it went as the trajectory of Canadian golf continued to move in the opposite direction.
“To think that I’m the person that people are thinking about,” Taylor said in disbelief, “is kind of breathtaking.”
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It has been an all-time 12 months for Canadian golf. The four winners are the most on the PGA Tour this season from any country other than the United States. Mackenzie Hughes of Dundas, Ontario, and Adam Svensson of Surrey, B.C., won in the fall, while Corey Conners of Listowel, Ontario, won in April. Svensson, Conners, Taylor and Adam Hadwin give Canada four players among the 50 still alive in the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup playoffs; no country other than the United States has more. The second leg of the playoffs, the BMW Championship, starts Thursday, with the top 30 in the standings moving on to the Tour Championship. If more than one Canadian earns his way into that field, it would be a record during the FedEx Cup era, too.
It doesn’t stop there, either: There have been two Canadian winners on the minor league Korn Ferry Tour, another two on PGA Tour Canada, a winner on the Epson Tour (the women’s qualifying tour), and another on PGA Tour Latinoamérica, while Stephen Ames has won four times on the PGA Tour Champions circuit.
And we haven’t even mentioned Brooke Henderson yet.
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The steely-eyed, blond-ponytailed, powerful-swinging small-town hero from Ontario already has 13 career wins on the LPGA Tour — a record for Canadians on either the LPGA or PGA Tour — including the Tournament of Champions to open the 2023 season.
Next week at the Women’s Open in Vancouver, Henderson, who is just 25, will go for her second national open title after winning it in 2018. That year she broke a 45-year Canadian drought on the women’s side. Henderson has been a mainstay in the world’s top 10 for more than a half-decade, and there will be dozens of fans — girls and boys, young and old — making up the “Brooke Brigade” next week in Vancouver, T-shirts and all.
Golf in Canada is clearly experiencing a golden moment, with Henderson’s never-before-seen body of work leading the way and linchpin moments such as Taylor’s Canadian Open triumph — which was celebrated on the green by other Canadian stars — not far behind.
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“Specifically in Canada, I feel like golf’s just continued to grow and evolve, and it’s just going to keep getting better,” Henderson told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in June.
None of this happened accidentally, according to those invested in the success of golf in a country more often identified for its winter sports prowess. Henderson and the other Canadians on the LPGA Tour (Maddie Szeryk and Maude-Aimée Leblanc), plus each of the four Canadian PGA Tour winners this season, were part of Golf Canada’s national team program as youngsters. The national program — which provides financial support, travel opportunities, gear and access to high-level coaching to young golfers — has been part of Canada’s golfing fabric since 2005, and earlier this year even the powerhouse United States took notice.
“We’ve studied Canada very closely, and we see the success,” said Heather Daly-Donofrio, managing director for player relations and development at the U.S. Golf Association.
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The USGA announced in February that it would be launching its own national team program, something seen in almost every other prominent golfing nation. The organization is in the process of interviewing candidates to be the head coach, with the program part of a near-decade-long strategy to help identify and develop the best of the best in American junior golf.
“When I played on the LPGA Tour, I’d look left, I’d look right, and any international player on the range with me had been a product of their national team, whereas we’ve never given that support to our players,” Daly-Donofrio said. “We want to make sure that if a kid picks up a golf club in the United States, they know what the pathway is.”
Fifty-seven golfers are part of Golf Canada’s program, including juniors, elite amateurs and newly minted pros. Canada has audacious goals, aiming to have 30 combined golfers on the PGA Tour and LPGA Tour by 2032, a number that Kevin Blue, Golf Canada’s chief sport officer, landed on after analyzing the length of other countries’ golf seasons and their high-performance output and comparing the data to Canada’s. If Canada — with its golfing public numbering into the multimillions — can develop players to be “tour-level” at the same rate as the United States, for example, then in the next decade the projection is 20 more Canadian men and women will join the current crop to get to 30 with PGA Tour or LPGA Tour status, Blue said.
“The men’s year we’re having has been absolutely phenomenal, and the country needs to believe that this kind of result is possible … and that we should be looking forward to [it] happening more regularly,” Blue said. “Not that we’re going to have four different [PGA Tour] winners every year, but a mind-set shift from ‘Canada is an underdog’ to ‘Canada is a major golfing country’ is something we hope to help achieve as we move forward.”
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Canada’s men’s national team is overseen by Derek Ingram while the women’s national team is headed by Salimah Mussani.
Mussani said more girls are being moved into Canada’s golf system sooner, which “can only be a good thing.” On the men’s side, two decades after Mike Weir’s Masters victory in 2003, the country is seeing the impact of that north-star kind of victory. All of Canada’s PGA Tour members have pointed to Weir’s win — which came around the time Tiger Woods was dominating pro golf — as a key part of their development.
“I look up to Mike Weir, and if kids say the same thing about me, that's the biggest compliment I probably could ever get,” Taylor said.
Part of Golf Canada’s focus is finding talented youngsters earlier and keeping them involved in the sport. That’s where Tristan Mullally comes in. He was the women’s national team coach for a decade before getting promoted into a new role in May 2022 as the head of national talent identification for Golf Canada.
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The organization also now has a home in Arizona for wintertime training and launched First Tee-Canada in 2020 to create even more junior golf opportunities. Combine those efforts with the dozen or so pro victories from the past year, and you’ve got momentum that Mullally said is “immeasurable.”
Mullally, Mussani, Ingram and Blue are playing key roles behind the scenes, but they beam with pride after seeing wins such as Taylor’s or Henderson’s record-setting body of work instead of seeking credit for themselves.
“Having someone who has done it from a country that has snow on the ground and the resources aren’t dripping from everywhere — that’s huge,” Mullally said. “It gives belief in a dream [that Canadian junior golfers] maybe never really had before.”
Such as getting a call from Wayne Gretzky — while waiting for fast food.
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