Gligic makes it eight for Canada
Bits, Bites and Barbs from around the world of golf:
> Bits: With Adam Svensson and Taylor Pendrith officially joining the PGA Tour and Michael Gligic getting his card back (more on that below), there will be eight Canadians in the big leagues next season: Corey Conners, Gligic, Adam Hadwin, Mackenzie Hughes, Pendrith, Roger Sloan, Svensson and Nick Taylor. It’s nine if you count Graham DeLaet, who still has 19 starts remaining on his medical extension should he get healthy enough to play. The season begins next week at the Fortinet Championship (previously the Safeway Open) in Napa, Calif. There are more days of Christmas than there are in the PGA Tour off-season ...
Canada’s Maude-Aimée Leblanc sits in fifth place on the Symetra Tour — the LPGA Tour’s feeder circuit — with four tournaments remaining. The top-10 players at season’s end receive LPGA Tour cards … Count me as part of Team Kevin Na for the Ryder Cup. I don’t put as much stock in the 30-man Tour Championship as most, but Na’s performance in Atlanta should seal the deal on him being a captain’s pick. A gutsy, fiery competitor that the U.S. team desperately needs …
Three inches from my first hole-in-one on the same hole I watched my dad get his first ace on last summer . Now that would have been cool.
> Bites: Didn’t know much about Leona Maguire before the Solheim Cup but I sure am a fan now. Another European golfer seemingly built for team competition … The Solheim won the channel changer war on my TV Sunday, but those last few holes of the Tour Championship were exciting enough. Full credit to Patrick Cantlay for getting the job done, but Jon Rahm did nothing to invalidate his standing as the world’s best. Just one win for Rahm this year but it was in a major championship in the U.S. Open and he was no worse than tied for eighth in the other three big-four events. He also would have won the Memorial if he did not have to withdraw due to COVID. Rahm blew everyone away in top 10s (15), and he topped the tour in scoring average and birdie average. He should be the tour’s player of the year …
How about the way Kingston amateur Noah Steele backed up his Mackenzie Tour-PGA Tour victory at the Osprey Valley Open a few weeks back? He finished second by one shot in his next event at the Brudenell River Classic last week and leads the circuit’s points list through four events … Nice three-week stretch for the Mackenzie Tour, with two tournaments in Prince Edward Island and one this week in Saskatchewan. Both are provinces the tour had been absent from for years.
Barbs: While Cantlay and Rahm were battling at East Lake, 25 guys — some rookies, some returnees — were earning PGA Tour cards at the Korn Ferry Tour Championship at the treacherous Victoria National GC in Indiana. Among them was Gligic, who wound up 19th in the three-event series thanks largely to a top-10 result two weeks ago. Things got a little close for comfort Sunday as the Burlington, Ont., native struggled to a 73, making an eagle on the ninth hole to erase two early bogeys and then eight straight pars on the back nine before closing with a bogey.
“I’m not going to lie, it was a nervy day from the jump, but I’m really proud of myself for digging deep and getting the job done,” Gligic messaged. “It’s a challenging golf course so to feel the nerves and battle through to the end feels really good.”
Gligic is like a lot of pro golf’s rank and file in that he absolutely has the game to contend regularly at the top level; he just needs the comfort and confidence that comes with being out there a while to do so. Those are qualities he will surely gain after passing the KFT Finals exam to get right back out on the PGA Tour next week.
“My game was in good shape going into the Finals, so I knew if I played my game, I’d be there in the end. Also, like every week, I’m playing to win, so I figured if I focused on that as the goal at each of the three KFT Finals events, that the rest would take care of itself … I’m happy to have earned my way back to the PGA Tour. It’s where I feel I belong.”