RBC Canadian Open

Fans were treated to some free golf for the second straight Sunday. J.T. Poston had not finished inside the top 20 all season. He led by four coming into Sunday at the Memorial, gave the strokes back over twelve holes Sunday afternoon, and birdied the last to drag Ryan Gerard into a playoff at −12. On the second extra hole Gerard three-putted for bogey, missing a six-footer coming back. The Postman tapped in for his fourth Tour win, four million dollars and a satisfying handshake.

“I knew I was gonna shake Jack's hand walking off 18 and I wanted to be proud of that handshake.” — Poston, post-win

The Memorial win has another layer for Poston as he moves from 94th to 39th in the world, which put him in the U.S. Open field without the labor of participating in golf's longest day, yesterday's 36-hole U.S. Open qualifier. Several other names made it to Shinnecock through it: Billy Horschel, Keith Mitchell, and Max Greyserman among them. Gerard, who had led on his own during the final round before Poston caught him, walked away with $2.2 million at Muirfield and the harder lesson. Wyndham Clark finished third alone; Fleetwood and Burns shared fourth, two names you'll see again below.

Canada's open, minus its regular

Rory McIlroy has won this tournament twice and treated it as a genuine fixture rather than a paycheck, playing every edition held since 2019 — including last year, where a quadruple-bogey eight in the second round sent him home early. This year he's not in it at all. The reason is the calendar: the RBC Canadian Open sits the week before the U.S. Open, and McIlroy, who has pared his schedule to the bone this season to protect his major prep, decided he'd rather arrive at Shinnecock rested than sharp. Scottie Scheffler made the same call. This is also the final Aon Swing 5 event, which means a tier of players below the top names are here grinding for the points and position that shape the rest of their season.

Four of the world's top ten are in the field — Matt Fitzpatrick (No. 4), Justin Rose (No. 6), Collin Morikawa (No. 7) and Tommy Fleetwood (No. 8) — alongside defending champion Ryan Fox, 2024 winner Robert MacIntyre, and the reigning PGA champion Aaron Rai. A hundred and forty-seven players, $9.8 million, and a course making only its second appearance as host.

Streaming: PGA Tour Live on ESPN+ (featured groups and early coverage from 7 AM ET Thu–Fri, 7:45 AM Sat–Sun); CBS simulcast on Paramount+.

What Ian Andrew moved

It seems we're in the golden age of course renovations — I can't remember the last primer that didn't touch on one. Courses keep getting longer because players keep getting longer, and the players are winning: Tour driving distance has climbed from roughly 288 yards in 2005 to 303 in 2025, the first era to crack a 300-yard average. Lengthening the courses and adding bunkers isn't keeping scores from going low.

In 2023 the North Course was torn down to its frame and rebuilt by Ian Andrew, the Canadian architect who had worked alongside Carrick on the original Osprey Valley courses, with the PGA Tour looking over his shoulder. Andrew repositioned every bunker — rebuilt on the Better Billy Bunker system, the drainage standard descended from the method a former Augusta National superintendent devised, which binds a gravel layer over a drain network so the sand barely moves in heavy rain — with most of them now clustered around the greens rather than the tees. He narrowed the fairways at the landing zones the Tour cares about, added back tees to stretch the card past 7,400 yards, and shaved short-grass runoffs around several greens, so a missed approach doesn't sit in rough; it trickles away from the target and leaves a decision.

The stated design brief was blunt: make the approach shot the hard part. That's the filter this week. The fairways are generous (roughly 37 yards across on average), the bentgrass greens are mid-sized, and the trouble waits at the green rather than off the tee. A bomber doesn't get punished for being a bomber, but he doesn't get rewarded either — what separates the field is who controls a wedge and a mid-iron into firm targets ringed by sand. Ball-striking, then putting. In that order.

The signature is the par-3 14th, nicknamed The Rink — a short hole, 125 to 144 yards, built into a stadium bowl. In 2025 it gave up a record 118 birdies, more than in any year since the hole opened in 2017, and raised $29,500 for the Credit Valley Conservation Foundation at $250 a birdie. It is the loudest tee shot of the week and the easiest. The course gives you that one; it makes you earn the rest.

Only one edition has been played at TPC Toronto, so course history is one data point, not a pattern. Fox's −18 made it the longest course in tournament history as a par 70 and still produced a playoff — soft, scoreable, birdie-heavy. The course record is 61, shot twice in Round 1 last year.

