Carter, Crosby, Taylor: Nick Taylor’s playoff winner ‘breathtaking’

It was the shot heard ’round Canada.

Looking to end his country’s nearly 70-year drought at its national championship, the RBC Canadian Open, Nick Taylor found himself locked in a playoff battle with England’s Tommy Fleetwood on Sunday evening at Oakdale Golf and Country Club outside of Toronto. And on the fourth playoff hole, the par-5 18th, Taylor got up and down from 221 yards – and from a divot in the first cut – sinking a 72-foot eagle putt to seal the dramatic victory and become the first Canadian to win the Canadian Open since Pat Fletcher in 1954.

“I can’t even describe it,” Taylor said afterward. “This is the most incredible feeling.”

Later in his presser, Taylor, who played No. 18 four times Sunday and did so in 4 under, went through the winning putt in detail.

“It was long, obviously,” he said. “We knew the finish line would be the best way to putt it. We knew about the last 15 feet because I had that in the second playoff hole. With the rain coming down, the slope, obviously, we knew it was going to be slow. It’s so easy to leave that putt 10 feet short from how far I was. To get it there was, obviously, a bit of a surprise, honestly. But I felt we’ve learned a bit from that second putt that we knew generally what it was going to do. There’s a lot of luck for that to go in the hole. The speed is all I was thinking about. Tommy probably had about 12 feet and I expected him to make it almost like the first playoff hole. So I was trying to get as close as I could to essentially know that he had to make or miss to keep going. So for that to drop, it was a huge surprise but an amazing one.”

He then was asked about the putt potentially going down as one of Canada’s top where-were-you moments, alongside Joe Carter’s home run to win the 1993 World Series for the Blue Jays and Sidney Crosby’s goal to win 2010 Olympic hockey gold for Team Canada.

“I don’t even know how to answer that,” Taylor said, “because those other moments were for me, like where was I when Sidney Crosby scored? I was watching with college buddies down in Seattle. That’s a really hard question to answer because to think that I’m the person that people are thinking about is kind of breathtaking.

“So, yeah, I think it will take time to realize kind of what’s just happened.”