10 years into pro career, Brooke Henderson stands as greatest Canadian golfer ever

SMITHS FALLS, Ont. — Brooke Henderson’s first day-to-day manager when she signed with global representation behemoth IMG, Gabe Codding, was filling up his rental car after visiting the Canadian wunderkind for the first time and says, with a laugh, he felt like he was going to die because of the cold. Now the director of marketing at the City of Rancho Mirage in California, Codding lives in the literal desert. He, of course, doesn’t own a real winter jacket, nor a hat, nor a scarf.

Codding was more prepared for his next visit as Henderson began her march to stardom as this country’s best young golfer. The wintertime is always special for Henderson, who grew up playing hockey and still loves Christmas on the lake with her family, but less so for Codding.

Dec. 18, specifically, is a date neither will forget. This year, that particular day marks the 10-year anniversary of Henderson announcing she was turning professional.

And a star was born.

For so many, Henderson is still a kid. Just 27, with plenty more to come in the future as a “big star” of the LPGA Tour, says outgoing commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan. Looking back, a celebrated golfing lifetime has already happened. 

Henderson has the most wins of any Canadian on either the LPGA Tour or PGA Tour with 13 — including two majors — and all that’s left is for her to add to that total. It’s no longer hyperbolic to say Henderson is this country’s greatest golfer ever. Whatever the number of victories she ends her career with will likely never be topped.

And if you look at recent golfers who, in 10 years or less on the LPGA Tour have at least 10 wins to their name, it’s iconic first name-only types — Nelly, Lexi, Lydia. Plus, Brooke.

“It’s hard to put into words,” Codding, a crack in his voice, told Sportsnet. “It’s actually really emotional. You just see people who carry a light and a kindness about them. Early on, I just really knew her from record and name and then when you meet her — there was just something there.”

As Henderson celebrates the 10th anniversary of her life-changing decision to become a professional golfer, the only question left is how much brighter can her star get? 

Henderson was long on the radar of the game’s biggest power brokers even as a young teenager. As an amateur, she won more than 50 times and ascended to No. 1 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking. She also won three professional events as an amateur — two Canadian Women’s Tour events plus the 2014 PGA of Canada Women’s Championship. One of her wins on the Canadian Women’s Tour came in 2012 when she was just 14 (and nine months and three days), which made her the youngest player, male or female, to ever win a professional golf event at the time.

Derek Ingram oversaw Canada’s women’s national team for a couple of years — he’s now the men’s team head coach and works with Corey Conners and Taylor Pendrith — and first witnessed Henderson’s incredible gift when she was just 14. The first time Ingram watched Henderson was at the Spirit International, a junior event just outside of Houston. She drank about a dozen Sprites that week — “I am not going to say anything, she’s the best player here. The last thing I’m doing is taking the Sprite off the table” — and beat everyone with a set of mismatched clubs.

“And she is stuffing it. Every shot,” Ingram continued. “This was something special.

“This is something I may never see in my lifetime again.” 

When the tournament was over, Henderson told Ingram she was thinking about going to the University of Florida to play golf (Henderson grew up a big fan of the school, and even had her room painted with the blue-and-orange colours). Ingram, on the way home from the course, told Henderson that there was “no chance” that she was going to college for golf. If she did, Ingram remembers saying, he hadn’t done his job.

“Finally, I was like, ‘You’re already better than all of them right now. You’re not going there. You’re going to the LPGA Tour,’” Ingram said.

Sure enough, Henderson continued to stack up her impressive results through the next few summers until things peaked in 2014, when she finished 10th at the U.S. Women’s Open as an amateur. That’s when she moved from IMG’s ‘players to watch’ list to the ‘players to go after’ list, according to Jay Burton, the senior vice president of golf clients.

In September of 2014, Brooke and her father, Dave, drove from Smiths Falls and Burton drove from Cleveland to have a multi-hour meeting in Toronto along with Sam Galet, who was then the managing director of IMG’s Toronto office. At that point, Henderson had already been denied early access to the LPGA Tour because of her age. But she had decided she was turning pro regardless. The key question was about where she could play.

“It became clear to me that the more we got involved quickly to line up sponsor invites to 2015 the better our chances would be to sign her,” Burton said.

Dave Henderson told Burton that there were other suitors so they would be taking their time with the decision, but Burton told the Hendersons that it wasn’t too early to start putting out some feelers about sponsor invites for the first half of 2014 — which flipped a business switch across the table.

The Hendersons granted what Burton calls a “hunting license” for the agency (which is now rebranded to WME Sports) to start engaging tournament directors about potential spots for the next year. Once things started rolling, the agency-player deal was finalized in short order.

Golf Canada became one of Henderson’s first sponsors, along with Ping — announced together when she turned pro. Funny enough, Burton recalls, Ping’s head office in Arizona initially said they “probably wouldn’t” sign Henderson. About three weeks later Burton got a call back as the American office of Ping spoke to the Canadian office and, well, they got the real rundown about how good Henderson could be. The official announcement came just before the holiday season in 2014, with RBC becoming a sponsor of Henderson’s in the first quarter of 2015. The bank remains a key corporate partner that’s still along for the ride.

