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It is often said you can tell a great deal about the character of an individual by the way he handles himself under pressure, so it was enlightening to see how Japan’s Takumi Kanaya reacted to an unusual incident coming down the stretch at the 2018 Asia-Pacific Amateur Championship at Singapore’s Sentosa Golf Club.
The Asia-Pacific Amateur is one of the biggest events on the amateur calendar. A place in the Masters and the Open Championship were at stake that Sunday as Kanaya, compatriot Keita Nakajima, and India’s Rayhan Thomas approached the turn.
This was a moment when millimetres mattered, but it did not stop Kanaya coming to Thomas’s rescue when he spotted the battery in the Indian’s rangefinder had run out and he was struggling with his yardages.
It would have been easy for Kanaya to ignore his rival’s plight. Instead, the crowd watched as the Japanese player rummaged through his bag and found a replacement battery for Thomas.
Kanaya claimed the championship by two shots to confirm his reputation as one of the world’s best amateurs. His sporting gesture also showed a side to his character hitherto apparent only to his inner circle.
“That’s typical Takumi,” confirmed Australian Gareth Jones, who has been national coach in Japan for five years and still works with Kanaya now that he has turned professional.
“He has an intense, almost ruthless, desire to win,” Jones continued. “But he has too much respect for golf and its traditions to not win honourably. He wants to triumph when everyone around him is at their best. If, five years later, he was told that he won because his rival was having trouble with his yardages, he would be very upset.”
If you are still unaware of the 22-year-old phenomenon from Hiroshima, Kanaya is the rising son of Japanese golf. He served notice while still an amateur by finishing second in the 2017 Japan Open, a tournament considered as arduous as the U.S. Open because of the way courses are set up. He then won the 2019 Mitsui Sumitomo Visa Taiheiyo Masters on the Japan Golf Tour.
After spending 55 weeks on top of the World Amateur Golf Ranking and securing the 2019 Mark H. McCormack Medal as the world’s top amateur, Kanaya joined the paid ranks in October last year. Within five weeks, he won the Dunlop Phoenix Open. He’s now within striking distance of the Official World Golf Ranking top 100. Expect further progress. Fast.
Just 5 feet, 7 inches tall, Kanaya is built more like a jockey than a modern-day golfer. The driving force behind his success is not muscle power. With surreal shotmaking skills and short-game prowess, he is a throwback to times gone by. He also has something else. The Japanese call it kimochi – a feeling of mind, heart and spirit coming together.
“He has a very strong kimochi,” Jones confirmed. “He doesn’t know how to give up. I have seen him so many times struggling with his game, but somehow he’d make a couple of birdies in his last two holes and come in with an even-par score.”
After playing the Zozo Championship on the PGA Tour last year, Kanaya returned home from California to a strict two-week quarantine. He stepped out of the hotel for the first time on a Tuesday, played a practice round on Wednesday, and finished tied fifth during his defence of the Taiheiyo Masters. His first professional win arrived the following week.
Kimochi was once again evident in the opening round of the recent Omega Dubai Desert Classic, his first European Tour start. After birdies on his first two holes, Kanaya made four bogeys in five holes to turn at 2-over par. He then made four birdies for a 2-under-par 70 that eventually led to a fifth top-10 (T9) in only his seventh professional start.
“He has an intense, almost ruthless, desire to win.”
Gareth Jones
If there is a chink in Kanaya’s armour, it is his relative lack of distance. He averages 285 to 290 yards off the tee. That is one reason he is looking to the Japanese and European Tours before the PGA Tour. He understands the need to carry the ball farther than 300 yards to succeed in the United States.
“I am working on distance, but my strength is my iron play and short game. I have been able to compete so far,” Kanaya said.
Jones does not see distance as a long-term problem.
“I don’t think he is frustrated by it,” he said. “He embraces it as an ongoing project.
“When I first met him, he was a very skinny 17-year-old. He has naturally filled out a bit now. I don’t want to load him up with protein shakes, but we have been using SuperSpeed and paying special attention to nutrition. He is making steady progress.
“He will play in the U.S. whenever he gets an opportunity. We will concentrate on the PGA Tour only when we think he is ready, and distance is a key part of it.”
Kanaya says his immediate goal is to break into the world top 100. “I have played the Masters, the Open Championship and the U.S. Open. I want to make sure that I get to play the PGA Championship this year, and I have to become a top-100 player for that,” he said.
Jones believes privately his pupil has set himself a much loftier target.
“What he is saying is not true,” Jones said. “He dearly wants to be the No 1 golfer in the world. That’s the goal.
“It’s just him being humble.”
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