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A pair of interesting golf tournaments tee off Thursday as the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup playoffs culminate with the big-money Tour Championship in Atlanta while many of the LPGA’s biggest stars (including a 21-year-old British sensation) are in the Toronto area for the Canadian Women’s Open. Here’s a look at both:
Canadian Women’s Open
Currently branded as the CPKC Women’s Open, the lone Canadian stop on the LPGA Tour is taking place at Toronto-adjacent Mississauga Golf and Country Club for the first time in the tournament’s 52-year history.
Befitting a national open, the field of 156 includes many of the biggest stars in women’s golf, including the top four in the world rankings and 19 of the 22 players who have won on the LPGA Tour this season.
World No.1 Jeeno Thitikul of Thailand is back in action for the first time since unseating American Nelly Korda for the top spot following the women’s British Open, where they both finished well out of contention at the final major championship of the season. Thitikul has one victory on the LPGA Tour this year while Korda is still looking for her first, but with so many different winners this season no one has been able to overtake them.
Third-ranked Lydia Ko of New Zealand is after her fourth Canadian Women’s Open title and first in a decade. She won Olympic gold in Paris last year, adding to her silver in 2016 and bronze in 2021, and went on to take the women’s British Open a few weeks later for her third major title. Australia’s Minjee Lee is up to fourth in the rankings after winning the Women’s PGA Championship this June for her third major.
American Lauren Coughlin returns to defend her title after winning in Calgary last year for her first LPGA Tour victory in her 103rd start. The 32-year-old won again in Scotland a few weeks later and is now ranked 14th in the world.
Most importantly, though, the most exciting player in women’s golf is here. Twenty-one-year-old English sensation Lottie Woad made headlines last month by winning the European Tour’s Women’s Irish Open as an amateur, then finishing one shot out of a playoff at the Evian Championship in France, an LPGA major. That convinced Woad to ditch her final year at Florida State University and turn pro, and she immediately won the Women’s Scottish Open for her first LPGA Tour title. After tying for eighth at the British Open earlier this month, Woad is the betting favourite to win the Canadian Open.
Sixteen Canadians will tee it up in Mississauga, highlighted by 13-time LPGA Tour winner Brooke Henderson and 15-year-old Aphrodite Deng, who last month became the first Canadian to win the prestigious U.S. Girls’ Junior championship.
Henderson’s 13 career titles are the most ever by a Canadian woman or man on a major tour. She owns a pair of majors — the 2016 Women’s PGA Championship and the 2022 Evian Championship — and in 2018 she became the first Canadian in 45 years to win the Canadian Women’s Open.
However, it’s now approaching three years since Henderson’s last victory, at the season-opening Tournament of Champions in January 2023, and she’s cracked the top 10 only once this season, at a match-play event in April. Once ranked as high as second in the world, the 27-year-old from Smiths Falls, Ont. now sits 58th. Still, she remains Canada’s top women’s golfer by a huge margin. No one else ranks in the top 300.
Henderson, who underwent eye surgery during a two-month break last year, has been good off the tee this season, ranking 15th on the tour in strokes gained driving. But she’s a brutal 112th on approach shots, forcing her to scramble for par far too often. Here’s more on the Canadian Women’s Open.
Tour Championship
An obscene amount of cash is on the line at the PGA Tour’s season finale, which tees off Thursday at East Lake in Atlanta.
The 30 players remaining in the FedEx Cup playoffs will take home a collective $40 million US, including an eye-watering $10 million for the winner. The runner-up earns $5M, which is more than any of the four majors paid their champion this year, while the third- and fourth-place finishers will each clear the $3.1M that Scottie Scheffler made for winning the British Open. Finishing dead last still gets you a cool $355,000.
Two Canadians will be vying for a bigger share of the payday after Corey Conners and Nick Taylor survived the final cutdown by ranking 19th and 25th, respectively, in the season-long points chase following last week’s 50-man BMW Championship near Baltimore. Taylor Pendrith just missed out after his 15th-place finish at the BMW inched him up to 33rd.
In recent years, Conners and Taylor would have almost no hope of cashing the massive winner’s cheque. That’s because the Tour Championship used a “starting strokes” format that rewarded the top players with a head start. The points leader began the tournament at 10 under par while the rest of the field slotted in between 8 under for the No. 2 seed and even par for the bottom few guys. Under this system, Conners would have had to make up eight shots on top-ranked Scottie Scheffler while Taylor would start nine shots back.
But, after Scheffler cruised to a boring four-shot victory last year, the PGA Tour decided to drop the starting strokes and have everyone begin the Tour Championship on equal footing. This gives each player a fair shot at the title — and hopefully leads to a more dramatic finish.
Having said that, Scheffler remains heavily favoured to hoist his second straight FedEx Cup after winning the BMW by two strokes for his fifth title of the year. The British Open and PGA Championship winner has already pocketed close to $24M in official PGA Tour winnings this year, plus a $10M bonus for leading the regular-season points race and another $5M for being the top seed heading into the Tour Championship.
Another victory this week would make Scheffler the third player to win multiple FedEx Cups, joining Tiger Woods (who captured the inaugural title in 2007 and added another in 2009) and Rory McIlroy (2016, 2019, 2022). McIlroy, ranked second in the world, has three victories this year but hasn’t won since his emotional triumph at the Masters in April to complete the rare career Grand Slam. Here’s more on the Tour Championship.