“We couldn’t be more proud of Brooke and all she has accomplished for the sport in Canada and on a global scale. She is a true trailblazer who exemplifies high performance,” said Mary DePaoli, the EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, RBC and likely the only other person who rivals Henderson’s influence in Canadian golf now.

“We’ve been proud to see Brooke grow from a talented young athlete to Canada’s winningest professional golfer, all while elevating the game and those around her along the way.”  

Corporate Canada aside, Henderson has had top-down support from the beginning. Mike Whan, the former commissioner of the LPGA Tour and now the head of the United States Golf Association, told Sportsnet of an event he was at for the old Manulife LPGA Classic where someone showed him a photo of Henderson — who was maybe 14 at the time — and told him she would be a future LPGA superstar. 

“I remember thinking in every city there’s a young girl that the whole town is convinced will be a pro star, but generally speaking that turns out to be incorrect. A couple years later, I saw her play golf for the first time and realized (Canadians) knew what they were talking about,” Whan said.

“If you had to describe a perfect LPGA player, your description would be pretty close to Brooke Henderson.”

Gord Percy remembers Henderson as a youngster better than anyone else because it’s his fault her swing is the most unique on the LPGA Tour.

Percy, now the head golf professional at Smiths Falls Golf and Country Club — not far from the sign into town that says “Home of Brooke and Brittany Henderson” — used to play golf with Dave Henderson and had a Ping driver with an extra stiff shaft which he eventually lent to Dave. Brooke Henderson started using it when she began playing competitive golf, and it was not much shorter than she was.

“They would come to the driving range at Lombard Glen (another course near Smiths Falls) and she was just watching like a sponge. She was just watching what anybody else was doing and then she would try to do it herself,” Percy, who got the driver back last year as a gift, remembers now. “You can never predict [what could happen], but you could predict the sense that she was going to be successful at whatever she did.”

After the announcement that Henderson would turn professional, it didn’t take long for her to make an immediate impact. She won a pair of pro tournaments in Florida (her first win saw her sister, Brittany Henderson, come second) and then broke through for a title on the then-Symetra Tour (now Epson Tour, the LPGA Tour’s developmental circuit) in June. Prior to that, she finished third at the Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic in April having got in the field on an early sponsor invite brokered by her new agents.

She finished tied for fifth at the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship and the U.S. Women’s Open, majors both, that summer.

Henderson would then go on to win her first LPGA Tour title in August by eight shots(!) and was immediately granted an exemption by Whan to take up LPGA Tour membership.

She turned 18 a month later. 

Codding, who was on site for the win in Portland, remembers being so hyped up for the Henderson sisters as, the next week, they were driving up to Vancouver for the CPKC Women’s Open. Brittany was a fine player in her own right — she’s in the Sports Hall of Fame at Coastal Carolina University — and got a sponsor exemption into the event in Portland that week, too. He figured the sisters would want to celebrate. Turns out, they wanted Burger King. Innocent joy from the drive-thru, and a nap in the back seat after crossing the border.

That initial win in Portland was the only victory of Brooke’s that Brittany was not on the bag for. Now the sisters travel the world together having built-in best-friend adventures.

“I feel like time is precious, but it goes by quite quickly and I feel like we’ve been able to accomplish a lot. And looking back, if you said you could see where we made it to, we would have been amazed, and thrilled, and just all those words,” Brittany told Sportsnet. “You embark on that journey and you don’t know how it’s going to go.

“We’ve been blessed and grateful for everything Brooke has been able to do — and I’ve been able to be there with her.”

Now, 10 years on, Brooke is continuing to climb golf’s big mountain.

It’s not getting any easier to win, although the likes of Nelly Korda made it look so in 2024 (Korda had seven titles to her name this year, including five in a row in the early part of the season) and she is still as keen as ever to reach No. 1 in the world at some point.

Henderson told Sportsnet at the LPGA Tour’s season finale that putting herself in contention more often is a big goal for 2025. She missed only two cuts and had nine top-10s this year — a 38-percent clip. But those two early exits came at major championships, leaving her disappointed to not have a chance to make a run for another big title. There have been some lows, Henderson admits. She didn’t win this year, for the first time since the COVID-shortened 2020. It’s hard, obviously, for Henderson to compare herself to anyone other than herself.

But there has, of course, been an overwhelming number of highs.

She has represented Canada at the Olympics three times, has two majors to her name, broke a 45-year drought for Canadians at the CPKC Women’s Open, got to No. 2 in the world, was the Canadian Press Female Athlete of the Year three times, and in 2019 was named the Founders Award recipient at the LPGA Tour’s year-end awards (an award voted for by the players). And there is the unmeasurable impact she’s had on junior golf in this country, especially among girls. Currently, there’s the Mike Weir generation on the PGA Tour. Canada won its first-ever World Junior Girls Championship in 2023. Could a Brooke Henderson generation be coming along next?

Henderson can look back on her first decade as a pro with, overall, nothing but happiness.

“It’s been truly amazing,” Henderson told Sportsnet. “I couldn’t have really asked for more than what I’ve gotten.

“It’s honestly been a dream come true.” 

Agents, sponsors, players, Tour leadership, fans. Whoever looks at Henderson and the last 10 years since she turned professional can think, well, she’s done it all.

That decision was pretty good.

So, what’s next?