MONTREAL — Earlier this month, Mackenzie Hughes tried to temper his expectations as he waited for a call to find out if he would be selected as a captain’s pick for the International Team for the Presidents Cup team.
Two years earlier, he didn’t get the nod when the competition was held at Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, just down the road from where he calls home and where he practices regularly. How did he spend the week of the competition? “Sulking at home,” said Hughes who didn’t bother to attend as a spectator either. “I don’t think I could’ve quite stomached it.”
Hughes, who grew up in Dundas, Ontario, set a goal to make this year’s team when the biennial competition returned north of the border to Royal Montreal Golf Club for the first time since 2007, and he played well during the qualifying period but not well enough, finishing 15th in the standings. The top-6 automatically qualified and then International Team Captain Mike Weir was given six captain’s picks to round out the 12-man roster. Hughes was at his son’s baseball practice when Weir’s name popped up on his phone. Hughes answered and took a deep breath.
Presidents Cup: Picks, odds | Leaderboard | Gala photos | Photos
When Weir began by saying it had been a tough few days of deliberation and that he had to make some tough calls, Hughes prepared for the worst. “I thought, Oh, man, here we go again. My heart kind of sank for a minute,” he recalled.
But Weir quickly shifted gears and dropped the good news that he had made the team.
“It was head spinning, heart thumping, this euphoric-type moment,” Hughes said. “Getting that phone call is probably one of the highlights of my career.”
Hughes wasn’t the only Canadian to make Weir’s team, which is made up of players from the rest of the world excluding Europe, which already compete against the U.S. in the Ryder Cup. Hughes was joined by fellow Canadians Corey Conners and Taylor Pendrith, who both represented the International Team two years ago but failed to win a single point as the Internationals lost for the ninth straight time.
Hughes, Conners and Pendrith represent a quarter of the team and it marks the first time that three Canadians have been selected for a team in Presidents Cup history. That’s not the only team these three share. All three overlapped at Kent State, with Hughes a junior when Conners and Pendrith joined the Golden Flashes at the northeastern Ohio school in the early 2010s.
Herb Page, who coached Kent State for 41 years before retiring in 2019, boasted that his three players in the competition was one more than powerhouse Georgia, Cal and two better than Texas. Ahead of the official announcement on Sept. 3, Hughes called his coach on FaceTime and then widened the image to show Conners and Pendrith all together and broke the news of their selection.
“I just about cried,” Page told the Canadian Press.
To Hughes making the team in any capacity was special but to do so with his former college teammates was “the cherry on top.”
Weir noted that he chose Hughes in part because of his splendid short game and touch around the greens. He ranked fourth in both Strokes Gained: Putting and Strokes Gained: Around the Greens this season on the PGA Tour. While he will be one of two rookies on the International Team, Hughes experienced competing in front of a partisan crowd at home when he played in the final group Sunday at the RBC Canadian Open in June. But he said the experience he will most draw on is being in a twosome with Tiger Woods at the 2018 Players Championship when Woods stormed into contention.
“It was a circus, absolutely chaos and I shot 68,” he said. “I’ll never forget what I felt like playing with him and I think that’s going to be along the lines of what I will feel like at Royal Montreal.”
Hughes is coming into the competition on a high note after finishing T-4 at the Procore Championship in Napa, California, less than two weeks ago, and said he plans to embrace the chaos of playing on home soil and potentially in foursomes or four-ball with Conners or Pendrith.
“I feel like I want to use the crowd to my advantage,” he said. “I know they’re going to be loud and energetic and I want to lean into that.”
