Hometown: Smiths Falls celebrates its ‘favourite daughter’ after title

Glenda Cooke started to get emotional when she sat, glued to her TV, while watching Brooke Henderson hit the golf ball off the 16th tee Sunday on her way to victory in the CP Women’s Open.

“That’s when I got up and got the Kleenex,” Cooke said Monday as she recalled witnessing Henderson, a fellow Smiths Falls, Ont., native, become the first Canadian to win an LPGA Tour crown on home soil in 45 years.

“And the happy tears started to flow and they just kept coming.”

By the time Henderson was walking comfortably toward the 18th, local fans of the 20-year-old were yelling “Go Brooke, yay,” said Anita Kerfoot as she and the others in her threesome were finish- ing their Monday morning round on the course at the Smiths Falls Golf and Country Club.

The Henderson family has become synonymous with golf in the small Eastern Ontario town. Her uncle, Tom Henderson, is the current local course title holder.

Henderson has, through her talents but also by virtue of her character, become an ambassador for not only Smiths Falls, but for the sport of golf and for her country, said the town’s mayor, Shawn Pankow.

“She’s our favourite daughter,” Pankow said as he stood on the sidewalk outside his office.

“When you look at the way she represents our community, the way she represents Canada, she’s still that humble small-town girl who has taken the golf world by storm,” he said.