Once a hidden gem, TPC Toronto at Osprey Valley ready for Canadian Open spotlight

As far as Canadian golf goes, the view is hard to beat.

It doesn’t have the Pacific Ocean as a backdrop, like some of our west-coast gems, or the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, where legendary architect Stanley Thompson did some of his best work a century ago, or the crashing waves of the Atlantic like at Cabot Cape Breton, the unlikely world-class destination that has taken shape in remote Nova Scotia over the past two decades.

But the view from the clubhouse deck over the 18th green on the North Course at TPC Toronto at Osprey Valley is something to behold — especially if you have the ability to look back in time.

A property that started as a gravel pit in an otherwise unremarkable rural area about 40 minutes northwest of Pearson International Airport finally is ready for its closeup this week. Amplifying the spotlight will be the presence of PGA Tour superstar Rory McIlroy at the RBC Canadian Open, which doubles as the unveiling of a glittering, 54-hole facility featuring three of the top public courses in the country, multiple clubhouses that are out of Architectural Digest, detail-perfect, stay-and-play cabins, and what might be Canada’s best practice facility.

The washrooms are indoors, and the parking lot is even paved. It was not always thus.

But over more than 30 years, it has been transformed — incrementally and then suddenly — from a single golf course lacking even the most basic amenities (you paid your green free at the maintenance shed; the washrooms were on a trailer outside, and your car needed a shower after you pulled out of the sand-and-gravel parking lot) to what is now a true destination. A jewel, even.

But it was always an unpolished gem.

Osprey — and anyone who was there ‘then’ still calls it only that — was forever the Toronto-area golf scene’s version of the bar band that could never get the airplay it deserved, the clever indie movie just needing the financing, or the hole-in-the-wall family restaurant with the great food, perfect vibe and ‘if-you-know-you-know’ marketing plan.

Those days are gone now. The band is doing stadium shows, the movie won at Cannes, the secret spot has a Michelin star.

It’s that trajectory that will make it so special and kind of hard to believe when on Sunday — in the mind’s eye at least — two-time Canadian Open winner and recent Masters champion McIlroy and, say, local favourite Corey Conners will come down the hill on the risk-reward, par-5 18th, the green surrounded by massive grandstands, the new clubhouse as backdrop.

Looking on will be Chris Humeniuk, who took over the Alton, Ont., property and a stable of related businesses from his father Roman and his uncle Jerry, a pair of first-generation Ukrainian land developers who didn’t golf and weren’t sure if it was even worth kicking the tires on a one-off golf course that had fallen into financial difficulties in the early 1990s.

“I first set foot on the property about 33 years ago to the day (spring of 1992). They (his father and uncle) knew a few of the investors in the group that built the original golf course, The Heathlands, and they knew that the partnership was in in financial distress. I was the only golfer in the family, so they sent me up to play it and tell them what I thought,” says Humeniuk, 57, whose career path was in finance and investment banking before he took over the family’s full slate of businesses. “And I very astutely told them: ‘It was a fabulous golf course, but it was in the middle of nowhere, and don't bother.’"

Fortunately his father and uncle ignored him, but progress from there came slowly.

“I’d say in the early days we were quite good at planning things, but the finishing left a little to be desired,” says Bob McClure, who served as the director of operations at Osprey from 1999 to 2017. “I kind of knew what the trajectory was going to be at some point, or was supposed to be, but it just didn’t quite get there.”

There were fits and there were starts.

The brothers acquired more land and had Doug Carrick, the renowned Canadian course architect who had designed The Heathlands, design and build more courses — now known as The Hoot (a nod to the now out-of-service freight rail line that bisects the property) and The North, the course that will host the Open. They opened in 2001 and 2003, respectively. Years later, a clubhouse was built — a wooden-beamed structure that looked more like a fairly modest family cottage.

There were plans for a full-service hotel and conference centre that never materialized, visions of a golf community with homes built in and around the three courses that never happened either.

Instead, for decades, Osprey remained more of a quaint, semi-rural treasure: an old farmhouse with great bones on valuable land but still with drafty windows and radiators that knocked in the night.

Unlike many other high-calibre public courses — all three are long-time fixtures in ScoreGolf's top-100 Canadian course rankings — for the most part the only thing going on was golf. There were no weddings, and few corporate events to clog up the tee sheet. It was a golf buffet, heavy on the protein, light on garnishes.

“My father and uncle were land developers, and so they had the foresight that comes with the experience of having acquired many parcels of land over the years on the expectation that growth would get there, the housing market would get there,” says Humeniuk. "And they used to love nothing more than to sit around over long breakfast at the diner across the street from their office, and blue-sky what Osprey might become.”

“(But) they were old school, and they came from a very simple background — you know, everything is an expense, right? — and I think they just could never bring themselves up to pull the trigger on making the investment … But they left us with an incredible slate of potential.”

