THE CANADIAN OPEN WILL GO ON, BUT WHO KNOWS WHERE OR WHEN
It is one of those golf stories that may or may not be true. It was 1955, and Arnold Palmer was trying to make it as a professional golfer. It was not going well. As the story goes, Palmer and his wife Winnie were at Weston Golf Club in Toronto for the Canadian Open. He told his wife that if he didn’t make a decent paycheque that week, he was going to give up golf and get a real job.
Palmer won the tournament, his first as a professional. He went on to a golf career of some note.
That the Canadian Open birthed the King is just one of many parts of its lore. Founded in 1904, the third-oldest national championship in golf has produced winners such as Sam Snead, Byron Nelson and Walter Hagen. Nick Price, Greg Norman, Curtis Strange and Vijay Singh have won it. One of the greatest shots of Tiger Woods’ career came out of a bunker in front of the pond on the 18th hole at Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville. Now styled the RBC Canadian Open, it will be played for the 108th time this week and for the 29th time at Glen Abbey, west of Toronto.
Its home for much beyond that is uncertain. The RBC Canadian Open is at the nexus of forces that are reshaping the golf world.
Glen Abbey, its most frequent home, has been slated for redevelopment into a residential community.
Its owner, ClubLink, announced in 2015 that it wanted to turn the facility, which was the first course designed by Jack Nicklaus and was opened as the permanent home of the Canadian Open in 1977, into a real estate play, but the process, which has been resisted by local politicians, is a long way from over.
Meanwhile, the PGA Tour is expected to radically change its schedule in the near future, which again raises questions about the Canadian Open’s less-than-ideal date. Coming as it does immediately following the British Open, the tournament is again missing many big names. Five of the top 40 in the world golf rankings are scheduled to play in Canada this week, although world No. 1 Dustin Johnson is among them.
And so, it’s unclear where the Canadian Open will be played in the future, and unclear when it will be played. But for Golf Canada, the sport’s governing body in this country, that means this is something of an opportunity.
“We know that there’s all the stuff going on outside, but it doesn’t stop the momentum of what we’re trying to do inside,” says Brent McLaughlin, Golf Canada’s managing director of professional championships. The most obvious of those outside forces is the ownership of Glen Abbey, which Golf Canada sold to ClubLink in 1998 for a reported $40 million.
The company, which owns several dozen courses and also has a real estate arm, has filed preliminary plans that call for 3,000 homes on the 93-hectare site: homes that would likely each be in the million-dollar range. It could take years before the course is bulldozed — Oakville is conducting studies to assess the planned redevelopment and there have been arguments for a cultural heritage protection.
Golf Canada is aware of the need to consider alternate sites for its men’s national championship, which it had done in recent years anyway. The tournament has been played at six different courses in the past two decades, including Royal Montreal, Shaughnessy near Vancouver, Hamilton Golf Club and St. George’s in Toronto.
But the Canadian Open’s wandering period ended in 2013, when it returned to Glen Abbey. This year marks the fourth time in five years it has been played in Oakville, and it is expected to return for at least next year. Coming back allowed Golf Canada, McLaughlin says, to use the “momentum” of repeated visits to help attract corporate sponsors and boost ticket sales. Being in the country’s biggest marketplace doesn’t hurt either. But though ClubLink announced plans to shutter Glen Abbey even as Golf Canada was getting used to hosting the tournament there again, McLaughlin says there has long been an eye on finding another home.
“Glen Abbey has been an unbelievable venue for us, but the tournament continues to change,” he says.
A PGA Tour event of today is a far bigger undertaking than those of the late 1970s, when Nicklaus created his spectatorfriendly design.
“We’ve kind of run out of space, to be honest,” McLaughlin says. “You almost have to custombuild a golf course or find a property that has another 150 to 200 acres outside of the actual golf course just to have (tournament) infrastructure. As we look to the future, any venue we are going to have is going to have that.”
The solution could be to build a new course, possibly as part of some kind of municipal sports complex, that would be a permanent home for the Canadian Open, or at least a semipermanent one. But pulling that off won’t be easy — not without the support of wealthy partners, especially when the market for high-end golf courses has slowed to a crawl.
As for when the tournament will be played, much of that is out of Golf Canada’s hands, as PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan has said he would like to see the tour’s schedule compressed, with the FedEx Cup playoffs moved to August from September to keep it from conflicting with the start of the NFL season. In that scenario, the PGA Championship would move to May, which means the Canadian Open would immediately follow the season’s final major and precede the FedEx Cup tournaments — an even more unfriendly spot, in terms of attracting top players, than it currently holds.
McLaughlin says a schedule shuffle is a strong possibility, but he adds there’s “no perfect date” for the tournament. If it moved into June, it could conflict with the U.S. Open, and there would be an increased chance of weather problems in early summer in Canada. If it moved back to the fall, where it used to reside on the tour calendar, it would risk becoming part of the dead zone of tournaments that come after the FedEx Cup is completed.
But McLaughlin says the Canadian Open has spent too much time wondering about its date. “We can’t focus on that anymore,” he says. “We can’t worry about the date. We’ve got a great product.”
That product begins in earnest on Thursday. And if a Canadian should win for the first time since 1954?
“I think the party, the celebration that would occur, would be something,” McLaughlin says.
If nothing else, it would push aside the questions about the tournament’s future plans — at least for a little while.