Brooke and the towering 290-yard high draw
The last thing any serious golf fan needs to be told is that Brooke Henderson is the real deal. But an experience I had last week forever changed the way I view the calibre of women’s golf at the top level, the LPGA Tour. Truth be told, two events have changed that, and the one last week at a Charity Pro-Am in Ottawa sealed the deal.
I would hazard to guess that I’m not the only male amateur golfer who has at times thought that if given the chance he could go head to head with a top notch female professional and come out on top. And I’m not sure why, especially when the evidence would clearly show that I couldn’t compete in a 72 hole stroke play event even on a 6,100 yard course and be deep in red (under par) figures like the best women are. My current index would predict that if I played four rounds over such a course I would be lucky to be better than 10 over par.
My way in to discovering Brooke Henderson, teenage Canadian golf phenom, was through my niece Meghan, also a teenage Canadian golf phenom a few years ago. Before Meghan’s NCAA golf career she was one of the top ranked junior girls in the province. I followed her closely and played a few times with her, hosting her at Wildfire and PGCC as practice rounds for important events in her competitive calendar.
But it was an early morning round at York Downs in Unionville in the summer of 2011 that I experienced firsthand how much better she had become than her uncle who had been playing for four decades. She hit every shot the same. Every iron was crisp, a sound familiar to anyone who has watched and listened to pros hit balls on a range at a Canadian or CN Open Championship. It’s the sound of a good golf ball being completely compressed that is foreign to 99.9 per cent of people who play the game. But Meghan had it. And the way she pummeled me, and her dad, that day made me both immensely proud and strangely jealous.
Back to last Tuesday. Brooke is a special guest of Ping and the charity golf event I was playing in. She was giving a clinic on the first tee to a crowd of local junior stars and a bigger bunch of middle aged men. Fresh off the airplane after an entire day of travel from her last tour stop in Mexico, she explained that she hadn’t swung a club in 48 hours, and then proceeded to warm up by hitting these feathery wedges and seven irons that rocketed sky high and landed almost on top of each other.
Then her caddie, and sister, Brittany hands her driver to her and this small, fit and muscular young woman starts hitting these long, high towering draws that are landing 290 yards down the fairway. Her backswing is way past parallel, and her clubhead speed is lightning fast. The flight path of the ball was something I hadn’t seen in a while.
I played that hole later in the day and remember how far behind Brooke’s balls our own drives were. Point made and never forgotten. The best women in the world are as super human as their male counterparts, and I feel bad for ever thinking any differently.