While the potential has since been realized, it was in this middle period, when the golf was superior even if the bells and whistles were non-existent, that Osprey developed a near legendary status among in-the-know-golfers in the Greater Toronto Area.

It created a combination of quality and access that is almost impossible to find — in anything, really — and attracted to it a like-minded tribe of players who didn’t mind their cars getting dusty in the parking lot, sitting on their bumper to change their shoes or heading home in sweaty shirts and salt-stained hats if the golf was great, the tee sheet open and the price point manageable.

“My first impression of the place (was) ‘I don’t know if we want to tell everyone about it, let’s keep it a secret,'” says John Wilczynski, a Caledon resident and a ScoreGolf voter. “We literally hopped the fence many times before it officially opened … I had played in Ireland and Scotland and knew this was a special place as Carrick (the course architect) captured a British experience.”

Every Osprey regular has a story about pulling into the parking lot having seen not a single golfer on any of the holes visible on the 1.9-km drive into the property from Main Street in Alton, and seeing only handful of cars parked, and no one on the range and then 'doing an Osprey:' playing until your back, feet, daylight or the cart battery failed you.

“About 15 years ago my brothers and about 12 other golf beauties used to play (what we called) the Sunburn Shootout at Osprey Valley,” says Justin DesRoches. “A marathon-style golf event blending 54 holes of competitive golf and full-speed party mode. From the crack of dawn to twilight, all three courses. I played 84 holes once and only stopped due to lightning striking the 10th pin on the Hoot after I asked for a sign.”

Jimmy Singh and his pal Preet Sandhu set out to test the limits of an offer Osprey used to have for all-day play — $120 Monday to Thursday, $140 on weekends. “We had the first tee time, a cooler for drinks and sandwiches and we played all three courses twice by 8 p.m., there was still light out. What an awesome experience.”

Rob Mackenzie used to do a one-man charity fundraiser based on how many holes he could play in one day. He got to 162 the first year, which was a surprise to one of the sponsors who had signed on for $5 a hole (a discount was worked out). The next year Mackenzie got to 180, finishing his 10th round in the dark. McClure, the long-time former pro, told him it was likely the single-day record.

The other version of ‘doing an Osprey’ was showing up late in the day or early in the morning and having the course to yourself and being done in the time it might take to play six holes under normal circumstances: my own example is driving up to nearby Caledon to pick up my son at an outdoor education centre and swinging by to hit a few on the range beforehand. Seeing the course empty, I paid the twilight rate, grabbed a cart and played a rapid-fire round in 75 minutes — and was not really that late for the pickup.

Osprey’s slightly off-beat, unconventional peak likely came from 2018-2023, when seasonal memberships for unlimited play were offered. Starting at $3,900 (plus tax) in 2018, it was an incredible deal — the annual dues at comparable quality private course were easily double at the time, and few of them had the quality of golf Osprey did, none of them on three distinct layouts.

“Golf isn’t cheap, but the old-school membership rates really felt like stealing,” says DesRoches, who cites as a lifetime achievement dropping a line and catching a bass in the pond along the 17th fairway on The Hoot and then making birdie on the same hole. “As a member at Osprey, I felt the huge value of access to three amazing courses every day. I kept my head held high wherever I played golf in the world. Osprey was the place to be. Anyone who knew what was up, played Osprey. 

It didn’t take long for the 250 slots available to be filled. I took one in 2020, which was a rare bit of foresight given the way golf took off during the pandemic.

Since Osprey wasn’t trying to be a private club in any sense, there were no events for a members, so a subset of the seasonal members created their own. Singh created a group chat on WhatsApp that is still active today (and, full disclosure, provided much of the source material for this article).

It was not your typical golf club crowd, at least according to the stereotypes. There was no wallet flexing. Among the regulars were elementary school teachers, cops, firefighters, small business owners, retired guys, a beer rep, a roofer, a pilot and a stone mason.

There were nicknames: Singh became ‘Jimmy 200’ (because he cracked the single-season 200-round barrier in 2020; the following year came the ‘Jimmy Rule’ where seasonal members had to pay to play a second round in a day). There was the Franchise, The Legend, The Artist, Carkaroo, Vodka Dave, Big Moe, Mango John, and John the Runner, an Osprey fixture who jogged through his rounds wherever possible (by necessity, given his skill, in a zig-zag pattern), often more than once a day and then hit the range afterward, seeking improvements that always seemed elusive.

It was a true sub-culture. There were skins games on Fridays, an unofficial club championship and, the highlight, a season-ending 'Ryder Cup.'

For many of those involved, it was a peak life — well golf, but it’s a slim distinction — experience, a way to get through the pandemic and sense that you were part of something special.

