This is the first of four days of competition at Royal Montreal.
Tony Finau hit the first tee ball Thursday morning to kick off the 2024 Presidents Cup. Teamed with Xander Schauffele, the American duo went out against Byeong Hun An and Jason Day of the International squad at Royal Montreal Golf Club in fourballs, the first of five matches on the first day.
Canadian Mackenzie Hughes was one of the two International players getting the day off but he made his presence felt on home soil, by chugging a morning beer on the first tee to get the fans fired up.
While this event doesn’t have the drama of the Ryder Cup, there were some friendly sparks flying after Tom Kim and Scottie Scheffler made back-to-back huge putts.
Through nine holes, there was a lot of red on the board but all the matches were tightly contested throughout but the Americans pulled away late in all of them.
Here’s a look at some of our favorite gear available at the Boutique Officielle.
MONTREAL, Canada — With music thumping, the merchandise shop was jumping at the 2024 Presidents Cup on Thursday afternoon. Or as the locals here call it, the Boutique Officielle.
I counted at least two dozen different brands selling gear ranging from USA and International versions of hockey sweaters from Adidas to colorful polos from Peter Millar, Greyson, Johnnie-O among others. The T-shirt game was strong to very strong with lots of playful use of the Maple Leaf, poutine and even a moose. There were hats from Imperial, Ahead and ’47, plus hot new brands like Holderness & Bourne, B Draddy and Lululemon.
Here’s a look at some of our favorite gear available at the Boutique Officielle.
The 2024 Presidents Cup kicked off on Thursday with Canadian Mackenzie Hughes taking a knee on Royal Montreal Golf Club’s first tee in front of the home crowd and chugging a Stella Artois. Once the matches were underway, it didn’t take long for fans to voice their displeasure for Golf Channel’s coverage — or lack thereof.
For starters, there are no streaming options on Peacock (although NBCSports.com does have it) until the weekend, including zero featured groups or matches.
The camera on the sixth hole is having an issue with the lens.
And, of course, the commercial load is a bit ridiculous.
Here’s what fans had to say on social media on Day 1 north of the border.
MONTREAL – Max Homa is tired of throwing mud at the wall.
It was a frustrating season for Homa, who failed to make it back to Atlanta and the Tour Championship. It began with great promise after he went to South Africa in November and won the Nedbank Golf Challenge. Then he was chasing his first major championship into the back nine on Sunday at the Masters until he made a disastrous double bogey at No. 12. The rest of the season? Fairly pedestrian with just one top-10 finish since that has seen him tumbling down the world rankings from No. 7 to currently 25th.
“It was bizarre,” Homa said in describing his play. “Kind of just started last off-season. I wasn’t swinging the club well, and I just felt like I was throwing mud at the wall all year and could not find anything that would stick.”
In an effort to rediscover his mojo, Homa has parted ways with instructor Mark Blackburn. When asked about who he’s working with now, Homa said, “I’ve been solo…. I have a buddy I’ve sent videos to and we’ve chatted about my golf swing. Joe has taken a big role in checking ball positions and distance to the ball and things like that.”
Homa confirmed he made the decision after the FedEx St. Jude Championship.
“It’s just a tough year. Time for a change. It’s unfortunate, I love Mark. He’s basically a part of my family. He’s just been an amazing human being,” Homa said on Wednesday during a media session ahead of the Presidents Cup. “But at times, the communication gets hard. I think everyone in here has gone through that at some point. It’s one of those things, more for me I need a break and sometimes I don’t do a great job of taking ownership of my own golf swing so kind of putting the ball in my court a bit, and you know, trying to figure it out myself. I mean, as much as a coach can be brilliant, a genius like Mark, I know my golf swing better than anybody, and I can see it and feel it. Just trying to take some ownership like that.”
Homa’s decision continues a growing trend that effectively began with Tiger Woods, to take great ownership of their golf swing. Justin Thomas, Tony Finau and Adam Scott are among other top players who have decided to go solo rather than having a coach who travels to tournaments and works on their swing.
Homa played in the 50-man field BMW Championship and finished T-33 and missed the cut at the Procore Championship two weeks ago.
“I did a bunch of setup changes, and just got to like work through that,” said Homa, who is on the bench Thursday for the four-ball session.
