Fire and Ice

Four Canadian pros reached the sundrenched 18th tee at The Bear’s Club, the exclusive south Florida retreat founded by Jack Nicklaus himself. Corey Conners and Stuart Macdonald were playing a match against fellow tour players Myles Creighton and Michael Gligic. It all came down to the last. The stakes were enough to make all four players sweat, and as Macdonald remembers it, he was drenched. 

Conners was a scintillating 10 under par through his first 10 holes, and Macdonald had barely contributed to the team all day. This was not an unfamiliar spectacle to Creighton. He was once playing a match against Conners at Dye Preserve in which he was 4 under through six holes and 3 down. Today, though, he and Gligic were effective partners against the one-man show that was Conners.

Conners had graciously invited Macdonald to The Bears Club after hearing the fellow canuck was in town. Macdonald was scraping it around, and he felt like he was letting down his host.

“It’s a weird feeling,” Macdonald said. “He’s the one winning you money because he’s on your team, but he’s also the one making you feel like shit about the state of your golf game.”  

The two had met years before when Macdonald was on Golf Canada’s amateur team and Conners had graduated to the young pro team. Macdonald looked up to players who topped leaderboards before him, especially Conners and Nick Taylor. Conners and Taylor went on to secure jobs on the PGA Tour while Macdonald was still battling in the minor leagues. On the final hole at The Bear’s Club, Macdonald didn’t want to let down his partner, friend and role model. Turning angst into determination, he delivered with the match-clinching birdie. 

His opponents could only shake their heads. “Now you decide to contribute!” one of them said. 

From one friend with a deep admiration for Conners to another. A poster of Conners in champion’s boots hangs behind the desk of Monday Q Info’s Ryan French. As my good friend tells anyone who will listen, Conners won a 6-for-1 playoff at the 2019 Valero Texas Open Monday qualifier, then won the tournament. With the echoes of past Sunday birdies blowing through the San Antonio oaks, Conners added another pair of champion boots to his collection on Sunday. It was also another win for golf-loving Canada.

Here’s a fun fact: According to The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, more Canadian adults play golf than hockey. This surprised me, as I always imagined the puck and ice as the dominant Canadian religion. The Globe and Mail report was from 2016. This is also around the time more Canadian professionals began making their mark. Brooke Henderson won her first LPGA event in 2015 at the Cambia Portland Classic.  Ryan likes to remind me she got into the event via a Monday qualifier. During the 2016-17 PGA Tour season, Mackenzie Hughes picked up his first win, at the RSM Classic. Months later, the man from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Adam Hadwin, bagged the Valspar Championship. Those breakthroughs led to a steady rise of more Canadians succeeding at the top of the game. If a guy from Moose Jaw can do it, why can’t I, eh? 

Here are the current top Canadians based on their respective world rankings: 

• Brooke Henderson: 7

• Corey Conners: 28

• Adam Svennson: 56

• Mackenzie Hughes: 57

• Adam Hadwin: 65

• Nick Taylor: 63

• Taylor Pendrith: 123

Conners, Hughes and Svennson will tee it up this week at the Masters. Mike Weir, the 2003 Masters champion, went before them. He reached as high as No. 3 in the world during his career. That was long before I played with him. At a Korn Ferry Tour event in Panama, I bought Weir an empanada and insisted he sample the spicy sauce. I’d been looking forward to our round all day. We never played together again, but for a brief moment that sauce gave him a satisfaction that fell somewhere between playing a practice round with me and becoming a Masters champion.

If you attempt to identify why more Canadian pros are playing so steadily, you could point to Weir as a trailblazer. You could also point to the increased investment from Golf Canada, the national organization that develops golf talent. Macdonald and Conners were brought together by Golf Canada’s teams. You could also point to Canada’s professional circuit, PGA Tour Canada. 

I played with Hughes in his first season on the Canadian Tour. I had heard about this up-and-comer, who had starred at Kent State. We were in oil country – Fort MacMurray, Alberta – with a $150,000 purse on the line. It felt like a fortune. 

