MONTREAL — Earlier this month, Mackenzie Hughes tried to temper his expectations as he waited for a call to find out if he would be selected as a captain’s pick for the International Team for the Presidents Cup team.
Two years earlier, he didn’t get the nod when the competition was held at Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, just down the road from where he calls home and where he practices regularly. How did he spend the week of the competition? “Sulking at home,” said Hughes who didn’t bother to attend as a spectator either. “I don’t think I could’ve quite stomached it.”
Hughes, who grew up in Dundas, Ontario, set a goal to make this year’s team when the biennial competition returned north of the border to Royal Montreal Golf Club for the first time since 2007, and he played well during the qualifying period but not well enough, finishing 15th in the standings. The top-6 automatically qualified and then International Team Captain Mike Weir was given six captain’s picks to round out the 12-man roster. Hughes was at his son’s baseball practice when Weir’s name popped up on his phone. Hughes answered and took a deep breath.
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When Weir began by saying it had been a tough few days of deliberation and that he had to make some tough calls, Hughes prepared for the worst. “I thought, Oh, man, here we go again. My heart kind of sank for a minute,” he recalled.
But Weir quickly shifted gears and dropped the good news that he had made the team.
“It was head spinning, heart thumping, this euphoric-type moment,” Hughes said. “Getting that phone call is probably one of the highlights of my career.”
Hughes wasn’t the only Canadian to make Weir’s team, which is made up of players from the rest of the world excluding Europe, which already compete against the U.S. in the Ryder Cup. Hughes was joined by fellow Canadians Corey Conners and Taylor Pendrith, who both represented the International Team two years ago but failed to win a single point as the Internationals lost for the ninth straight time.
Hughes, Conners and Pendrith represent a quarter of the team and it marks the first time that three Canadians have been selected for a team in Presidents Cup history. That’s not the only team these three share. All three overlapped at Kent State, with Hughes a junior when Conners and Pendrith joined the Golden Flashes at the northeastern Ohio school in the early 2010s.
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