Canadian PGA Tour member Brad Fritsch was in Nashville for a Pro Am on Monday and won the one-day tournament.
It was a big honour for Fritsch, who didn’t get into the PGA Tour event this week, as the winning trophy was named after one of his childhood golf idols, Payne Stewart.
But, it was likely the second-most excitable moment of the day, as he went right from the course to see the conclusion of the Nashville Predators’ series against the Anaheim Ducks.
Although he couldn’t score tickets for the game, he enjoyed the ‘madhouse’ that was downtown Nashville after the final buzzer.
And then Fritsch, a hardcore Ottawa Senators fan (he was born in Alberta but spent nearly his whole life in Ottawa), hopped on a plane to catch the Senators defeat the Penguins in a crucial Game 6 from the Canadian Tire Centre Tuesday night.
“People are probably thinking I’m just doing the hockey tour,” said Fritsch with a laugh, although he didn’t make it to Pittsburgh for Game 7, despite a tweet he sent Tuesday that alluded to just that.
Fritsch, 35, hasn’t had the best of starts to his PGA Tour season, saying he’s been a little frustrated with not being able to get into as many tournaments as he would like, but things are coming around.
“I kind of knew at the start of the year that starts would be tough to get,” he admitted. “I haven’t been driving it well. Once I overcome that, the scores will start to come a lot lower. If you put me in the fairway or on a par three, I’m really good. I just can’t get it into the fairway right now. Once that comes, it’ll be good.”
However, the Senators’ unexpected and spirited run through the Stanley Cup Playoffs have helped eased the pain, ever so slightly.
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Fritsch said the atmosphere in Game 6 was unlike any he’s maybe ever heard – he was in the stands for the Game 7 loss against the New Jersey Devils in 2003, and said it was comparable – and now that Fritsch has become friendly with many of the players like Bobby Ryan and Erik Karlsson, the wins mean something different.
“If you win or lose as a fan, in the next couple days you’ll be OK. But when it’s for people you really know well, it just feels great,” he said. “This run is a little unexpected, to go this deep, but it’s really exciting.”
Fritsch said Karlsson, who took up golf about five years ago, enjoys playing on off-days. He even turned in a round at Oakmont Country Club – the host course of the 2016 U.S. Open and 5th-ranked course in the world according to Golf Digest – during this series against Pittsburgh.
“It’s his thing. It’s the way he relaxes,” said Fritsch of Karlsson’s penchant for golf.
But while Karlsson and the Senators have given fans in Canada’s capital plenty to cheer about this spring, the attendance in Ottawa remains a sticking point.
Some of the blame can be put on the Government of Canada’s new payment system, called Phoenix, leaving staff of the city’s biggest employer either paid less than they should be, or not at all. And of course, there was the flooding in the Ottawa Valley and Gatineau, Quebec a few weeks ago that was so bad a state of emergency was called.
Fritsch, to his credit, bought a couple tickets during the series against New York and gave them away on Twitter, saying he wanted to help someone who normally wouldn’t get to go and at the same time do a small part to help the team.
“There were 2,000 tickets available. Imagine, you just won a playoff series for the first time in a couple years and as a player, you step out there and there are hundreds and hundreds of empty seats. I had the means to buy a couple tickets, so I did and I gave them away,” he explained.
Fritsch said the way the media has so far portrayed the fans support or lack thereof, isn’t reflective of the city itself.
“It’s very easy to spend other people’s money. The articles criticize people for not spending money. I would never stoop to that. It’s a fact of life for this particular time and this particular city and this particular team, and that’s OK,” he said. “It’s not a huge city. People who are fans of Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver are trying to compare Ottawa to their city and we’re two, three, four times smaller than those cities. It is what it is.”
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Having grown up outside Ottawa’s core, Fritsch was neither here-nor-there about the arena – which has been criticized for being too far away from downtown – but said after seeing the pandemonium in Nashville, he’s a proponent for the arena to move.
“Seriously, I never really though about it before, but that completely changed my mind,” he said.
On Tour, Fritsch’s fellow Canadians like Mackenzie Hughes, Adam Hadwin, Graham DeLaet, and David Hearn are giving him a supportive bump when he sees them – as they’re following the playoffs closely – and surprisingly there are a handful others who are hockey fans.
Brandt Snedeker, a former RBC Canadian Open champion, has become one of them (he’s from Nashville), along with Tour winner Brendan Steele (cheers for the Los Angeles Kings), and the caddy for Tour veteran Mark Anderson is from Toronto, but is a Senators fan (“he didn’t want to cheer for the same team as his Dad or his brother growing up,” said Fritsch, who was happy to find a fellow Senators fan on Tour).
And although Fritsch won’t be in Pittsburgh for the series finale, he has a prediction for it nonetheless.
“If we win it has to be low scoring,” he said. “So I’ll say 2-1 Sens.”