Memorial Scorecard

The model was no better than a monkey with a dartboard at the Memorial. Muirfield was a reminder of what the model can't do. It is built to find the players whose skills fit a golf course, and last week the course fit its favorite perfectly — Scheffler topped the board with one of the highest Par+ figures of the season, with McIlroy, Young, and Åberg right behind. They finished T12, T12, T46, and 39th. Not one of the top five finished inside the top five. The tournament instead belonged to J.T. Poston, who came in ranked 49th in the field by Par+ — squarely in the back half of the board. A model that reads form and fit has nothing useful to say about a man playing the best four days of his year out of nowhere. Nine of the top ten at least survived to the weekend, which on a week like this counts for something. The grade is a D+, setting the bar nice and low for this week.

This Week's Model Picks

A week after its top four finished no better than T12 at Muirfield, the model gets a course suited to the inputs it weighs most: approach play, then the short game, with length set aside. The board looks different from a typical week, too. Without Scheffler or McIlroy at the top, the names compress — the favorite and the tenth-ranked player are separated by a few tenths of a stroke. In a field that tight, the question worth asking isn't who sits first; it's where the model and the market read the same player differently.

They line up on Matt Fitzpatrick, who tops the board (Par+ +1.16) with the field's best course-fit score (92.6) at a price the model treats as roughly fair, near 8%. The gaps open behind him. The model ranks Eric Cole fifth on recent form while the board prices him near 2%, the widest distance between the two reads this week. Wyndham Clark sits fourth on ball-striking and form the market has been slower to price. Those are the two the model rates well above the board.

Par+ composite: market pricing (35%) + current form (25%) + course fit (20%) + SG:APP L24 (10%) + bogey avoidance (10%). Market implied probability de-vigged from sportsbook consensus as of June 9. Course fit weights this week: approach-first, putting on bent weighted up. Note: Alex Fitzpatrick's mark rests on a partial-season sample (39% stat coverage).

The model rates a few well-known names below their price. Robert MacIntyre (Par+ #29, +0.38) and Justin Rose (#23, +0.65) sit in the low-to-mid 3% range on the board while the model has each outside its top fifteen, a function of recent ball-striking that hasn't matched the world ranking. The two leading Canadians land lower still — Corey Conners (#87) and Taylor Pendrith (#83), both on cold recent form. So does defending champion Ryan Fox (#52), the New Zealander whose course-fit figure the model scores well under what last June's win might suggest.

The grounds crew gets their moment

Last June, Ryan Fox and Sam Burns came to the par-5 18th tied at 18 under and could not separate. They halved it. They played it again and halved it again. So the grounds crew did something almost no one in the gallery had seen before: between the second and third trips down the hole, they cut a new pin, tucked closer to the pond that guards the green, and dared the two of them to take it on. Fox did, on the fourth try — a 3-wood from 259 yards to seven feet — and that was the tournament.

It's the only championship golf this course has on record, and it ended with the setup crew physically rewriting the test mid-playoff because the players had solved the first version. That's the tell. TPC Toronto gives up birdies in bunches — The Rink alone surrendered 118 of them last year — and a course that scores this easily tends to gather contenders rather than thin them, which is how you get a four-hole sudden-death finish in the first place. The winner here won't be the player who avoids mistakes; there won't be enough of them to matter. It'll be the one still making birdies when the hole moves.

Mild, changeable early-June conditions north of Toronto — nothing extreme, highs in the upper 60s to low 70s with a standing 20–30% shower chance each afternoon. The variable worth watching is wind: the course already surrendered 18 under in benign weather last year, and a still, soft week could send the number lower. A breezy Sunday off the northwest is about the only thing in the forecast that toughens a course this scoreable.

Each week, a bird native to the tournament's corner of the country.

Osprey  ·  Pandion haliaetus

The course is named for it, but that doesn't mean you'll see one stalking the 7th fairway. The Osprey is a fish hawk — it primarily patrols water, not wooded area, and it hunts almost nothing but fish, the only North American raptor with a diet that's roughly 99% one thing. Look up over a pond or along a river and you might catch one: it hovers, folds, and drops feet-first, and it carries a reversible outer toe that lets it grip a slick fish with two claws forward and two back, lined up head-first to cut drag in flight. It breeds across southern Ontario from April into September, building bulky stick nests on dead trees, hydro poles, and the man-made platforms it took to so readily that the species came all the way back from its DDT-era collapse.

Range  Every continent but Antarctica; breeds across most of Canada near water, winters from the southern U.S. to South America Habitat  Lakes, large rivers, reservoirs and coastlines — anywhere with shallow water and fish