Hughes up for Open adventure
Early success has taken the pressure off Dundas pro
During his rise from two-time Canadian amateur champion to PGA Tour winner, Mackenzie Hughes has built a reputation as a straitlaced, goal-driven overachiever.
Herb Page, Hughes’ coach at Kent State University, says he’s rarely seen a golfer as diligent about everything from practice habits to diet. “Never even see him drink a diet soda,” Page said. Hughes’s wife, Jenna, said in a recent interview that her husband’s taste in meals veer toward healthconscious fare such as salmon and quinoa, and that his scheduling is reminiscent of a Swiss railroad.
“If you throw him off his routine by 10 minutes, he’s not a happy camper,” said Jenna.
His mother, Sandra, describes him as a “meticulous” student who kept a childhood bedroom in Dundas that was as neat as his printing.
“If I were to look through his old school notebooks, his printing looks like it’s been typed,” she said.
So it maybe it was to be expected that on Thursday, in Hughes’ first round at the RBC Canadian Open since 2013, he had his figurative house in order. Using the clockwork swing that helped him earn his maiden PGA Tour win back in November, the 26-year-old Hughes put up what he called a “mostly stress-free” round of 67 on the opening day of the 108th playing of the national championship. Hughes’s five-under-par day left him two shots back of a fivesome of tournament leaders — Hudson Swafford, Brandon Hagy, Matt Every, Kevin Chappell and Ollie Schiederjans — all of whom put up rounds of 65 at a rainsoftened Glen Abbey Golf Club.
For the top Canadian on the leaderboard, it was a near-ideal first-round result — firmly in contention, but without the pressure that comes with being a front-runner.
“You can’t win (the tournament) on Thursday but you can lose it on Thursday,” Hughes said. “I put myself in a pretty good spot.
Which is not to say Hughes, for all his perfectionist tendencies, never finds himself in slightly less-than-optimal predicaments.
After he and Jenna were married in October, for instance, they spent their honeymoon in Thailand, where their itinerary included time spent co-occupying a cage with fully grown tigers at a wildlife sanctuary.
“We both thought it would be fun to pet little baby tigers, like dog-sized. But when we got there they said the wait (for the baby tigers) was almost an hour.