Clutch under pressure
Brooke Henderson is Postmedia’s Female Athlete of the Year — for second time in three years
It was Canada. It was less than an hour from her hometown. It was supposed to be a big week.
But for Brooke Henderson at the CP Women’s Open in Ottawa, it was all slipping away.
Playing partner Cristie Kerr walked over to her. “OK, now it’s time to dig deep,” Kerr said.
“I am digging,” Henderson replied.
“You gotta go harder,” Henderson remembers the 20-time LPGA winner telling her.
This conversation took place on the front nine on Friday — rarely the scene of a great golf tale — but it’s the backstory to a week in August that the 2017 Postmedia Female Athlete of the Year won’t forget, during a season to remember.
Henderson took Kerr’s advice to heart, dug deep, righted the ship, and two hours later walked to the ninth hole (her last of the day) one shot back of the cut line.
“I was like, ‘OK, I definitely need to make birdie here to play the weekend,’ ” Henderson recalled over the phone while home for the holidays in Smiths Falls, Ont. “I knew there was a possibility of me hitting that green in two. It was a par five, so I was confident, but there was a lot of pressure and I definitely did feel some nerves.”
Whatever nerves she felt didn’t show as Henderson pulled it off, hitting the green in two to set up a birdie and make the cut. Her uphill 200yard, seven-wood to the green was recently lauded by SCOREgolf magazine editor Jason Logan as the clutch shot of the year.
“That Friday round might not be one of the best rounds I’ve played this year, but it was one of the best I’ve played under pressure,” Henderson said. “Once Saturday hit, everything was off my shoulders, and I just went out and tried to play the best that I could play.”
And she did. Fans following Henderson were packed 15-deep on Saturday to watch her fire a courserecord 63, giving Canadian golf fans a day they wouldn’t soon forget, and the enduring memory of the young star’s 2017 season. She finished the CP Women’s Open at the Ottawa Hunt club in a tie for 12th.
“I don’t know if something like that will ever be repeated exactly for me, she said. “The tournament only comes to Ottawa every so often, so it’s really something that I’ll remember for the rest of my life.”
Henderson’s 2017 ended with two LPGA wins, eight top tens, and more than US $1.5 million in prize money. But the iconic hometown performance that Saturday in Ottawa surely stuck with Postmedia sportswriters and editors, who voted the 20-yearold golfer our Female Athlete of the Year for the second time in three years.
“It’s really an honour and I’m really proud to be named Postmedia Athlete of the Year,” Henderson said. “So, thank you and hopefully I’ll do it a lot more years in the future.”
That’s a safe bet since all signs point to Henderson’s continued rise toward the top of the golf world. Since turning pro in 2015, she has won five times on the LPGA and is only three victories shy of Sandra Post’s record eight LPGA wins by a Canadian. In 2016, she joined Post as the only Canadian to win a women’s major.
Henderson’s scoring average has improved every season and her 69.88 average in 2017 was 10th on tour, despite playing the busiest schedule of any top player.
Growing up in Smiths Falls, it’s not uncommon to dream of sports stardom but it usually involves ice, skates and a stick. In her youth, Henderson played both hockey and golf. And like her father and golf coach Dave Henderson, Brooke was a goalie. She played on the Smiths Falls Cubs for six years, winning a provincial championship.
Despite playing on Canada’s national golf team, the decision to quit hockey at 14 years old and focus on golf wasn’t easy and some of her peers must have thought the idea of Brooke Henderson: major champion was a little far fetched.
“In anything, there’s always going to be people who don’t believe in you right away, but for the most part I had such a strong team around me that I knew I could do it,” she said. “There’s always gonna be some naysayers.”
Henderson credits hockey, in part, for developing the mental and physical strength she shows on the golf course. The goalie crease, like the golf course, can be a lonely place. All the talent in the world can go to waste without a strong mental game. Henderson’s mettle surely was tested at the CP Women’s Open and a deeper look into her stats shows it wasn’t a fluke. Her final round average score of 69.3 in 2017 was nearly three-quarters of a shot better than her average over the first three rounds.
Saving the best for last is becoming a Henderson trademark. It was even the case for the 2017 season as a whole, which got off to an inauspicious start. From January to May, Henderson recorded just a single top10 finish in a dozen stroke-play starts and saw her world ranking fall outside the top 10. The year was trending toward disappointment before a tie for 11th in Canada turned things around in early June.
“I went to the Manulife Classic, played in Waterloo, and that’s kind of when things started to change,” she said. “I felt the energy from the crowds and it was exciting. I went into the next week and I felt like a lot of pressure was off.”
That next week was in Michigan at the Meijer LPGA Classic, and Henderson opened with an eight-underpar 63. She followed that up with back-to-back 67s and a final round 66 to win against a loaded field that included top-10 finishes from tour stars Lexi Thompson, Lydia Ko and Michelle Wie.
“It felt like such a long time from my third win to my fourth, Henderson said. “But it was really less than a year.”
Summers are long when you’re a teen golf phenom.
The following week was the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship where Henderson was looking to defend her breakthrough 2016 major title. After another Sunday push, this time with a five-under-par 66 and a birdie-birdie finish, Henderson forced eventual winner Danielle Kang to birdie the 72nd hole for victory.
With the season successfully turned around, Henderson sprinted to the end with four top 10 finishes over her final eight tournaments including a five-shot win at the inaugural New Zealand Women’s Open. That victory earned her the traditional Maori cloak. The Game of Thrones-looking photo that appeared in nearly every newspaper in Canada was a fitting season highlight for this golf queen of the North.
The teen phenom years are over and for most young stars that means it’s time to clean up the short game. It doesn’t take long for a player to realize that nearly everyone out on tour has put in hard work around the greens. Henderson finished 2017 ranked 41st in putts per green in regulation and 100th in sand saves, so if there’s room for improvement, that’s where it is.
“That’s really where my main focus is going to be as I prepare for 2018,” she said. “If I can fix that a little bit, then I’ll be able to move my world ranking back inside the top 10.”
This increased focus on her short game didn’t stop Henderson from sneaking herself a little gift under the Christmas tree. She’ll start the 2018 season with a new driver in the bag.
“The G400 Ping, which actually, it came out last summer I guess, but I just made the switch over in the last few weeks,” she said. “I’m excited for that.”
And what about that decision to give up the goalie pads?
“Looking back now, it was definitely the right move.”