But it was obvious changes were coming, construction starting on the foundation of the new 65,000-square-foot clubhouse being the most obvious clue. The trajectory had already been broadly hinted at when Osprey was relabelled TPC Toronto at Osprey Valley in 2017, the only Canadian facility to become part of the PGA Tour-owned TPC network — which includes world-renowned PGA Tour venues like TPC Sawgrass, home of The Players Championship, and TPC Scottsdale.

“It all felt too good to be true,” says Paul Spadafora, who stumbled into Osprey when he and wife moved to Caledon in 2017. “And we (knew) we were now playing on borrowed time.”

Reality hit in 2024 when the clubhouse was finished and the renovation of the North Course — by architect Ian Andrew to be up to PGA Tour specifications — was completed. It was time for Osprey to meet its destiny as a world-class golf destination and a venue for everything from big weddings, to small conferences, to buddy trips, to corporate tournaments. The WhatsApp chat is now called Former TPC Osprey 2023, and the day the news came that there would be no seasonal memberships or discounts going forward was a sad one.

You could see a group of (mostly) middle-aged golf dudes have their happy place go up in smoke in real time. In 2023, with a discounted rate you could walk the courses on the weekend for $110. Playing the North Course this summer at peak times is $235 plus tax. In the context of destination golf it’s not atypical and arguably on the lower end, but it’s steep for frequent players. The Legend, the Franchise, Jimmy 200 and the rest of the Osprey crowd, for the most part, had to move on to find their fix. 

For Humeniuk, there was little choice but to move forward.

“Really the fact that we owned 800 acres in total, there really wasn’t much of a decision between, ‘do we make the investment, or do we sell it’,” says Humeniuk. “But we thought long and hard about it because it’s been a very meaningful investment.”

How meaningful? After hiring a consulting firm to help chart their path forward, Humeniuk says they set out with an initial budget of between $60-$70 million and that was before the challenges of building during and after the pandemic. “It’s safe to say it’s (been) a little bit higher than that.”

But the slow-roll approach has had benefits too. Destination golf travel has become one of the hottest categories in the industry so Osprey’s timing has worked out well. Given the challenges of building or developing on the scale Humeniuk has, it’s unlikely someone else will be able to match what TPC Toronto has become anytime soon, if ever at least locally, and certainly not adjacent to one of North America’s largest urban markets and busiest airports.

The timing worked out well too in that Golf Canada — the national governing body — needed a new home after being at Glen Abbey in Oakville, Ont., for decades. Golf Canada will be moving to a purpose-built headquarters adjacent to the 12th hole on the North Course that will include a national training centre and a publicly accessible 18-hole putting course. The Canadian Golf Hall of Fame and Museum will be located on property as well, and the new clubhouse already has a rotating display of its collection. And while there no immediate plans, there is land available to develop at least one more full course.

It didn’t seem possible three decades ago, but now in the space of three years, TPC Toronto has laid legitimate claim to becoming the ‘home of Canadian golf.’

“I always said that for me this is about tying up my father's legacy and my uncle's legacy,” says Humeniuk.  “But a friend said to me — and this was just after my uncle passed — 'this is about your legacy, too.' So that made me dig deeper and be sure about what I was doing. And the joke is it will be my legacy if I (mess it up) and it will be theirs if it works. But I really have put a lot of myself into this.”

It will finally be on full display Thursday to Sunday when the PGA Tour makes its first stop at Osprey, and not the last. The Canadian Open will be held here in 2026 as well, and given the long-term relationship with Golf Canada, there will likely be many more Opens held at the facility in the future.

Some of the old Osprey crew will be there this week, working as volunteers for the tournament or just attending as fans. There is no consensus view on what their golfing happy place has become, other than they dearly miss what it was along with the tribe of like-minded golfers.

Some are put off: “It feels like someone’s having a party at my house and I’m not invited,” was one take; others are resigned, recognizing that the old way was probably not a sustainable long-term business plan. But there’s pride too at having been part of something that has evolved into a facility of such obvious quality. And there’s the fun of seeing the best in the world walk the fairways they themselves have so many times from dawn to dusk in the long days of a typical Canadian summer.

“I think that it was always a place that deserved a Canadian Open, as was quite obvious to so many of us that had played there,” says Jason Bracken, who will be marshalling on the first hole for Wednesday’s Pro-Am event. “ I feel like it's perfect that it's ‘the home of golf’, (it) makes me super proud …

“(Also) I'm 5'8-ish. Rory's 5'8-ish, and now that he’s playing here, we'll have just one more thing in common.”

Looking on from the deck adjacent to ‘Two Brothers’ — the clubhouse restaurant that is a nod to the property’s beginnings — will be Humeniuk and his family, including his father Roman, who is mostly in a wheelchair now at age 89, but is determined to see the ultimate expression of the vision he and his brother sparked so long ago.

The view, through the lens of time, promises to be spectacular.