St. George’s all set for Open
GOLF
Bits
If Phil Mickelson plays in next week’s PGA Championship, where he is the defending champion, his pre-tournament news conference is going to be as entertaining as any golf shot struck at Southern Hills. And the PGA of America should not give Mickelson a pass to duck the scribes. If he plays, he should finally face the music … The odds of Tiger Woods making the cut at the PGA should be longer than those of him playing the weekend at the Masters. He’s won at Southern Hills, yes, but Augusta is 1,000 times more familiar to him … I think I’ve figured out why I three-putt so much: I don’t hit the ball close enough to the hole.
Bites
Two words for Sergio Garcia, evidently set to take Saudi money and join Greg Norman’s LIV Golf International series: Good riddance. No professional golfer has whined more over the last 20 years than the Spaniard. Having said that, Garcia has also been one of my favourite players to watch strike a golf ball over the last two decades … RBC Canadian Open officials weren’t asked about the competing LIV Golf series at Monday’s media day to promote the June 6-12 tournament. But both Mary DePaoli, RBC’s executive vice-president and chief marketing officer, and John Sibley, Golf Canada’s chief commercial officer, indirectly addressed it when they made sure to express extreme gratitude for the tournament’s partnership with the PGA Tour …
Cameron Smith, Tony Finau and Matthew Fitzpatrick were confirmed for the Open on Monday. They join defending champion Rory McIlroy, world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler and past champion Dustin Johnson as top-20 players in the field. There will be more big names confirmed before tournament week, too. Hardly anybody who will play in the LIV series event in England will be missed by Canadian golf fans …
Nothing gives you an appreciation for how skilled top touring pros are than playing a tournament course in prep mode. The rough at Toronto’s St. George’s Golf and Country Club is already long and thick, if not yet consistent. The question now is whether it will be that way for the tournament. The PGA Tour cut it significantly when the Canadian Open was there in 2010.
Barbs
Of all the evidence — physical and anecdotal — to support the notion that this year’s Canadian Open will be the largest undertaking in Golf Canada’s history, this may be my favourite tidbit: There will be approximately 7,000 pieces of furniture on the grounds of St. George’s to fill the 210,000 square feet of hospitality and fan activation space that will have been erected. That’s roughly 1,700 more pieces than what was required at Hamilton Golf and Country Club for the 2019 Open …
Here are some additional numbers to digest: That hospitality space represents 92,000 more square feet than what was built in 2019. There will be 234 tents at St. George’s compared to 179 at Hamilton. There will be 10 viewing decks or bleachers with more than 2,000 seats compared to five in 2019. And there are 37 partner activations for this year’s tournament compared to 15 in 2019. The tournament has an official automobile, chicken, sausage, restaurant, hotel, betting app, Caesar, beer, wine, tequila, pop, convenience store, lawn mower and more …
St. George’s is going to be bursting at the seams with excitement come tournament week so long as Mother Nature co-operates. And at this point, that’s all officials are hoping for. Asked what’s on top of their event list wish, DePaoli and Bryan Crawford, the tournament’s director, cited the sunny skies and temperatures in the 20s that have finally arrived in southern Ontario. Everything else, they said, is in place.