Shawn discovered golf like Sudarshan did — on TV — though it came when he mistakenly happened upon it while searching for cartoons when he was seven — Looney Tunes or Scooby Doo, he can’t remember which — and became captivated by it in mere minutes. Born in Livonia, Mich., but raised primarily in Windsor, the 14-year-old Sehra took his first swings in elementary school with the plastic clubs and tennis balls of SNAG (Starting New At Golf), an introductory program used around the world. He then joined the junior league run by Randy McQueen at the city-owned Roseland Golf and Curling Club and later began working with longtime Windsor-area teaching pro Joye McAvoy-Sinn at Silver Tee Golf and Virtual Gaming Centre. Very quickly he became a prolific winner and last fall he captured back-to-back tournament titles on the Golfweek Junior Tour in Michigan. He is second on Golf Ontario’s U-15 Boys Bantam Rankings and if you run a Google search for his name you’ll find photos of Shawn as a mite clad in the familiar Sunday black and red and Nike cap of his idol Woods. Oh, and his respective Twitter and Instagram handles are @get_that_curry and @get_ that_curry2, playful yet prideful nods to his heritage.

Sheikh trailed her father, Ali, to the golf course. Ali, a telecommunications engineer, and his wife, Hina, were born in Nairobi and followed family to Canada in 1991. Ali first played golf in a company tournament in 1995, purchasing a set of used sticks at Play It Again Sports. A dozen years later, while working around Boca Raton, Fla., he played regularly at a course called Southwinds. He attempted, unsuccessfully, to engage his oldest daughter in the sport first, before trying with Raesa, who complied chiefly because she loved driving the golf cart. But Ali insisted she at least hit some golf balls too and when Raesa found the middle of the driver face for the first time she fell in love. Last year, she recorded six top-three finishes, including a victory, on the Canadian Junior Golf Association circuit, and captured the Ontario Bantam Girls’ Championship. A few spots behind Sehra on the Ontario Bantam Rankings is Kavith Ranchagoda, who is Sri Lankan. He won two CJGA tournaments last summer while Vaijayanti Bharkhada, from Brampton, Ont., captured one and finished second in the U-19 Girls division of the season-ending Mizuno Championship. Like Sheikh, her family immigrated to Canada from Kenya, with her heritage reaching far back to India. Hansika Tathgur, also from Brampton, has Punjabi heritage and is currently on a golf scholarship at Chicago State. Her father, Amarjit, came to Canada in 1983, discovered golf through work, and eventually joined ClubLink, playing out of Rattlesnake Point in Milton, Ont. He was formerly a director of the Punjabi Golfers Association — yes, the PGA — which launched in 2007, the same year SCOREGolf’s race story was published. Though no longer with that association, the elder Tathgur said it’s helped increase the game’s popularity with local Punjabis. At Rattlesnake Point, there is now a fun 27-hole Ryder Cup style tournament known as the Lions (Sikhs) versus the Bears (Caucasians), in which the Lions wear turbans and the competitors convene for a grand dinner afterwards.

The Canadian Junior Golf Association has seen youngsters of colour excel on its circuit before: Sri Lankan-Canadian Gajan Sivabalasingham, who finished second in the Ontario Amateur behind Yellamaraju last year and who, as a tot nearly 20 years ago, was dubbed ‘Little Tiger’; Yuvish Singh, who turned pro in 2012 as a 16-year-old and now has his own golf school in Brampton; and Salimah Mussani, a former touring pro of East African descent who teaches at Vancouver GC. And while it does not keep statistics to support its diversity, chief operating officer Brad Parkins reported a definite increase in kids of South Asian and African descent in recent years, and confirmed the heaviest pocket for such membership is around Vancouver — like Toronto, a major mosaic. In fact, Parkins said it’s safe to say at least 60 per cent of CJGA participants in British Columbia are either Indian or Asian.

One Indian boy from B.C., Jeevan Sihota, has long held the attention of industry observers, having been featured on local television for his feats multiple times. At 13, he won last year’s B.C. Juvenile Championship by 11 shots, carding a 54-hole total of seven under par. Claire Lovan, whose parents are Thai, was the Girls Juvenile winner, and her older brother, Sy, is a member of Simon Fraser University’s very diverse golf team. (See sidebar.)

