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Golf may be an individual sport, but there will be a definite team feeling among the four Canadian golfers who will represent the country at the Olympics in Tokyo this summer.
Brooke Henderson, Alena Sharp, Corey Conners and Mackenzie Hughes are interconnected in myriad ways beyond their Ontario roots and Canadian passports, creating a comfort level they hope will be to their advantage in Japan.
LPGA Tour regulars Henderson and Sharp, named last week to Canada’s Olympics team, competed together at the 2016 Games in Brazil as golf made its return to the Olympics. Sharp, 40, has been a mentor for Henderson, 23, throughout her LPGA career.
Sharp is from Hamilton, next door to Hughes’ hometown of Dundas.
Hughes and Conners have known each other for more than half their lives, meeting as pre-teens at a tournament in Listowel, where Conners grew up. They have continued their friendship through time together on Canada’s national amateur team, at Kent State University, at other international events representing Canada, and now on the PGA Tour, where they play practice rounds with each other regularly.
“I don’t know what the odds on that are,” Hughes said last week in reflecting on them both reaching the Olympics, the first for each, after such a humble meeting. “To think that those two kids are going to Tokyo to represent Canada, you can’t make it up.”
Henderson was on the same national amateur team as Hughes and Conners, too.
Because of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Tokyo Games organizers are keeping a tight lid on athlete movement. The golfers (and other competitors) will stay in hotels rather than an athletes’ village and will be prevented from freely moving around Tokyo.
Henderson said the restrictions might make the golf tournament feel like a “regular tour event” but she and Sharp both expect to have the same feeling of pride in wearing the Maple Leaf that they had in Brazil.
“It just felt like we were part of a bigger team playing for others,” Sharp said.
Sharp added the camaraderie among the four will help ease the pressure and drama of competing at the Games. She expects the “great unit” will pass the time between competition, playing cards and watching Netflix.
Henderson added she hopes to glean tips on how to play Kasumigaseki Country Club from her male compatriots, whose competition begins July 29, a week before the women’s event.
Hughes has gained entry into next week's Open Championship at Royal St. George's, adding to the Canadian contingent that already consisted of Conners, Adam Hadwin and Richard T. Lee.
Hughes of Dundas, Ontario, earned a spot based on his world ranking as of June 30: No. 65. This will be his debut in the major.
The Open awarded berths last week to the 12 players with the highest rankings who weren’t previously exempt from qualifying.
The DCM PGA Women’s Championship of Canada is returning in late August after a one-year absence because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This year’s edition is scheduled for the Oshawa Golf and Curling Club beginning Aug. 30. The Greater Toronto Area club also staged the 2006 championship, won by Marie-Josée Rouleau.
The 36-hole tournament is the PGA of Canada’s marquee event for female golfers and has been played since 1987. The field typically is made up of tour and club professionals, mostly from Canada but open to international players as well.
Other past winners include Henderson and Lorie Kane, the LPGA Tour veteran and five-time PGA Women’s Championship winner after whom the event’s trophy is named.
Title sponsor DCM, a marketing firm based in Brampton, Ontario, is also continuing its bursary program for up-and-coming players. It offers $5,000 to each of seven players from any country, with one of the bursaries reserved for a PGA of Canada Class A member. Players have until July 31 to apply.
The Mackenzie Tour-PGA Tour Canada has added a tournament to its schedule, this one with a high-profile backer. PGA Tour player Graham DeLaet will act as honorary chairman for the Elk Ridge Open in his home province of Saskatchewan.
The event in early September marks a return of the developmental tour to the Western province, which held the Dakota Dunes Open near Saskatoon until 2016.
It’s the eighth event of 2021 announced for the scaled-down Mackenzie Tour, which took last year off because of the pandemic and is resuming this season as a circuit for Canadian-based players only because of the lingering U.S.-Canada border restrictions.
The Elk Ridge Open will be held at the Elk Ridge Resort, a getaway that is under new ownership in the hamlet of Waskesiu. A group of eight Saskatchewan investors recently bought the 27-year-old resort out of receivership. Under the corporate name Routes2SK Inc., the new owners have committed to holding the Elk Ridge Open for eight years.
“This is exciting news for Saskatchewan especially for the tourism industry as we come out of a pandemic that has devastated the sports-event business,” said Hugh Vassos, president of VMC Sports and Entertainment, which will run the event.
The Mackenzie Tour’s season begins July 29 with the Mackenzie Investments Open in Blainville, Quebec. Other stops are in Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Alberta and British Columbia, with the season wrapping up in September.
A Toronto-area club has launched a series of junior tournaments in Ontario that will give the top performers an opportunity to compete where the pros play.
The series for boys and girls age 18 and younger began last week in Bath, near Kingston, and will conclude in early August in Avon, near London.
The top six boys and three girls at each of six qualifying events advance to the 36-hole finale in mid-August at series organizer TPC Toronto at Osprey Valley, a public facility in Caledon that boasts three courses among Canada’s top 100. The club also stages the Mackenzie Tour’s Osprey Valley Open.
The series, dubbed The Road to TPC Toronto, aims to provide young players with another competitive avenue amid what club tournament and program director Brad Parkins called junior golf’s “remarkable explosion in popularity in recent years.”
The runaway winner in the female amateur division at the prestigious Glencoe Invitational in Calgary had a secret source of inspiration in her golf bag.
Angela Arora, 17, carries an autographed golf glove that LPGA Tour star Lexi Thompson gave her at the 2015 CP Women’s Open in Vancouver.
Arora told the Calgary Sun she wasn’t overly interested in golf at the time but the encounter with the American star and the keepsake inspired her to proclaim, “Oh my god, I want to be just like her.”
The teen from Surrey, British Columbia, a member of the national amateur team’s junior squad, won her division by nine shots and set a course record in one of her rounds. Christine Wong, a former Symetra Tour player from Richmond, British Columbia, topped the women’s pro category.
The Glencoe, founded in 1992 and Western Canada’s premier amateur event, opened to female competitors this year for the first time. “I really wanted it,” Arora told the Sun after her victory. “Going into this week, I told my dad, ‘I want to be the first female champion for the Glencoe Invitational.’ ”
Another junior squad member, Ashton McCulloch, 18, of Kingston, Ontario, took the men’s crown at Glencoe Golf and Country Club.
In another encouraging development for Canadian golf as it emerges from pandemic lockdowns, one of Canada’s most famous golf resorts opened last week to travellers from across the country.
Cabot Cape Breton in Inverness, Nova Scotia, said Canadians with two doses of vaccine now can travel to the province without testing or self-isolation. The remote resort, however, remains largely out of reach for now for international guests, who still face quarantine rules at the Canadian border.
Golf is open throughout Canada and some provinces, including Alberta and British Columbia, eliminated all their remaining travel and other restrictions last week.
Top: Brooke Henderson (left) and Alena Sharp
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