Homa hopes he can turn a new leaf and regain the magic that made him a consistent winner over the last several years and a player who seemed on the verge of a major championship breakthrough.
“Probably spent too much time throwing mud and not enough time trying to figure out how to get the ball in the hole,” he said.
There are no players happier to be north of the border this week for the 2024 Presidents Cup than Mackenzie Hughes, Corey Conners and Taylor Pendrith. The Canadian trio grew up playing golf in Canada, and now they return to Royal Montreal Golf Club to represent the International Team — and Hughes got the party started early Thursday.
Before the opening four-ball session kicked off with Xander Schauffle and Tony Finau battling Jason Day and Byeong Hun An, Hughes took a knee in front of the home crowd on the first tee and chugged a beer — a Stella Artois to be exact.
Check out 10 brands who have recently released Presidents Cup gear, including t-shirts, hats, sweaters and more.
The 2024 Presidents Cup gets underway this week at Royal Montreal Golf Club in Canada, with Jim Furyk leading Team USA and Mike Weir leading the Internationals. If you’re a big fan of the biennial bash, you’re in luck. We’ve searched the internet for some of the best Presidents Cup apparel items.
From polos and crewnecks to hats and hoodies, we’ve included an item from every corner of the game.
Just some of the brands included below are Peter Millar, Malbon Golf, Johnnie-O and more.
B. Draddy is the official apparel sponsor for the 2024 Presidents Cup in Canada, offering dozens of pieces for both Team USA and the International Team.
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FootJoy
FootJoy 2024 Presidents Cup Swing Hoodie (FootJoy)
FootJoy’s Presidents Cup collection includes t-shirts, hoodies and a couple of must-see polos. The logo on this hoodie is too good; we had to feature it.
“I was almost sure I would never play in another one,” he said.
MONTREAL – After Keegan Bradley won the 2011 PGA Championship and played in the Ryder Cup in 2012 and 2014 and the Presidents Cup in 2013, he assumed he was going to play for the U.S. side every year. Then a decade went by without him representing the U.S. in either competition.
“I remember thinking when we’re watching the Ryder Cup or Presidents Cup, I’m thinking, ‘I’m never going to get to do this again.’ It was a bummer,” he said.
A year ago, Bradley got the hard-luck call that he hadn’t been picked for the U.S. team at the Ryder Cup in Rome. The cameras for the Netflix documentary “Full Swing” were rolling at his home as he received the heartbreaking news for all to see how much he was crushed to be left off the team. Then, in July, Bradley was the surprise choice to captain the U.S. squad for the 2025 Ryder Cup. That led to U.S. Presidents Cup Captain Jim Furyk offering him a role as an assistant captain.
But Bradley, 38, messed up those best-laid plans as he continued his career resurgence to No. 13 in the Official World Golf Ranking. Last month he won the BMW Championship and Furyk gave him the nod as one of his six captain’s picks.
“I kind of wanted him to be an assistant captain, but he just had to go and play so darn good at the BMW and kind of lead from wire-to-wire and kind of earn a spot on the team in my mind,” Furyk said. “So we’ve kind of taken those assistant duties away from him and focus on kind of integrating himself amongst his teammates, being a leader on that team with kind of a veteran status, and everyone knows he’s the captain next year as well.”
Bradley bleeds red, white and blue like few other competitors. He famously still hasn’t unpacked his bag from when the Americans lost the 2012 Ryder Cup at Medinah and refuses to do so until he’s part of a winning side.
“To be back here a decade later, it’s really been a special week. I look around the room at dinners and stuff, and there’s nobody there that I was on these other teams with, and Jim was playing the last time I was out here,” Bradley said. “I want to prove to the guys that their captain can still play.”
The shoes of Keegan Bradley of the U.S. Team for the 2024 Presidents Cup at The Royal Montreal Golf Club. (Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)
One of those players on the U.S. side that reminds Bradley a bit of himself is Wyndham Clark, who won a major and has since made the last two U.S. teams.