School Ties Both of B.C.’s top university golf teams reflect Canadian golf’s growing diversity. B.C. has long had a large Korean population active in golf, and many accomplished young players have represented the province in the Canada Games and been part of Golf Canada’s developmental and national amateur squads. But look at the golf teams at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, and you’ll find golfers of many different cultural backgrounds. Currently at SFU is Chris Crisologo, who is Filipino and this year part of Team Canada’s national team, while Sy Lovan, older brother to Claire, is Thai. On the women’s side, Jaya Rampuri is Indian; Belinda Lin is Taiwanese; Breanna Croxen has both African-American and Indian heritage; sisters Emily and Estee Leun were raised in Hong Kong; and Kylie Jack is a First Nations member from Kelowna. Also, past B.C. Girls Juvenile champion, Shirin Anjarwalla, who is East African, is a future SFU golfer. UBC’s men’s team is captained by Zaahidali ‘Ziggy’ Nathu, whose parents are from Kenya and Tanzania. His teammate, Kamyar Yamini, is Persian, while the parents of fellow squad member Christian Zalli, the 2017 B.C. Junior champion (over his younger brother Ilarian), are Polish and Albanian. On the women’s team, Shania Remandaban is Filipino as is incoming men’s team member Diego San Pedro. “Canada is just so diverse with so many cultures and it’s so nice to see these families finding their way into the game,” said Chris Macdonald, head coach of UBC’s men’s and women’s squads. “And as you know, our game isn’t that easy to enter.” — Logan

This is not news to Kris Jonasson, the executive director of British Columbia Golf. If diversifying the game at all levels in this country is a hot topic — and it certainly was at Golf Canada’s annual general meeting in February and during a town hall discussion at the PGA of Ontario’s industry expo in November — Jonasson has long been out in front of it. In 2004, the amalgamation of B.C.’s men’s and women’s golf associations resulted in a ridiculous number of board positions, which Jonasson first whittled down to 25 and later to nine. But when looking at the growing number of South Asian and First Nations golfers in his province, as collected in an annual market report , Jonasson concluded his board was not reflective of the golfers it sought to represent. So he requested extra seats and filled them with Patrick Kelly of the Leq:amel First Nation, a member of Gorge Vale GC in Victoria and now British Columbia Golf’s president; Jasvinder Dhaliwal, a past president of the International Punjabi Golf Association (separate from Punjabi Golfers Assn.); PGA of Canada member Helen Jung, who is of South Korean heritage and as a top junior golfer in 2001 was the first Canadian to attend the Tiger Woods Learning Center; and Chinese-Canadian Grace Hui, who has owned Duncan Meadows GC with her husband Ming for 20-plus years. Then Jonasson charged his new board members with engaging their respective communities to learn how golf can be made more accessible and attractive.

“We can’t grow the game unless we involve all of the population of British Columbia,” Jonasson said. “Our population and the demographics are changing so quickly that unless we show golf is a game for everyone the sport is going to be left behind. We’ve recognized that for a long time.”

It’s that kind of thinking that led the United States Golf Association to highlight British Columbia Golf’s board during its 2017 North American Golf Innovation Symposium in Vancouver. Jonasson, Kelly, Dhaliwal, Jung and Michelle Collens, another board member who is in part tasked with ensuring retention in golf among girls, were moderated by Steven Schloss, whose job title at the USGA is chief people officer.

“In this case, you have an organization who has far exceeded what most boards do, which is they’ve become consciously aware of how to be inclusive to serve their particular marketplace,” said Schloss in introducing the panel.

It was during that discussion that Kelly told a story of how Gorge Vale once had problems with kids from neighbouring First Nations communities coming onto the golf course after hours and playing soccer and other activities on its sixth green, causing damage. With the support of Gorge Vale’s members, Kelly invited the kids to be part of the club’s junior program, something it had never proffered in 77 years. Today, Gorge Vale boasts 15 First Nations juniors, the trespassing having long ceased.

