Brittany Henderson, the eldest daughter of a golf-loving father, started playing competitively long before her teenage years. Her kid sister, Brooke, was just like the thousands of younger siblings in this country who are forever toted along to arenas and soccer fields and, in this case, golf courses, so that the older one can play.
But Brooke Henderson was watching. Just a toddler then, she followed her sister around the course. And she learned.
“I would grab an umbrella or a stick or something, and I would just try to mimic her swing,” Henderson says. “And also try to perfect my own.”
Fifteen or so years later, the blonde-haired ragamuffin who was grooving her swing with a tree branch on the courses of Eastern Ontario is now an LPGA major champion. Henderson, the 18-year-old from Smiths Falls, won the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship on Sunday on the first playoff hole against Lydia Ko. The victory, only the second time a Canadian woman has won a major — the first was Sandra Post in 1968 — is Henderson’s second LPGA title, and adds to what was already an audacious resumé. She managed a top-10 at the U.S. Women’s Open, a runner-up finish at the U.S. Women’s Amateur, and was the top-ranked amateur in the world, all before reaching voting age. Now she has a shot at reaching number one in the professional rankings before she is old enough to buy alcohol in her home province.
“It was just kinda my day yesterday,” Henderson said in a conference call from the Pacific Northwest, where she beat Ko at Sahalee Country Club in the kind of dream matchup that the men’s game has sorely lacked in a major final round. Ko, the 19-year-old New Zealander, had won the previous two majors and is the top-ranked player in the world. She was on a streak that had echoes of Peak Tiger, but Henderson, who came into the tournament ranked fourth in the world, didn’t flinch at the enormity of the stage or the stature of her opponent. She fired a closing-round 65 that included a nerve-rattling 13-foot par save on the 18th hole, then won the playoff when she stuffed her approach shot on the first hole — Sahalee’s 18th, again — and Ko missed her birdie attempt.
At that moment, Henderson said, it sunk in that she had “this little putt” to beat the best player in the world and become a major champion in the process. It was a lot to put on a three-foot roll.
“My hands were really shaking,” Henderson said. “Somehow I was able to knock it in.” Later, she would hoist the big silver PGA championship trophy over her head like it was the Stanley Cup, fittingly enough on the same day that the Pittsburgh Penguins would do the same just down the coast a few hours later.
Ask anyone who knows Henderson well, and they will say her defining strength is her ability to be mentally tough in the moment. But none, not even Henderson herself, seems all that sure where it comes from. She just knows she’s mentally tough, and that it works for her.
It also seems to help that, in her whirlwind of a pro career, where she won last year before even having a Tour card — she was too young to be eligible — Henderson has stuck with the same routines that helped her become a prodigy. Her dad, Dave, is still her main coach, although she has worked for years with Golf Canada’s development program, and she is resolutely someone who has eschewed the technical swing analysis that often makes a golf broadcast sound like an introductory course in mechanical physics. Henderson started working with the national amateur team when she was a 14-year-old with a mismatched set of hand-me-down clubs and she remains the player who had an old seven-wood she could hit 150 yards or 200 yards, depending on what shot she needed.
Asked on Monday if her entrance into the pro ranks, where there are an embarrassment of instructors and coaches and training tools touting an equal amount of techniques, had changed her approach, Henderson responded that, no, it was “very much the same.”
“I don’t like working on technical Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images
“There’s a strategy to get to number one, and I’m pretty happy with the way it’s been going,” she said. When she turned pro in December of 2014 she was ranked 223rd in the world. Eighteen months later, after her win on Sunday: two. Yes, it has been going OK.
She has a busy summer ahead, with the full LPGA schedule, which includes three more majors and the Olympics in August. Is she worried about getting worn down?
“I’m still pretty young and feeling pretty good.” Again: point taken.
On Thursday at Sahalee, Henderson aced her fourth hole, which happened to earn her the hole-in-one prize of a new luxury sedan. She’s giving it to Brittany, her caddie now. “Every week, when we step up to the hole-in-one car hole, I say to Britt ‘If I get that, I’m giving it to you,’” she said. “I didn’t say that this week” — they didn’t realize it was the car hole — “but I’m really happy to give it to her.”
Seems fair enough, since she helped give the kid with a tree branch her swing.
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