MEDINAH, Ill. — Of all the roads to this Presidents Cup, Nick Taylor has traveled the longest.
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’s won an impressive five times on the PGA Tour — more than almost all his teammates — 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 finalized, where he was left on the outside looking in. Earlier this week, he explained to GOLF.com how the pain of missing the ’24 Cup — held in his homeland — 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.
Finally now, in a year when he didn’t win, he got the positive phone call that he’d earned a spot. And then, on Wednesday evening, he was told by the same captain, Geoff Ogilvy, that he’d have to wait a bit longer — he had to sit the first session.
It might have all been the best thing for him.
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.
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.
On paper, it looked like the making of an unfair fight. But it would be ignorant of Taylor’s 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.
Taylor is 3-0 in extra time on the PGA Tour, which is why it had to be worrying, if you’re 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.
“That was just a poor swing at the wrong time,” he said of the tee ball that finished about 50 yards right of the center of the fairway.
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’ 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’t. The adrenaline of a team setting he’s spent years imagining had arrived in full. A “hold-off” 9-iron it is, and “it came out perfect.”
He and his caddie weren’t sure they’d 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. “It was a nice feeling walking up that it was a kick-in,” Taylor said. Sam Burns’ 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.
If that foursomes session was one big reminder about not counting out underdogs, then Taylor’s final approach was the perfect derivative of it. People really have been counting him out for much of his career. And at times, he’s given them plenty reason to do so. (He’s 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.
If what you watched wasn’t proof enough, then here’s 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.
“Any game, any time, anywhere,” Joel Dahmen replied via text. “Dude is a boss in crunch time.”
