Of all the roads to this Presidents Cup, Nick Taylor has travelled the longest.<\/p>\n
The 38-year-old Canadian has been on the cusp of this event for most of the past decade, never quite cracking the team. He\u2019s won an impressive five times on the PGA Tour \u2014 more than almost all his teammates \u2014 but only once during a Presidents Cup year. It happened at the 2024 Phoenix Open, in February, a full six months before the International team was finalised, where he was left on the outside looking in. Earlier this week, he explained how the pain of missing the \u201924 Cup \u2014 held in his homeland \u2014 had subsided into acceptance. But then he watched from afar as his best friends competed in Canada and the scab got reopened all over again.<\/p>\n
Finally now, in a year when he didn\u2019t win, he got the positive phone call that he\u2019d earned a spot. And then, on Wednesday evening, he was told by the same captain, Geoff Ogilvy, that he\u2019d have to wait a bit longer \u2014 he had to sit the first session.<\/p>\n
It might have all been the best thing for him.<\/p>\n
Taylor had the smoothest way of easing in to his first team event. He went to the 1st tee as a viewer Thursday morning, taking it all in. He watched each of his teammates pass through, then he warmed up and played a few practice holes in the background, unbeknownst to basically everyone on property.<\/p>\n
Then, on Friday afternoon, he got to sit and watch again, as Corey Conners played their opening tee shot. Conners is as comfy of a pairing as Taylor could have asked for, playing alongside one of his best friends. Only they were matched against, statistically, the two best golfers on the planet in Scottie Scheffler and Sam Burns.<\/p>\n
On paper, it looked like the making of an unfair fight. But it would be ignorant of Taylor\u2019s journeyman career. His second career win came at Pebble Beach in 2020, in a final pairing against Phil Mickelson. He out-dueled Tommy Fleetwood in an unforgettable playoff at the 2023 Canadian Open. That Phoenix Open win? From a playoff. His most recent win? Another playoff.<\/p>\n
Taylor is 3-0 in extra time on the PGA Tour, which is why it had to be worrying, if you\u2019re a Nick Taylor fan, to see how squirrelly his tee shot was on the 18th hole, in a quasi border battle between the U.S. and Canada, holding a 1-up lead.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was just a poor swing at the wrong time,\u201d he said of the tee ball that finished about 50 yards right of the centre of the fairway.<\/p>\n
He had tucked Conners so far right of right that the only move was to chop it 70 yards back into the fairway, short of the Americans\u2019 tee shot. The number was 151 yards for his uphill approach, with a little wind in his face. A gassed up 9-iron, he thought, if these were normal conditions, but they weren\u2019t. The adrenaline of a team setting he\u2019s spent years imagining had arrived in full. A \u201chold-off\u201d 9-iron it is, and \u201cit came out perfect.\u201d<\/p>\n
He and his caddie weren\u2019t sure they\u2019d even be able to get his ball to tap-in range, but they had about eight clues standing behind the green whipping their flags in the air. \u201cIt was a nice feeling walking up that it was a kick-in,\u201d Taylor said. Sam Burns\u2019 15-footer for a halved match rimmed hard on the lip of hole and spit itself out, an omen of sorts for the entire afternoon, which the Internationals swept, 5-0.<\/p>\n
If that foursomes session was one big reminder about not counting out underdogs, then Taylor\u2019s final approach was the perfect derivative of it. People really have been counting him out for much of his career. And at times, he\u2019s given them plenty reason to do so. (He\u2019s netted just one top 25 in 22 major starts.) And yet he also has this uncanny knack of hitting the exact shot when certain moments call for it.<\/p>\n
If what you watched wasn\u2019t proof enough, then here\u2019s a message from his PGA Tour pal watching along from Scottsdale, who has known Taylor since they were freshman roommates at the University of Washington.<\/p>\n
\u201cAny game, any time, anywhere,\u201d Joel Dahmen replied via text. \u201cDude is a boss in crunch time.\u201d<\/p>\n
This article was written by Sean Zak and originated on Golf.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Of all the roads to this Presidents Cup, Nick Taylor has travelled the longest. The 38-year-old Canadian has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":783149,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,116744,48976,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-783148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-nick-taylor","tag-presidents-cup","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/783149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}