A former Westlock resident has made it big in the Canadian golf world, playing well enough to rank sixth on the Canadian Professional Golfers’ Association’s (CPGA) first annual top 100 list of Canadian golfers.
Brett Burgeson first picked up the game of golf when he was seven and hasn’t stopped honing his game ever since.
“Being that high up on the list is a great thing for me,” he said. “It shows me that all the hard work over the years has made a difference.”
However, he cautions not to read too much into the CPGA’s list. It is limited to golf professionals at golf clubs or teaching facilities, and does not include amateur golfers or Canadian Tour players. In short, it’s not a comprehensive list of all Canadian golfers.
That is not to discount his ranking, Burgeson said, but rather to acknowledge the specific type of golfer the list ranks.
That being said, Burgeson is happy with how he compares to his fellow golf pros across the country.
“It’s a special thing for me to be in the Top 10,” he said. “It’s somewhere I want to be and where I want to continue to stay for a long time.”
The rankings take into account the last three years of play in certain tournaments in Canada, he said. As such, it rewards consistency as much as it does results over that time span.
He has had good results in the last few years at the Canadian Club Professional Championship in particular, including winning in 2003, he said.
At the most recent event, he said he came in seventh thanks to triple-bogeying the eighteenth hole in consecutive rounds. Had he managed to par that hole in those two rounds, he said he would have won the tournament.
He takes that bit of bad luck in stride, because he knows what it takes to win and move up the rankings.
“If I can just put in a little extra work and get things going together for a couple of these events, I could easily move up with a couple of wins,” he said.
His placement on the list brings with it a few privileges, Burgeson said. The chief among them is an invitation to CPGA Championship this summer in Calgary. It’s a match-play tournament to which the top 64 golfers in the country are invited.
Despite his high ranking, and a 14-point cushion between him and the number seven golfer, he said things can change on the list in a hurry.
“The funny thing is, with this point ranking, 14 isn’t a whole lot when you consider all it takes is one person to win and they could really jump up the list quickly,” he said, adding a person could have a bad run of tournaments and drop just as quickly.
As he has moved through the golfing world, Burgeson’s love for the game has evolved. Now that he’s a golf pro at the Country Hills golf club in Calgary, he said he enjoys teaching players, fitting them with the right equipment and organizing events at the club.
Yet, he has never lost the love of playing he developed in his youth during countless hours at the Westlock Golf Course.