The course was narrow, and the cold rain pelted relentlessly. The tar beetles, straight out of a Biblical plague, were merciless. Sarah, my now-wife from Edmonton, Alberta, was my caddie. The grass squealed as the drenched carry bag pushed her deep into the soles of her shoes. At one point I noticed she was moving awkwardly. She said she was fine, but I wasn’t too focused on golf to notice the painful blisters on her heels. She soldiered on. 

I recall how Hughes played golf like a tactician. He seemed keenly aware about what shots he could play and felt comfortable laying back on narrower holes, relying on his approach game. He possessed a self-awareness above all else. He did it his way – and it worked. The purse that week was put up by the oil company Syncrude. Eleven years later, it’s impossible to imagine purses without a mention of oil, sand and money. 

LIV Golf has organized teams by player nationality: The Torque from south of the border; The Majesticks from England; The Ripper from Australia; The American 4 Aces, and so on. Everyone knows the Aces. What a win it would be for LIV to add a Canadian team. Maybe the team name would be something that evokes the culture, like The Mounties or The Enforcers. Tim Horton’s could sponsor a team with a name like Double Double. Or perhaps something more nationally fitting: The Mannered. But these Canadians, to my knowledge, are too self-effacing for that. Fire and ice are opposite elements. Canadians know the cold. Saudi Arabia is scorching. 

If Conners were a member of the fictional Mountees team, or The Enforcers, he would have prepared for the Masters last week at Orange County National in Orlando. OCN has two courses: Crooked Cat and Panther Lake. Panther Lake remained open to public play during the LIV event. For $179, you could have played on the same property, at the same time, as some of the world’s best. I’m not saying Crooked Cat isn’t a good golf course. The infamous Big Money Classic was held there. OCN is where I earned KFT membership at the final stage of Q school in 2019. While Crooked Cat is enjoyable enough, as Jack Nicholson’s Frank Costello says in The Departed, “If I can slander my own environment, it makes me sad, this regression.” 

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Calgary’s Roger Sloan, who at the 2021 Wyndham Championship lost in a six-man playoff. Branden Grace, who now plays on the LIV Tour, won it. Also in the playoff were Si Woo Kim, Adam Scott, Kevin Na and Kevin Kisner. A six-man playoff is a shootout you’d like to avoid. 

Sloan won on the Canadian Tour in 2011, and then he won the only Korn Ferry Tour event that was played in Canada in 2014. That same season, Hadwin and Taylor graduated to the PGA Tour. Sloan recently lost his good form, but three years before the six-man playoff, he was riding buses with me to Korn Ferry Tour events. 

When my Canadian wife was going through the process of applying for her U.S. green card,  Sloan, who had been through the process, helped steer us away from the pitfalls. He and his wife had applied themselves, filling out laborious, endless paperwork. Knowing that one mistake or omission would send the application all the way to the bottom of the stack, I admired Roger’s attention to detail and his patience. Those traits undoubtedly helped him find his good form. 

As for Conners’ latest win in Texas, Macdonald was in Porto Feliz, Brazil, for the PGA Tour Latinoamerica event. After making his 10th birdie of the day on the final hole of the tournament, he went in search of a laptop. He had just shot a bogey-free 61, beating the Sunday scoring average by 11 strokes and finished tied for sixth. The 61 matched the score Conners had posted as his partner years earlier at The Bears Club. Before the final round, Macdonald had calmed himself with a deep meditation and now he was frantically trying to find a way to watch Conners finish. Just like the feeling he had on the 18th tee of the match at The Bears Club, Macdonald had to find a way to be there for his friend.

He found a friend’s laptop and watched Conners play his last three holes. After the final putt was holed, Macdonald was overjoyed. He is thinking about life outside of golf more these days. His wife, Carly, is expecting their first child this summer. Conners’ beautiful little daughter wrapped her tiny arms around her daddy’s neck on the 18th green, and oblivious to the attention or importance of the moment, rested comfortably. Conners carried Macdonald that day at The Bears Club. In that frame on a friend’s laptop, Macdonald felt a tinge in his heart. Time has passed, things have changed, and what they carry now has never mattered more. 

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