Nick Taylor is heading to Memphis with Georgia on his mind.
The Abbotsford native is in prime position as the PGA TOUR’s FedEx Cup playoffs begin with next week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis.
Taylor’s ultimate playoff goal is to improve or hold his current position and earn a coveted spot in the Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta in late August.
“I think a couple of solid events will get me to East Lake,” Taylor said in an interview with British Columbia Golf. “The goal is obviously to win one of them or be there contending and just being in a good spot confidence-wise going into the Tour Championship.”
Heading into this week’s Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, N.C., where Taylor is not playing, he stood 17th on the FedEx Cup points list.
The top 70 players on the points list following the Wyndam Championship earn a spot in the Memphis field.
The top 50 after Memphis advance to the second playoff event, the BMW Championship in Owings Mills, Md. The top 30 after the BMW head to Atlanta for the Tour Championship, where mega-bucks can be earned.
To be safe, Taylor thinks he may have to get to the 1,600-point level to remain inside the top 30 and qualify for the Tour Championship. He currently has 1,437.
“But it really depends on how people play,” Taylor said. “There is more volatility at Memphis with more players in the field. If I stay where I am going into the BMW, then I am going to be in a good spot. If I don’t play great, there’s a chance I could move pretty far back.
“I have done a good job this year of not worrying about things that I have no control over. It’s just about me going and playing as well as I can and focusing on that.”
Taylor likes the Memphis course, TPC Southwind, and would love to have a solid week in Tennessee that would punch his ticket to Atlanta. “It is a really tough golf course,” he said.
“You’ve got to hit it in play and everything has got to be sharp. It is not really bomb and gouge, but if you miss fairways it is going to be really hard to make birdies. I like the difficulty of it.”
Taylor is looking to put a bow on what has already been a terrific year. It started with a bang when Taylor won the first full-field event of 2025, the Sony Open in Hawaii. It was Taylor’s fifth PGA TOUR victory and he is part of a select list of players who have won in each of the last three seasons.
Taylor did not rest on his laurels following that Hawaii win. He continued to play solid golf all season. He had a pair of top 10s at Signature events (T9 at the Genesis Invitational and T4 at the Memorial) and Taylor is proud of the fact that he has only missed four cuts all season and amassed 11 top-25 finishes.
“This year after winning so early it could be easy to get complacent and almost cruise in, in a sense, but being quite consistent the whole season has probably been the best part of the year,” he said.
It is not a stretch to suggest Taylor’s 2025 season rivals his superb 2023 season, which was highlighted by his storybook win at the RBC Canadian Open. “If you look on paper and just the finishes, I would say 2023 was probably my best year,” he said.
“But if you look a little deeper, I think this year there has been a little bit more consistency. I really felt like that four-week stretch earlier this summer from Memorial through Travellers that I definitely could have had a win in there and/or more top 10s.
"I was a little disappointed, but to be disappointed with four straight top-25s in great events just kind of shows that my floor has gotten a little higher than it has been. So I would say this has probably been my most consistent year.”
Taylor also made progress in major championships, which had been something of an Achilles heel. He made the cut at the Masters, where he tied for 40th, and contended through three rounds at the U.S. Open before finishing tied for 23rd.
Now 37, Taylor finds it hard to believe he has been out on Tour for 11 years now. And while the PGA TOUR seems to be getting younger each year, Taylor thinks he has lots of great golf left in him. “I’m getting to an age where I know I won’t be out there forever,” he said.
“It’s hard to believe it’s been 11 years. I’m still as hungry as ever. I think I am better than I ever have been. I would say even with the way golf has changed since I turned pro, there’s plenty of pros that have peaked in their mid- to late 30s.
"It seems rare now because the game has become so young and powerful, but I hit it further now than I ever have, I feel like I have the experience and knowledge of my own game better than I ever have, so I think for that reason there is a lot of good to come.”
One of the rewards of playing so well the past three or four years is that it allows Taylor to take more time off. He and his wife Andie have two young children, five-year-old son Charlie who is heading to kindergarten this fall, and two-year-old daughter Harper. Taylor said it’s no coincidence his best years have come since starting a family.
“I’m still as hungry as ever, but there are more important things in life than golf,” he said. “Scottie (Scheffler) went viral recently talking about that. I do feel the same. The older I have gotten I have less self-image attached to my golf score. It’s no surprise that my golf got better since having children. There is such a power to that.”
His Hawaii win makes Taylor fully exempt through the end of the 2027 season. Earlier in his career, he spent more than a couple of seasons fighting to keep his card and the freedom he now enjoys has also freed up his golf game. Instead of focusing on making cuts and hanging onto his Tour card, Taylor now craves being in contention.
“Because I have become more consistent I have been able to put myself in positions where I’m trying to win on the last nine on Sunday. I feel confident in those moments that I can rise to the occasion. So that has probably been the most enjoyable part of playing well the last three years or so.
"It is being in those moments, feeling good about it, not that I’m never not nervous. But I’m kind of excited to be in those moments and I don’t know if it’s validation, but just feeling like I belong more. The first six or seven years of just hanging on, keeping my job, just never felt like that was it for me. I thought I could do more.”
Later this month, Taylor hopes to do more in Atlanta. He made his debut appearance at East Lake in 2023 and finished 25th in the 30-man field. The course has subsequently undergone a renovation and the Tour Championship is also changing its controversial scoring format.
It will now be a standard stroke-play format, eliminating the FedEx Cup starting strokes format where players began with a lead based on their season-long points. Taylor loves the change.
“Whether you are first or 30th, you are starting at par,” he said. “I like that change, it makes it more of an actual playoff.”