When the Winter Olympics came to Calgary, in 1988, I happened to ask Canadian figure skater Kurt Browning about the relationship between the United States and Canada.
“It’s kind of cool,” he said. “Like a cat and a dog being friends.”
Starting today, at Dunkirk’s Shorewood Country Club, golfers from the U.S. and Canada will compete in the 100th birthday of the International Quadrangular golf match, better known as the Quad. It’s like cats and dogs playing golf.
The players are from two clubs on the American side of the Niagara River, and two from the Canadian side. (Two plus two equals Quad.) Shorewood and Lockport Town & Country Club represent Western New York, while St. Catharines Golf and Country Club and Lookout Point Country Club represent Southern Ontario. (Lookout Point is in Fonthill, not far from Niagara Falls.)
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The Quad was first played in 1923, and its participants call it golf’s oldest continuous amateur international team event.
The Ryder Cup, a pro event that begins at the end of this month, is a bit better known. “Just a trifle,” Shorewood’s Beau Passafaro says with a laugh. “Their players are a little better, too.”
The Ryder Cup pits the best golfers from the United States against the best from Europe, but it was first played in 1927 — four years after the Quad first teed off.
“We have researched it for years, and we really think that we’re the oldest,” Passafaro says. “We found four clubs in New York State that have a competition that’s older than ours, but it isn’t international.”
It's the international flavor that makes the Quad special. Passafaro, 63, first competed against Brent Pym of the St. Catharines club decades ago. They became good friends. The two have second homes near each other in Florida — Passafaro in Naples, Pym in Fort Myers — and they play golf together several times each winter.
“I’ve made lifelong friends with guys at the other clubs, particularly the American clubs,” Pym says. “Sometimes we attend the funerals of our fellow competitors.”
Each club in the Quad enters 18 golfers, and 12 play from each will play today, Saturday and Sunday. They play Ryder-Cup style, including two-man best ball and individual matches. Participants are matched by handicap, but because it’s a scratch format, handicaps do not figure in the scoring.
“We all want to win the Quad, of course,” says Passafaro, who has a 6 handicap. “But we also all want for each other to play the best that we can. And then, for the victor, it is so much the better.”
St. Catharines leads the all-time standings with 27 victories. Shorewood is next with 25, followed by defending champ Lockport, with 24. Lookout Point has 11 since it joined in 1962, when it replaced Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Country Club, which had 14 in its time. (That adds up to 101, but twice there have been co-champions.) Only once — when Covid closed the border in 2020 — the Quad wasn’t played.
“We played through the Depression and through World War II,” says Jeff Passafaro, 71, Beau’s brother. “It took a plague to stop us, but we played twice the next year.”
Much of the friendship comes when the golfers from one country spend a pair of overnights in the other. (The host club changes each year, on a rotating basis.)
“The camaraderie comes in the evenings,” Beau Passafaro says, “when there is known to be adult beverages and games of chance.”
Pym, who is president of the St. Catharines club, says each of his golfers will come into today’s round with new golf bags embossed with Canadian and American flags.
“This is going to be a big one to win,” he says of the 100th birthday. “We’re going to have a black-tie dinner Saturday night.”
Club professionals have their own event, a one-day best-ball match, U.S. versus Canada. This year, Shorewood’s Brad Smith and Lockport’s Daniel Vanill will defend their 2022 win against Cameron Thin of St. Catharines and Dan Roud of Lookout Point.
In the Ryder Cup, captains of the American and European teams pick the best golfers for that biennial competition. It works differently in the Quad. Once a golfer makes a club’s team, he is on it for as long as he likes — sort of like U.S. Supreme Court justices.
Jeff Passafaro, the Shorewood captain, is playing in his 44th Quad, today through Sunday. For Beau Passafaro, it’s his 34th. Their late father, Ronald, competed in at least 25.
“As your game deteriorates, it is incumbent on you to know when it is time to step away,” Beau Passafaro says. “You have to fall on your own sword.”
Or, in this case, golf club.
“When I started playing in the Quad, I thought it was just a golf tournament,” Shorewood’s Jeremy McAfee says. “I learned pretty quick how special it is. There is so much synergy among the four clubs and between the two countries. For that one weekend, at least, it feels like everyone is a lot alike, the Americans and Canadians. They have the same glow about them — because it is the Quad.
“Think about everything that has happened in the last 100 years. This tournament has stood the test of time. And that’s a testament in itself.”
When Canada celebrated its sesquicentennial, in 2017, Jeff Passafaro spoke at a Quad dinner. He quoted Winston Churchill, who said of our shared border: “That long frontier from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, guarded only by neighborly respect and honorable obligations, is an example to every country and a pattern for the future of the world.”
Churchill said that in 1939. By then, the Quad was already 16 years old.
Then Passafaro quoted John F. Kennedy, who once said: “Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends.”
Kennedy said that in 1961. By then, the Quad was 38 years old.
By the time Kurt Browning weighed in, at 1988’s Calgary Games, the Quad was 65.
And this weekend it turns 100.
May the best cat — or dog — win.