“He’s older than me and kind of in different walks of life. He’s kind of, not that he’s, his career isn’t done by any means, but he’s on the back end of his career and I’m in the beginning of mine,” Clark said. “It’s great to be around him. He even admitted five weeks ago he was like, ‘I was ready to come up here and be a captain’ and it’s quickly changed. The fun thing is he talked with us about obviously next year and talking about the Ryder Cup. Says, ‘Hey, this is a starting block now.’ This week is huge for Team USA for next year’s Ryder Cup. He’s so positive and such a great leader. I’m really excited that he’s our captain and excited he’s on this team.”
But Bradley isn’t concentrating on assistant captain duties and learning the ropes from Furyk this week ahead of taking the helm for the U.S. efforts to regain the Ryder Cup next year.
“I have to go out there tomorrow and play. So I’m not here to do any of that,” Bradley said. “For me, personally, it’s more about getting to know the guys. I knew them all, but I knew them all sort of from a distance.”
And for Bradley, getting to play one more time – if it happens to be his last time as a player – is a bonus.
“I was almost sure I would never play in another one,” he said. “So, I am trying to remind myself to take a second, look around. I’ve been trying to do that a lot more in my career of taking a moment and looking around and taking it all in.”
Hughes was at his son’s baseball practice when Weir’s name popped up on his phone.
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.
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.
Herb Page, who coached Kent State for 41 years before retiring in 2019, boasted that his three players in the competition was one more than powerhouse Georgia, Cal and two better than Texas. Ahead of the official announcement on Sept. 3, Hughes called his coach on FaceTime and then widened the image to show Conners and Pendrith all together and broke the news of their selection.
“I just about cried,” Page told the Canadian Press.
To Hughes making the team in any capacity was special but to do so with his former college teammates was “the cherry on top.”
The International team for the 2024 Presidents Cup at The Royal Montreal Golf Club. (Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)
Weir noted that he chose Hughes in part because of his splendid short game and touch around the greens. He ranked fourth in both Strokes Gained: Putting and Strokes Gained: Around the Greens this season on the PGA Tour. While he will be one of two rookies on the International Team, Hughes experienced competing in front of a partisan crowd at home when he played in the final group Sunday at the RBC Canadian Open in June. But he said the experience he will most draw on is being in a twosome with Tiger Woods at the 2018 Players Championship when Woods stormed into contention.
“It was a circus, absolutely chaos and I shot 68,” he said. “I’ll never forget what I felt like playing with him and I think that’s going to be along the lines of what I will feel like at Royal Montreal.”
Hughes is coming into the competition on a high note after finishing T-4 at the Procore Championship in Napa, California, less than two weeks ago, and said he plans to embrace the chaos of playing on home soil and potentially in foursomes or four-ball with Conners or Pendrith.
“I feel like I want to use the crowd to my advantage,” he said. “I know they’re going to be loud and energetic and I want to lean into that.”
He won’t be looping north of the border this week, but Mike “Fluff” Cowan will act as Jim Furyk’s right-hand man at the 2024 Presidents Cup.
Fluff and the captain of Team USA have been working together for 25 years — the pair split briefly earlier this year when Cowan went to caddie for C.T. Pan on the PGA Tour — and will be side-by-side as they wander the layout of Royal Montreal Golf Club over the next four days.
Cowan told our Adam Schupak last month he underwent surgery on his left hip and was hoping to be recovered enough to be Furyk’s cart driver at the biennial event.
The Americans have dominated, but the Internationals have the experience this year.
Does experience matter at the Presidents Cup? It can’t hurt.
When it comes to this year’s biennial bash, which begins Thursday at Royal Montreal Golf Club in Canada, there’s a stark advantage for the International team in terms of experience in the competition between the United States and rest of the world, excluding Europe.
Of the 12 golfers on the American team, four of them are rookies, and the remaining eight have 11 combined appearances at the Presidents Cup. This week, Adam Scott will make his 11th start in the competition.
With stalwarts like Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth not competing, there are some new faces for the Americans, like Sahith Theegala and Wyndham Clark, the latter of who competed in Rome last year in his first team competition.
For the Internationals, however, three players have competed in at least four Presidents Cups, and they have only two rookies in 2024, including Canadian Mackenzie Hughes.
With the Americans owning a 12-1-1 advantage in the competition, it’s hard to say experience does matter, but perhaps this year can be when the International team gets an overdue victory.
Here’s a look at past records for every 2024 Presidents Cup competitor in Montreal.
