Mackenzie Hughes hopes comforts of home will pay off at Wells Fargo Championship this week

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This article was published 05/05/2021 (1979 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mackenzie Hughes is looking forward to some home cooking this week while playing the Wells Fargo Championship, in hopes of turning around some of his recent results on the PGA Tour.

But the native of Dundas, Ont., who now calls Charlotte home, won’t be alone in sharing that home-cooked experience, at least for one evening.

Hughes invited the rest of the Canadian contingent in the field this week for a socially-distant barbecue in his backyard. The golfers must test negative, and then be re-tested as negative again, before playing in the tournament itself. Given the health measures installed by the Tour, Hughes thought it’d be a great way to get the guys together, safely.

Something normal in abnormal times.

“It’s the little things in life that get you excited,” said Hughes, referencing as well how he doesn’t have to live out of a suitcase this week and he’ll get to sleep in his own bed.

Hughes lives about 15 minutes from Quail Hollow Club, this week’s host course. It’s also the course for the 2022 Presidents Cup, a team he has his eyes on being a part of.

The 30-year-old is also hoping that teeing it up in his new hometown of Charlotte, at a course he plays a couple of times a year, will help him to get out of a cold stretch.

He took to Twitter last week at the Valspar Championship and joked he played in the pro-am, “like a 5-handicap.” That makes it sound worse than it is — Hughes has found the weekend 12 out of 17 times on the PGA Tour this season and sits 64th on the FedEx Cup standing. He is also Canada’s second-ranked male golfer, putting him in a position to represent the country at the Olympics this summer alongside good friend Corey Conners — but he has notched just one top-10 finish in 2021.

“I don’t feel like I’m in a spot where I’m lost, necessarily. I just feel like I haven’t been as good lately,” said Hughes. “I’m looking forward to turning things around and going the right direction.”

Hughes and the fellow Canadians this week at the Wells Fargo Championship (there are seven teeing it up: Corey Conners, Adam Hadwin, David Hearn, Michael Gligic — who just announced he and his wife are expecting their first child — Roger Sloan and Nick Taylor) are also all feeling inspired by Mike Weir’s first PGA Tour Champions victory on Sunday.

Weir topped a trio of golfers including John Daly by two shots.

“I’ve played with him enough the last few years that you could really his game was coming around and you could see his determination,” said Taylor. “It’s a testament to how much he works and there is no part of the game where he’s not putting 100 per cent effort into. It’s nice to see that paying off.”

Hughes was just as thrilled as his fellow Canadians to see Weir win his maiden title on the Champions Tour saying the “floodgates are open now,” in terms of what Weir — who is playing in the Regions Tradition, a major on the PGA Tour Champions schedule, this week — can accomplish on the 50-and-over circuit. But he can’t help but laugh when he recalls the first time he saw Weir up close.

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In 2004, the year after Weir won the Masters, Hughes caddied in the RBC Canadian Open pro-am for an amateur in Weir’s group. Unfortunately Hughes, who was 13 at the time and an up-and-coming junior golfer, was hanging onto every word of Weir’s and basically ignored the golfer he was supposed to be attending to.

“It would be amazing to get that guy’s take on the day because he absolutely would have wanted to murder me halfway through the round. I was all over the place. The guy would say, ‘Oh I’m over here.’ Or ‘Hey, I’m over here.’ I was just walking next to Mike, picking his brain,” said Hughes, laughing. “Mike was a mega star.”

Now Hughes, a PGA Tour winner himself and who has even teed it up at the famed Augusta National alongside his childhood idol, is trying to get back to his winning ways — just like Weir.

“And there’s no better place to do it,” said Hughes, “than your own backyard.”

Adam Stanley is a freelance golf writer based in Ottawa