Kelly retold the story as an invited guest to Golf Canada’s annual general meeting in Calgary. Tradition places Golf Canada’s AGM in the home city of its incoming president, which this year is Leslie Dunning, but that the governing body convened at the Grey Eagle Resort and Casino on the Tsuu T’ina Nation was emblematic of it recently creating its own Equity, Diversity and Inclusion policy, which it has asked provincial associations to either adopt or follow when devising their own. Golf Canada accepted the Tsuu T’ina Nation’s elementary and high schools into its Golf in Schools program, inviting Paddy Big Plume, general manager of the on-site Redwood Meadows G&CC, to accept the gift.

Dunning is an ideal person for the president’s chair as Golf Canada finally journeys down this path. For 13 years she was the director general for Western Canada of the Red Cross, a global organization with diversity in its DNA. Given Western Canada’s large Indigenous population, part of Dunning’s mandate was to recruit First Nations members as Red Cross staff and board directors. That was done largely through outreach and education — learning about the different customs and traditions of First Nations tribes and teaching them about the Red Cross. A golfer since her teens, and a past president of Alberta Golf, Dunning said tackling diversity in the game is a natural fit for her. And by that she meant more than just trying to get people of different cultures playing golf, because they are playing golf; she meant engaging people of different cultures as golf association employees, volunteers, rules officials, course raters, etc.

I asked her why that’s so important.

“It’s the right thing to do,” she said simply. “The sport should be open for everyone and we are open for everyone but just because you say you’re open for everyone doesn’t mean they’re going to feel that you are.”

Which is a good answer but not the only one. Canada may boast more than five million golfers and approximately 60 million rounds played annually if you accept the numbers of the National Allied Golf Association’s 2015 economic impact study, but let’s face it: nearly every course needs more people through its pro shop, so there is a practical purpose to diversifying the game in addition to the principled one.

According To Statistics Canada population projections per current trends released in January 2017, immigrants could represent between 24.5 and 30 per cent of Canada’s population by 2036 compared to 20.7 per cent in 2011, with close to 60 per cent coming from Asia compared to 44.8 per cent in 2011, and only 15 to 17 per cent coming from Europe compared to 31.6 in 2011.

In short, Canada’s diversity is growing rapidly and in some cases sports seeking new participants may need to sell themselves to the uninitiated. One need not look further than the national pastime’s initiative with Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi Edition. Canadian golf has been doing this for years too, through programs such as Future Links and Golf in Schools. Kevin Thistle, the new CEO of the PGA of Canada, would like to see the latter program expanded or complemented by a “pros in schools” component, whereby golf professionals, or superintendents and club managers, take part in career days to educate students about the number of different jobs in the golf industry. British Columbia Golf’s Jonasson has made a concerted effort in recent years to amplify the editorial coverage of minority participation and accomplishments on the association’s website, which does an excellent job going beyond results-oriented stories with its content. Several years ago, the association created educational golf CDs and translated them into a number of different languages such as Hindu, Punjabi, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

Because Jonasson, who is also part of the World Golf Foundation’s diversity task force, is well aware there’s a capitalistic angle to all of this, and that ultimately it is up to golf courses to ensure they are engaging minority communities, especially if they lie in close school proximity to them.

“There are a lot of courses where, if they are not going into that community, then I don’t know where their business is going to come from in the future,” Jonasson stated.

On a bitterly cold day in February I drove north from Toronto to Shelburne, Ont., specifically to Shelburne Golf Club, which is owned and operated by Sam Young. Young, who came to Canada from his native Scotland when he was seven, has been a pro for nearly 60 years, apprenticing under the likes of Al Balding and George Knudson, and when he was inducted into the PGA of Canada’s Hall of Fame at the PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, Fla., in January, he had trouble exiting the room because so many people wanted to shake his hand. Young is also partly the reason this topic piqued my interest; at that PGA of Ontario town hall discussion last November, which I watched remotely, Young addressed the room on the heels of some antiquated statements about golf courses needing to be careful to not ignore their key constituents — white males — and said this: “I don’t care who you are, as long as you love the game, you’re in.” Young added that last summer he taught a three-and-a-half-year-old boy from Trinidad.

