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For some, it might be the finish line.
But for Taylor Pendrith, it is just midway through the race.
Last week, after finishing in the 15th spot in the Veritex Bank Championship on the Korn Ferry Tour, Pendrith (above) finally guaranteed his spot on the PGA Tour for the 2021-22 season. We’ll say “finally” because Pendrith really should have locked up his status last year after finishing in the top five in five of his 10 Korn Ferry starts last summer when he did everything but win. That put the Richmond Hill, Ontario, golfer near the top of the tour’s points list to graduate to the PGA Tour. Oh, and he also turned heads at the U.S. Open, where he finished 23rd and wowed many with both his astounding length and his deft touch with the short game.
One would have thought that would lock up a spot on the PGA Tour for the current season, but it wasn’t that simple in a year when COVID-19 disrupted best-laid plans. Instead of heading to the land of courtesy cars and purses of multimillions, Pendrith returned to Canada for a couple of months, put his clubs away, hung out with his fiancée and planned a strategy for 2021 to nail down a spot on the PGA Tour. He came back feeling revitalized.
“My goal is to get to No. 1 and be fully exempt,” he said from the Korn Ferry’s latest stop in Huntsville, Alabama. “I worked a lot in those months I was off, and I feel stronger and my speed is back up. I’m hitting it a bit further. I’m in a good spot.”
“My game is in a really good place right now. I’m doing the small things really well. I’m doing a lot of things right, really. It feels great.”
Taylor Pendrith
That’s a bit frightening considering Pendrith already is one of the longest golfers on the planet, a player who has been capturing attention with his prodigious bombs since he first appeared at the RBC Canadian Open in 2014 as an amateur. At the time, it was taken for granted that Dustin Johnson was the biggest hitter in the field, yet Pendrith outdrove him that week.
But it was that incredible power, built on the foundations of a self-described homemade swing, that meant it took a while for Pendrith to reach golf’s highest levels. While Kent State teammates such as Mackenzie Hughes and Corey Conners (yes, it was a pretty good team) went to the PGA Tour and won, Pendrith was slowed by a series of injuries likely caused by the sheer power of his swing. He made the Korn Ferry Tour two years out of college, finished second in one of his first starts, and then got hurt and couldn’t find his form. He went back to Canada, spent a couple of years dealing with various maladies and played his way back to the Korn Ferry Tour for 2020. Healthy for the first time in a few years, Pendrith finally demonstrated the promise that was expected when he turned professional.
Not that it has been easy to have success in such unusual times. Pendrith has spent the past year living in the house of former teammate Conners, at least on those rare times when he’s not on the road. Though his fiancée, Meg Beirnes, was with him for a few weeks recently, she’ll soon return home to Hamilton, Ontario, where she works as a nurse. For his part, Pendrith isn’t sure when he’ll get back home. After all, with pandemic quarantine restrictions in place for anyone coming back to Canada, Pendrith isn’t certain he’ll have the time in an already busy schedule to get home at all this summer. That means potentially missing the wedding of a close friend as he continues to chase a spot at the top of the Korn Ferry Tour.
Though a schedule for the upcoming PGA Tour season hasn’t been announced, there’s a good chance the big-hitting Canadian will have very little time between the end of his current season, and the start of his rookie year on the PGA Tour.
That’s why reaching the top of the food chain on Korn Ferry is so significant. It comes with a total exemption for the season, which gives a newcomer more certainty that they’ll get enough starts on the year to potentially retain their playing privileges.
“If you’re not in that category, it can be really stressful trying to figure out what events you’ll get into,” Pendrith says. “Getting to the No. 1 spot would be huge. It would make a real difference.”
Advancing to the PGA Tour is a challenge, a path littered with can’t-miss golfers who somehow did. In the past, Pendrith took one step forward in his professional career, only to move backward when injuries kept him from playing as well as anticipated. This time he says he’s ready, having played PGA Tour events, made the cut in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and shown the world what he’s capable of doing at the U.S. Open. He’ll hit the PGA Tour with the confidence that he’s been successful at every step on the path to golf’s top tour.
“My game is in a really good place right now,” he says. “I’m doing the small things really well. I’m doing a lot of things right, really. It feels great.”
And when Taylor Pendrith feels great, there’s no limit to what he might achieve.
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