Canadian Mackenzie Hughes has hometown advantage at PGA Championship?
Corey Conners is always a safe bet for a good week with his world-class tee-to-green game and local resident Mackenzie Hughes is getting hot at the right time.
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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Five Canadian is less than four American with the exchange rate, but that didn’t help the boys from north of border in trying to put together a practice round at the PGA Championship in Charlotte.
With a quintet of Canadian golfers in the field for the tournament beginning Thursday at Quail Hollow, the major championship tradition of an all-Canadian practice round was slightly more complicated.
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Canadian Mackenzie Hughes has hometown advantage at PGA Championship? Back to video
“We thought about playing a fivesome, but had to break it up,” Mackenzie Hughes said.
Hughes played in a threesome with Adam Hadwin and Nick Taylor on Tuesday and the trio caught up with Postmedia as they waited on the back of the 18th green for Corey Conners and Taylor Pendrith in the group behind, perhaps in order to sort out some friendly wagers.
“We used to barely fill out a foursome and now we are splitting it into two groups,” Hadwin said. “Guys are playing great. It’s been incredible to see the growth of the game in Canada and the individual games of the guys out here.”
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Hughes is coming off a playoff loss to Ryan Fox at last week’s Myrtle Beach Classic and the notoriously streaky player looks to have found his form at the right time heading into the season’s second major, with three top tens in his past four starts.
“The things I’ve been working on with my full swing have been coming along nicely. That’s been a nice progression over the past eight weeks,” Hughes said. “I’m seeing signs of that with my strokes gained numbers improving. My putter is starting to come back around and I’ve just got to wait for one of those tournaments where I put it all together and I know that if I play like have the past few weeks I can have a chance to win.”
As a Charlotte resident and a Quail Hollow member, Hughes is the de-facto tournament host for the Canadian contingent this week. On Tuesday evening, the entire gang — including wives, kids and caddies — headed over to Hughes’ place for dinner.
“Fifty dollars at the door,” Corey Conners joked as he came off the 18th green.
“BYOB,” Hughes responded.
With the course being a regular stop on the PGA Tour for years, Hughes doesn’t think he has much of a home-field advantage over the rest of the players, but says the added comfort of seeing familiar faces at the course and sleeping in his own bed has him feeling unusually comfortable for a major championship week.
Five-time PGA Tour winner Taylor is trying his best to get comfortable at a weather-softened golf course that will play longer than its posted 7,626 yards and seems built for the game’s biggest bombers.
“It’s playing super long,” Taylor said. “But you’ve still got to hit iron shots to the green and make putts. I feel like if I get it play I can compete with anybody with my iron game and putting and chipping.
“I’m not trying to overpower anything because that’s not my game,” he added. “I’ll try to draw back from weeks like Torrey Pines earlier this season which was playing brutally long and I had a nice week there doing my thing.”
Taylor Pendrith is the longest hitter of the five, but will need to turn his game around this week with just one solid finish in the past two-and-a-half months.
Conners always is a safe bet for a good week with his world-class tee-to-green game, as Canadians wait patiently for the ball-striking maestro to run into a hot putter for four days at a major championship.
The popular Hadwin finds himself searching this season, with just one top-ten finish in 2025.
“Mentally, it’s taken its toll,” Hadwin said. “My game’s probably been better than it’s shown, but maybe it snowballs the wrong way sometimes.”
That lack of form, mixed with the demanding length and soft conditions of Quail Hollow this week, could be tough to overcome for the tour veteran of modest distance.
“It’s really nice to go around a golf course and not have to learn much about it. Having played here so many times we have a general sense of where to hit it, where to miss it and all those sorts of thing,” Hadwin said. “The biggest thing is the distance and how long the golf course is.”
But those are problems for later in the week. Golf can be a lonely sport at times and, for this group of Canadians, it is practice rounds like this that remind them how far they’ve all come.
Because once the balls are in the air on Thursday, it’s every man for himself. With a few exceptions.
“If it’s not going to be me, I want it to be one of them,” Hughes said.
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