So I went to see Young, who was occupying his rather cluttered desk upstairs in Shelburne’s clubhouse, with old newspaper clippings and photographs documenting his long career as a junior leader piled so high a shorter man might have trouble seeing over them. Except for maybe the fact he gets to work alongside his wife and daughter every day, nothing gives Young more pride than the countless junior golfers he’s minded over the years. But they’ve been mostly white kids and Young’s fairways are filled with mostly white golfers, which he sees as both a problem and an opportunity given Shelburne’s location not far from the heavily diverse city of Brampton and given that many South Asian families have moved into new subdivisions built a stone’s throw from Young’s golf course.

Young told me that two years ago, several Indian men came to his course to hit balls on the driving range. The next day, they returned with their entire families, including grandmothers wearing traditional saris, to play nines holes with carts. Their bill was close to $900 and from Young’s perspective they had an enjoyable day.

“I thought, ‘Geez this is nice, this is a breakthrough.’ Well, they didn’t really come back,” Young said, before noting that he has nonetheless observed more Indian men on the course in recent years.

So it’s up to him to solve that problem, he admitted, to get that family and others like it to return. “Hell, yeah,” he said, it’s important to the long-term health of the game to not only introduce golf to new Canadians but keep them as customers, too. And hell yeah, it’s up to golf course owners like him to do so. After all, golf courses are the industry’s “stores,” as Mike Kelly, Golf Ontario’s executive director, described them.

“One of the keys to growing the sport is incubation,” said Kelly. “How do we give a positive golf experience from the time they step on the property all the way through? It’s understanding what that experience needs to look at.”

There is no doubt some clubs are doing an excellent job of this. Team Canada member Chris Crisologo, who learned the game under the late Harry White — as devoted to junior golf in B.C. as Young is in Ontario — would not be on the national squad without the support of Vancouver’s Marine Drive GC. The Crisologos, who are Filipino, are of modest means and Marine Drive took both Chris and his younger brother, Michael, into its junior program to foster their talent. Look at the caddie programs at some private clubs, such as Toronto’s Oakdale G&CC and B.C.’s Victoria GC. Oakdale, a mostly Jewish club that was formed in 1926 because Jewish Torontonians were not welcome elsewhere, is one of the most expensive haunts in the country and is situated in a highly diverse west Toronto neighbourhood. Its roll call of caddies for the 2018 season, all of whom are privy to introductory golf lessons if they so please, includes people from Barbados, Cambodia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. Of the club’s 250 staff, approximately 200 are from the neighbourhood, many of them new Canadians, and two of the caddie program’s graduates are key Oakdale staff: golf operations human resources manger, Angelika Misiewicz, who is Polish; and clubhouse manager, Jermaine Brissett, who is Jamaican.

Victoria GC is the only Canadian club with a caddie program entirely devoted to the Evans Scholarship Program, which was established in 1929 by U.S. Amateur champion Chick Evans to send deserving caddies from low-income families to university. Its roster includes caddies from Albania, Hungary, the Philippines and Indonesia. Last year, River Bristow, who was born in Jakarta to an Indonesian mother and a Canadian father, was one of two Victoria caddies to earn a full academic scholarship to the University of Washington through the program. A straight-A student, he is studying medicine after being inspired by the doctors who treated his ailing father. He is now a golfer too, enjoying the sport’s socialness, a big breakthrough for a once-shy boy.

“(River) was just the most awkward kid you’ve ever seen. He could barely talk to people, couldn’t look them in the eye, just didn’t’ know what to say and he was completely out of his element. But over the years he grew into this really confident, loud kid,” described Conner Taiji, an associate pro at Victoria, who came to the club with the express purpose of managing the caddie program.

“The club is great for allowing the caddies to play golf, setting them up with clubs and instruction,” Taiji continued. “If it wasn’t for the program, I could safely say many of these caddies would never get a chance to set foot on this golf course.”

Diversity. The word is deep and important with many definitions. With respect to golf, it doesn’t mean just getting more new Canadians into the game, but more girls and women, too. More Indigenous people. It means being accessible to physically challenged golfers — blind golfers, deaf golfers, amputee golfers. It’s about industry executive branches following the lead of British Columbia Golf, where appropriate, and becoming more reflective of this wonderful colourful nation, as Golf Ontario’s Kelly has vowed to do with his board. It’s about education and awareness — pillars of Golf Canada’s new Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Policy — and outreach too, although some people being reached out to might not yet be receptive. In addition to the 30-plus people I spoke to for this story, I also sent emails or left voicemails with several different minority golf groups — the Toronto Punjabi Golfers Association, the Indo-Canadian Golf Association, the B.C. Muslim Golfers Association — without getting a reply. It could have been the time of year or it could have been they had no interest in talking. Sometimes you just don’t hear back from people. But that’s ok. As Leslie Dunning, Golf Canada’s president, said, these minority groups are golfing, and she found more than I, several in her hometown of Calgary.

