CALEDON, Ont. – Several hours after Ryan Fox tapped in to win last year’s RBC Canadian Open at TPC Toronto, he was sitting down to a late dinner with his wife, Anneke, their children and members of his team.
This was in the Babbo Wine Bar at the nearby Hockley Valley Resort, past 10 p.m., after all the “chaos had stopped.” His kids were zombies at that point, Fox said, but the evening, naturally, was celebratory. Golfers don’t enjoy the spoils of victory often, so Fox sipped champagne and “probably had a couple glasses of red wine, too.”
Fox had hit the “best shot of his life” to defeat Sam Burns on the fourth playoff hole at TPC Toronto that day. A month earlier, he’d won the Myrtle Beach Classic in a three-man playoff that included Canadian Mackenzie Hughes. And prior to joining the PGA Tour he’d won four times on the DP World Tour, including its flagship BMW Championship in 2023, plus twice on the European Challenge Tour and thrice on the Australasia circuit.
So his trophy cabinet was far from empty. This addition, however, was different.
“I mean, Myrtle was special because it was my first PGA Tour win, but it was an opposite-field event,” said Fox in an interview earlier this year. “Wentworth was obviously very special. That’s sort of the players championship of the DP World Tour and that was a great field and a great leaderboard as well. But the Canadian Open has been around for, well it’s the third- or fourth-oldest tournament in the world, if memory serves, and there are some pretty iconic names on that trophy. And it was a full-field PGA Tour event, it was a strong field. That’s the stuff that you dream of growing up. Or, for me, when I first started taking golf seriously at 18 years old, that’s the stuff that I really wanted to achieve one day and that was literally ticking off a dream. And it definitely was more special, the Canadian Open and all the history with it and it being a national open.
“I think Rory (McIlroy) has said a lot about it over the years, that national opens just have that something extra about them and I certainly believe that too and to be the Canadian Open champion is pretty damn awesome, I have to say.”
McIlroy has hoisted RBC Canadian Open hardware twice, in 2019 and 2022, and it was telling that after his first victory at Hamilton Golf and Country Club, the superstar took a few moments in the media centre to admire his prize on the dais and those who had held it before him. When the inevitable what-does-this-mean-to-you query came, McIlroy immediately recited legends he had joined.
“I mean, even just looking at some of the names on this side of the trophy. Sam Snead, Bobby Locke, Arnold Palmer, Tiger Woods, Nick Price,” said McIlroy. “I mean, some of the greats of the game have won this trophy. For me to put my name on it is something I’m very proud of.”
Ryan Fox, Robert MacIntyre and Rory McIlroy are three recent international winners of the RBC Canadian Open. (Photos: The Canadian Press, Getty Images)
The common thread between Fox, a New Zealander, and McIlroy, a Northern Irishman, is that they are international players. So too is Scotland’s Robert MacIntyre, who said this upon winning the Open at Hamilton in 2024 when much of the PGA Tour conversation centred on “elevated” events, which came to be called “signature” events: “I think national opens are huge for professional golf or any kind of golf. I feel like national opens are elevated because it is national.”
International players have always had a soft spot for the RBC Canadian Open, one of few PGA Tour events contested outside the United States. To the masses, especially those in the United States, it might simply be viewed as another stop in a busy month that includes next week’s U.S. Open and two of those “signature” events in last week’s Memorial Tournament and the upcoming Travelers Championship.
It is not. It is the world’s fourth-oldest professional tournament behind the Open Championship, U.S. Open and BMW Championship, which traces its roots to the Western Open, begun in 1899, five years before the Canadian Open. It is the only national open to be a PGA Tour event, with the British and U.S. Opens owned and operated by the R&A and USGA, respectively. It is a tournament with more than a century’s worth of winners, moments, highlights, heartbreaks and heroes.
That distinction is worth considering when contemplating the PGA Tour’s proposed plans under new CEO Brian Rolapp to split its schedule into two tiers — one slate of events for the stars and another for the rank-and-file. There are many unanswered questions as to which track the RBC Canadian Open would take under such a transformation, and what that would mean to the makeup of its field as an “open” championship.
For now, though, let’s reinforce the importance of this tournament — “elevated,” as MacIntyre called it, even though it is not officially designated as such by the tour. And let’s hope that this week’s winner is another in a long line of champions like McIlroy, Fox and MacIntyre who truly appreciate and understand the accomplishment and that it is indeed more special than winning most anywhere else.
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