THUNDER BAY — Longtime friends Cam Kennedy and Evan Littlefield had joked for years about doing something in the golf industry together.
The Thunder Bay products did just that in April when they opened Pure Golf Performance Centre, located on Central Avenue.
“Even when we were in different places, we’d always manage to play golf together once or twice a year and we would always talk about golf stuff,” Littlefield said.
“The COVID-19 pandemic was almost kind of a blessing in disguise for us in a sense. It brought us back to Thunder Bay and it gave us a reason to put a golf business together.”
Plans were officially put on paper around a year-and-a-half ago for Pure Golf, with a main focus being on club fitting, lessons and practice/simulator rentals.
“The whole goal though is to help grow the game of golf in Northwestern Ontario,” Kennedy said. “That’s the most important thing to us. We want to make sure that we’re involved in junior golf, which is where we got our start, but we also want to help grow the game for all skill levels.
“Plus, we have basically a seven-month winter here in Thunder Bay and we wanted to offer something that was open year-round and different from everywhere else, whether that was through the club fittings, the lessons we offer and the simulators.”
“Golf can be a very intimidating sport if you’ve never played it before right,” Littlefield added. “It’s tough to go get a set and then go out and hit balls for the first time at a golf course or a public driving range.
“One of the positives here is that for those that are learning the game, they don’t have a whole set of eyes on them. You can the learn game in your own comfort and have fun doing it.”
In addition to their roles as co-owners, Littlefield is the head teaching professional for Pure Golf while Kennedy is the master club fitter.
The pair have varied backgrounds when it comes to their time in the sport.
Littlefield got to work with top coaches David Leadbetter, Hank Haney and Sean Foley and later went on to play at Western New Mexico University and Niagara College, where he graduated from the professional golf management program in 2016.
Kennedy also played at the post-secondary level at Concord University and Lakehead University. He later became a professional club fitter with Tour Experience Golf in Toronto and worked under Ian Fraser, who is considered to be one of the best club fitters in the world, on his way to becoming a master club fitter.
“You have to do 4,000 club fittings just to get to that point, and then you have to write an exam, which has about a 20 per cent passing rate,” Kennedy said.
Since opening its doors on Central Avenue in the spring, business has been busy at Pure Golf, and not just from those in Thunder Bay.
“We got a call from a gentleman in Fort Frances the other day saying he’d like to set up a club fitting in April and Evan’s been teaching lessons to a guy who comes down from Geraldton,” Kennedy said.
“In the community as a whole, it’s been very supportive. We were booking three to four weeks in advance in the summer for fittings and lessons and we’ve had a lot of people coming by to meet us because they’ve heard good things about us.”
“We’re just a couple of guys who love to talk about golf, so if you want to chat our ears off about the sport and get a tour of the place, we’d love to do that as well,” Littlefield added.
Pure Golf is almost a full-circle journey for Littlefield and Kennedy, as they want to help Thunder Bay’s younger golfers improve their game while staying close to home.
“Cam and I were both fortunate that we could go to camps in Florida when we were younger, but if we had something like this back when we were growing up, we wouldn’t have had to go down there,” Littlefield said.
“We want our junior golfers to come here and use our facility to get better and pursue some of the opportunities that we had growing up,” Kennedy added.
More information on Pure Golf, including hours of operations and upcoming events, can be found on their website and social media pages.