Diversity is about shattering stereotypes too — that golf is too timely, too difficult and too expensive, which is only true in some instances. The Oakdales and Victorias of the country are too rich for most, sure, but there are more golf courses in Canada than any other country in the world except the United States, most of them public, many of them affordable, some of them just nine holes. And of course that other stereotype, that golf is too white, which it still mostly is on the PGA Tour, both inside the ropes and out, although walking around Oakville, Ont.’s Glen Abbey GC during the RBC Canadian Open through the years has told an evolving tale. But this is important: Not one person of a minority background I spoke with for this story described any barriers in entering the game. Those walls crumbled long ago.

So we sell its virtues. That it’s a game for life, an excellent form of exercise, a sport of honour and a sport where one can discover one’s self, like Harry White helped Chris Crisologo do. White stressed to the young Filipino kid that it was good to be different, good to be unique. He taught him about character, a trait Crisologo showed in spades when writing a very touching blog tribute to White upon his mentor’s passing.

One of the most fascinating conversations I had in reporting this story was that one with Sudarshan Yellamaraju and his parents at Eagles Nest. Despite Sudarshan’s golf prowess and accomplishments, Suresh and Meera Yellamaraju remain unsure about any sort of career as a professional golfer for their son. Their heads aren’t anywhere near around it, but they have always encouraged him to play, not only because he enjoys golf so much, but because it’s imparted in him a quality they have struggled to articulate.

“It’s a very tough word to explain, called integrity,” said Suresh. “It’s so many things put together in that word. As a child it’s hard to understand because you say one thing to mean integrity and a few days later you explain, ‘Oh, that’s what means integrity.’ This gives him a conflict in his mind.

“We’ve always told him what you should be doing is the right thing. The right thing is integrity. Try to keep it as simple as possible because it could mean so many things, that word. That’s the one thing we’ve always tried to drive home.”

And golf has helped. It has taught Sudarshan to show up on time, to follow rules, to accept the consequences of a bad shot or a poor decision and to learn from his mistakes. It’s helped him focus and, as a result, become a better student.

So you sell that. And maybe Sudarshan doesn’t become a professional golfer. Or maybe he does. It’s only in the last couple of years that his game has really excelled and his family has learned of the opportunities his talent could bring in terms of education. A 16-year-old provincial amateur champion with no real history of taking lessons can pretty much have his pick of the litter in terms of NCAA schools, one would think. Either way, the important thing is that Sudarshan is a golfer. And he’ll probably be a golfer forever. He’ll find a way to play, no matter where life takes him. And so will Shawn Sehra, Raesa Sheikh, Chris Crisologo and all the other kids mentioned in this story. Maybe one day their children will be golfers too, and theirs. UBC’s Ziggy Nathu told me he’s champing at the bit to get his niece and nephew onto the golf course. And maybe they’ll inspire, like India’s Anirban Lahiri no doubt did when he played in the Presidents Cup twice, and like Shubhankar Sharma is doing, having been invited this year to play in the Masters. At the pro level here, Sameer Kalia, an Ontarian with Indian heritage, recently competed in a Mackenzie Tour-PGA Tour Canada Q-School.

This is how a cycle starts, not that this one hasn’t begun in earnest already.

“People who come from all these different cultures, different parts of the world, if they start coming up and playing well and you hear all these stories, I definitely think a lot of kids will say, ‘OK, yeah, we should try this,’” said Sudarshan, speaking measured, quietly, honestly and hopefully. “It could be golf; it could be any other sport. But I definitely think diversity would spread for sure. I can see that already when I go to practise, at any public place to practise, I can see there is a lot more diversity now than I’ve seen just in the past few years.”

This story appears in the 2018 Spring Issue of SCOREGolf Magazine.