We’ve been playing golf in Mississauga for nearly 150 years, and the city is home to championship courses and history-defining women players such as Ada Mackenzie and Gayle Borthwick.
The Toronto Golf Club, North America’s third oldest golf course, has a long history of producing champion women players.
Originally established in 1876 near Gerrard Street East in what is now known as the Upper Beaches, the Toronto Golf Club was one of the first in Canada to welcome women onto the links in 1894.
The Club moved to its current location in 1911, buying land on the western shore of Etobicoke Creek, on Dixie Road, and hired British golf course architect Harry Colt to design Canada’s first championship golf course.
From here, the Club’s long-time golf pro George Cumming coached a cadre of strong women golfers, including Cecil Smith, a five-time Ontario Amateur Champion in the 1920s and 1930s.
As the Toronto Golf Course was training champions, across the street the Lakeview Golf Course was also earning a reputation as a place of stellar views and greens.
Like its neighbour, Lakeview Golf Course wasn’t originally from here. It was created in 1896 as the High Park Golf Course, relocating to its current location on the west side of Dixie Road, north of Lakeshore Road, in 1907 and changed its name to the Lakeview Golf Club in 1910.
By the late 1950s, the area west of the Club was beginning to welcome new residents with the building of the region’s first suburbs. As Toronto Township grew, the council started looking for ways to provide recreational activities for residents, first leasing the Club in 1957 and then purchasing it in 1965.
It quickly earned a reputation as one of Canada’s best municipal golf courses, and securing a Lakeview tee time remains a coveted accomplishment for the region’s amateur golfers.
Rounding out the list of the city’s grand old golf courses is the Mississaugua Golf Club, which credits its unusual spelling to a typo that was never corrected.
The Club was created in 1905 after a group of investors, which included founder John E. Hall and founding club president Lauchlan A. Hamilton, arranged to purchase the land for $12,500.
They named the Club for the Mississaugas of the Credit, whose village and mission had been on the same site until 1847 when the Mississaugas relocated to the Grand River in advance of the colonial government’s expropriation of their land.
Team Canada silver medalists at the 2024 CPKC World Junior Golf Tournament hosted by Mississauga’s Credit Valley Golf and Country Club, where Gayle Borthwick holds the ladies competitive record, with a score of 70. (Photo courtesy of Robert Elliot)
One of its earliest stars was Ada Mackenzie, daughter of founding member George Mackenzie, who was soon eclipsing her dad’s accomplishments on the links.
She won her first of five Canadian Women’s Amateur Championships in 1919, listing Mississauga as her home course.
However, Mackenzie disliked the restrictions on women golfers, with most clubs limiting the ladies to afternoon tee times.
After failing to convince the all-male club boards to change the rules, Mackenzie created a women-only club, purchasing land in present-day Markham after raising the required $30,000 via 300 $100 memberships.
The Ladies Golf Club of Toronto opened in 1924, the first women-only Club in North America, and she continued to play and compete for the next four decades. She won eight Canadian Senior Women’s championships between 1955 and 1965, and in 1969, at the age of 78, she won her final title, the Ontario Senior Women’s Amateur.
As Mackenzie was retiring from the GTA’s golf scene, Gayle Borthwick, Canada’s most successful amateur female golfer, was moving in.
Originally from Saskatchewan, Borthwick’s amateur golf career began as a teen in British Columbia, where she was a three-time Junior Ladies Champion and a two-time Amateur Champion.
Marriage brought Borthwick to Mississauga in the mid-1960s, where she began to play out of the Toronto Golf Club.
Her amateur career is punctuated by an impressive tally of three U.S. Senior titles, victories at the Canadian Amateur and Canadian Senior, and many provincial championships. She is the only golfer to win all four national amateur titles – Canadian Junior, Canadian Amateur, Canadian Mid-Amateur and Canadian Senior Amateur.
Borthwick played on national teams for over three decades, from the 1963 Commonwealth Games team to World Amateurs Team Captain in 1996.
Plus, she holds the Credit Valley Golf and Country Club ladies competitive record with a score of 70.
Borthwick was inducted into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame in 1997, joining Ada Mackenzie, who had been inducted in 1971.
Well played, Ada and Gayle. Well played.
You can hear more stories about the people and events that helped shape Mississauga via our podcast, We Built This City: Tales of Mississauga, available on your favourite podcast platform or from our website.