Henderson living up to top billing

If this was a shouty sports radio segment or a piece on one of those onlineonly outfits favoured by young people and search engines, it would appear under a bold headline like: Move Over Mike Weir, Brooke Henderson Will Soon Be the Greatest Canadian Golfer Ever. Or, Brooke Henderson: Like Genie Bouchard, But More Talented.

But here in old legacy media, we don’t go for such tricks. We’re all about subtlety and nuance. When we say Brooke Henderson will soon be the greatest Canadian golfer ever, we do it down here, in the small type (assuming the headline writers have played along, which they might not have).

The point is, Brooke Henderson is really good at golf. Let us pause to appreciate that.

Henderson, the 19-yearold from Smiths Falls in eastern Ontario, is the rare young athlete who is living up to the hype. Her win at the Meijer LPGA Classic on Sunday was the fourth LPGA victory of her career, tying her with Lorie Kane for second all-time among Canadian women, four back of Sandra Post. She’s now won LPGA events in three straight seasons, the first of those coming when she was 17 and had been refused a Tour card because she was too young (the LPGA relented once she had won a tournament, wisely coming to the conclusion that she probably wasn’t too overmatched to be a member). She won her first major last year, the Women’s PGA Championship, tying Post’s career mark for those. No other Canadian woman has won one. And she was not old enough to vote in the last federal election.

Last weekend, with the win in Grand Rapids, Mich., Henderson added one more first to her resume: she busted out of a slump.

“I really needed this win, I think it’s going to turn around my entire season,” Henderson said on Wednesday on a media call from the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club, where she was promoting the CP Women’s Open, which will be held there this summer and be a true homecourse advantage (she’s a member).

For Henderson, the term “slump” is a relative one. In 14 events before last week, she had made 13 cuts, with two top-10 finishes and five top-15s. This was hardly a disaster, but it hadn’t quite matched the inferno of her arrival as a pro, where she shamed the LPGA into giving her a card and followed that with two quick wins in her first full season. After the second of those last June, she had risen to second in the world rankings. She had fallen back to 15th before the win bumped her back up two spots to 13th.

But Henderson said she never felt that far off. She said her “game was in a great place” and it was just a matter of getting a couple of extra putts to fall on Thursday and Friday to give her some momentum heading into the weekend. When she opened the Meijer with a scorching 63, she said: “I knew it was going to be a fun week for sure.” When you have six birdies and an eagle in a round, Henderson said, you start to feel like you can go on a run. We will have to take her word for it. She says getting back on top of a leaderboard gives her “good vibes and good confidence” for the rest of the season, which includes a defence of her Women’s PGA title next week at Olympia Fields, outside Chicago, plus three more majors and a major of sorts for her, the CP Women’s Open, where she’ll try to be the first Canadian to win since 1973.

Henderson has made a point since her win, which came on Father’s Day, of giving plenty of credit to her father, Dave, her longtime coach. She has the charming backstory of being the apple-cheeked range rat who followed around her older sister, Brittany, mimicking her swing and learning by feel with a mismatched set of random old clubs. As the younger Henderson tore through the junior ranks and became the top-ranked amateur in the world before passing on a University of Florida scholarship to turn pro, there have been rumblings that she would need, at some point, to hire a non-relative to be her primary coach. But Henderson said it was her father who walked Blythefield Country Club with her and gave her a bunch of aggressive lines off the tee, cutting corners on doglegs and giving her better birdie opportunities.

“Without him being there, I wouldn’t be in this position today,” Henderson said. There is no thought of changing her routine, with Brittany as her full-time caddy and her parents on the road, too. “I’m extremely grateful for it,” she says of the close-knit family. “Everyone has made sacrifices to help me get here.”

From here, Henderson says she hopes to climb back up the world rankings, which are unusually compressed on the LPGA side. She was the 15th different winner in the 15 tournaments this season. The opportunity is there for someone to pull away.

“I’m kind of feeling like I can get off to a few more wins, and hopefully that could be me,” she says.

It would be another first, anyway.

EVERYONE HAS MADE SACRIFICES TO HELP GET ME HERE.

Brooke Henderson