National Post (National Edition)
Hughes in hunt for consistency
The PGA Tour might have the shortest off-season in sports, but that didn’t stop Mackenzie Hughes from trying to make the most of it.
With a month off, the 28-yearold golfer from Dundas, Ont., didn’t touch a club for three weeks and spent 10 days in Italy with wife Jenna and her family.
“I just felt like I was going to play a lot of golf in the fall and it had already been a pretty long year, so it was a good time to take a break,” Hughes told Postmedia News.
Hughes finished the 2018-19 season playing six of eight weeks and making it to the PGA Tour playoffs. He made the cut at the Northern Trust, finishing T67, but didn’t advance to the second playoff event. Hughes was 98th in FedEx Cup points, earning just over US$1 million in prize money, safely inside the all-important top-125 needed to secure a tour card for this new season.
Hughes made six of his last seven cuts, but that consistency wasn’t there for most of the season. Before that late stretch, he had made just eight of 18 cuts. But the Canadian made the most of his good play, which included some hot stretches. In March, he finished T13 at the Valspar Championship, played on the difficult Copperhead course at Innisbrook in Florida, and then followed it up with a T2 the following week in Punta Cana. Then, in late May, he had a T8 at the Charles Schwab Challenge, and followed it up with a T14 in front of his hometown fans in Hamilton at the RBC Canadian Open.
“I would say I definitely had my share of high peaks last year, but wasn’t as consistent as I would’ve liked to have been,” Hughes said. “But going into my fourth year on tour, I feel like I have a good grasp on what I need to do.”
Hughes believes that although you can always get better physically and technically in golf, the key to consistency will be found more in his mental approach.
“It needs to start with bringing a consistent approach to the course every day and just being level-headed out there and being patient and having a great attitude,” he said.
The man Hughes will be leaning on to help keep a positive attitude on the golf course, in large part is caddy Derell Aton. One of Aton’s jobs is to watch for any sign Hughes is getting down on himself, because according to Hughes, negativity is a red-flag for his golf game. Hughes credits some tough conversations the pair had last season for sparking his best stretches of golf.
“I had a couple moments during last season where I learned a lot about myself and learned a lot about what it takes for me to play my best golf, so I’m definitely taking those things forward into this year,” Hughes said. “As a player you don’t see quite as clearly because you’re kind of in the middle of it.”
Hughes played in last week’s season-opener at The Greenbrier and missed the cut, but after giving the clubs a rest for three weeks, his expectations weren’t overly high as he got back in the groove and prepared for a busy fall.
“I’m just kind of working my way into the season here,” he said. “So, I think the key in the beginning part of the year is just to be really patient and to know that again, it’s a long year, and you don’t need to be a hero in your very first week.”
Hughes is taking this week’s Sanderson Farms Championship off, but plans to play the next three weeks in Napa, Las Vegas, and Houston. The schedule could change if he were able to get into the fields in Asia next month for tour stops in Japan and South Korea. Those tournaments are open to the top-60 committed players from the previous year’s FedEx Cup standings and the cutoff is usually somewhere in the nineties, where Hughes finished. If he earns a spot into the Asian events, he likely will skip the Houston Open.
“I look at this like we’re right in the middle of the season, basically,” he said. “I don’t think that this is a light time of year for me. I still want to play a good bit of golf and get off to a nice start.”