The highest bar for any Canadian athlete – for any Canadian anything, really – is the moment the country stops patting them on the head for doing good. We maintain a marvellous national capacity to be delighted whenever one of us does well, and a less marvellous tendency to crow about it as though we just invented tennis, or whatever it is.
Brooke Henderson is one of the very few to break through that cycle. She has won enough that we don’t feel the need to treat each successive victory like it’s some massive breakthrough for Canadian sport.
Over the weekend, Henderson won her 10th LPGA title at the HUGEL Air Premia LA Open. It sounds more like a skin cream than a golf tournament, but they all count.
Henderson started the final day trailing by four shots, won by one, and set a record score for the event in the process. If golf had a Gordie Howe hat trick, that might be it.
It feels as though she’s been around forever, but Henderson is still a kid. She was 23 years 7 months 14 days old when she won on Saturday.
Tiger Woods was 23 years 6 months 5 days old when he won his 10th PGA tournament. Annika Sorenstam was 26 when she won her 10th LPGA tournament.
You can’t make like-for-like comparisons between eras and tours, but it gives you some sense of the historical company Henderson runs in. She is not just a good golfer. She is as good a golfer as there is. She may be an all-timer.
She’s also showing back up on the front page of our collective minds at just the right time. We’ve just entered the three-month countdown for the Tokyo Olympics, which means we are in the market for national heroes.
In the usual course of things, we’d have some sense of how Canada’s Games are shaping up. We’d have anointed a few stars or stars in waiting. We’d be talking about our medal expectations – that great, once-every-two-years national reckoning where we pretend not to care about something we really, really care about. We’d be gearing up for the party.
None of that is happening this time around. Like everyone else, I go back and forth on whether I believe there will be a Games at all.
On one hand, there is the money. Billions already spent, and billions more to be made via broadcasting and sponsorships. Money usually settles any argument. But on the other hand, there is the inconvenient fact that Japan is a democracy.
Recent polling suggests more than 7 in 10 Japanese want the Games either cancelled or postponed (which means cancelled). These days, you can’t get 70 per cent of people to agree the Earth is a ball. If I were a Japanese politician, the number 70 would haunt my dreams.
We’ll spend the next few weeks arguing about the smart thing to do, which is what we usually do before deciding on doing the stupid thing instead. The only certain thing is that there will be no certainty until the last moment. Taking a down-to-the-wire approach will allow organizers to claim they have listened to all sides and considered every possibility. It’s cover in case everything goes pear-shaped.
Hemming and hawing is a good tactic for elected officials, but it’s a disaster for the participants. Many have had a hell of a time qualifying for the Games because all their warmup/play-in tournaments have been cancelled. All their routines are already a mess. Travel restrictions won’t allow them to show up early to acclimate to the time change and weather conditions (Tokyo is suffocatingly hot in July and August). Nothing is as it should be.
Who does that situation favour? Professionals.
During one of his increasingly desperate sounding pep talks lasts week, IOC president Thomas Bach likened the Olympics to everyone’s favourite spring weekend.
“Look at the Augusta Masters,” Bach said. “They took place. International event. No, no problem. Great Japanese victory [by winner Hideki Matsuyama].”
The Masters is 88 guys on a playing field the size of an airport. The Olympics is more than 10,000 competitors wedged into one of the densest cities on Earth. The comparison is laughable.
But while Bach is no virologist, he’s onto something when it comes to how this Olympics may play out. No Games yet held will so favour the few fully professional competitors involved.
The pros are used to uncertainty. They spend their lives popping in and out of strange places.
They don’t follow the build-to-a-performance-peak model favoured by amateurs. They have to be in winning form all the time, or else they starve.
Crowds don’t bother them. A sudden crush of media attention won’t turn their head. Professionals are conditioned to excel all the time, regardless of how annoying their surroundings. If you can’t manage that, you’re not going to be a pro for long.
Who’s going to be the star of this Olympics? More than likely, someone who’s a major star already. Someone who’s used to performing in the midst of chaos.
Who’s that person for Canada? Brooke Henderson. She just reminded us that she is Canada’s most professionally accomplished professional.
The women’s Olympic golf tournament takes place at the end of the Tokyo Games. So if Canada has been having a hard time of it, the expectations on Henderson will be massively amplified. Remember London 2012? You probably have nice memories. But that’s because Rosie MacLennan won Canada’s only gold medal during the Games. MacLennan let the whole country off the hook with that win.
It’s possible Henderson could find herself in the same sort of situation – weight of a country and all that. She won’t be alone in that. A bunch of other high-profile pros (Bianca Andreescu, who on Sunday said she had tested positive for COVID-19, Félix Auger-Aliassime, Kia Nurse, etc. ) will be in Tokyo as well.
But if you had to lay a bet on it, who would you pick? One who’s good, or one who’s so good, we hardly notice it any more?