At this week’s Presidents Cup, the International Team will be led by a left-handed Canadian golfer named Mike Weir. When Weir won the Masters in 2003, his three defining features in media accounts were his nationality, his diminutive size, and his left-handedness. The last of these traits was almost exotic—he was the first southpaw Masters winner, beating Phil Mickelson to the punch, and considering that roughly 10 percent of the population is left-handed, it felt somewhat meaningful. But there’s a twist here. More accurately, there are two twists: First, Weir is actually right-handed. Second, left-handed golfers in Canada are nowhere near as unique as the general population. Statistics range on the low end from 20 percent to 30 percent, with some Canadians anecdotally saying that it rises as high as 40 percent in the recreational game. That figure feels like a stretch, but the perception alone is instructive on the difference.

So…what gives?

If you’re reading this article, there’s a strong statistical chance that you’re a right-handed American. You almost certainly have no memory of when you learned that you were right-handed, because the preference probably developed when you were an infant or a toddler. That’s when you became “lateralized” and began to show a consistent tendency (this despite the fact that your genes likely gave away your handedness as early as the eighth week of pregnancy). Certain basic physical activities, like writing and throwing and brushing your teeth, fell naturally to your dominant hand.

And that’s where the easy narrative ends and the complications begin, particularly when it comes to sports. Take tennis legend Rafael Nadal, one of the three best players in the sport’s history. He writes, throws, and brushes his teeth with his right hand, but plays tennis left-handed. There’s an apocryphal story floating around that his Uncle Toni forced him to play left-handed when he was young for a competitive advantage, but the truth is that like many children, Nadal’s lack of power as a youngster forced him to swing the racket with two hands from both sides. When the time came to choose a forehand side, Toni Nadal could only observe that the left-handed swing looked smoother, and he noticed something else—the young boy showed a preference for kicking a soccer ball with his left foot. So he “made” him left-handed, but didn’t know at that early age that he was a natural righty in other parts of life. His tennis left-handedness is an accident, and if you were to describe Nadal today, you’d say he was right-handed in everyday tasks, left-footed, and left-handed in his most important athletic endeavor. He’s a terrific example of the gray areas when it comes to handedness in sports, and how it can be influenced by far more than nature.

Now try another exercise: imagine the first time you picked up a golf club. If you’re a righty, why did you choose a right-handed club and place your left hand at the top of the grip?

The primary reason could be that this is how right-handed players have been gripping the club since the days of Old Tom Morris and beyond. But what made you a golfing righty instead of a lefty? A secondary possible factor is that if you’re like me, and many Americans, you played baseball before you ever thought about golf, and it was totally natural as a right-handed person to put your left hand on the top of the club, just as you’d put it in the same position on a baseball bat. Even if you’d never played baseball, you were probably instructed on the grip by someone who had, or someone who themselves was part of the American paradigm of golf instruction that had been influenced by baseball.

Then ask yourself another question: Forgetting all your training, is it better to have your dominant hand pulling through in the golf swing, or guiding the club? Could there be an argument for standing on the other side? Is there a chance that you could have been a better, more powerful player if you learned to play golf “left-handed”? On that note, Dr. Sasho MacKenzie, a leading biomechanist in golf and a professor at St. Francis University, says that hand dominance shouldn’t determine how one swings, since there’s no measurable advantage either way, either in skill or power. So why do we all go to one side?

And to get really deep, what does it even mean to say you play golf “right-handed” or “left-handed”? There’s an argument to be made that unlike throwing or writing or brushing your teeth, the side on which you stand when playing golf, and which hand goes on the top of the club, is a simple choice that has very little to do with your dominant hand. The fact that we call one side “right-handed” is a cultural product of something that is taught, and isn’t especially meaningful as a description. In America, we just do it because we think that’s what right-handed people do when they play golf.

That question is pertinent to our question about Canadian golfers. Just as many Americans have held a baseball bat before they ever think about golf, many Canadians have held a hockey stick. The blade of the stick used to be flat, but in the ’60s it became popular to curve the stick, which gave players a shooting advantage. The minute that happened, hockey sticks went from neutral to a certain “handedness.” The question for young players became, how do you hold a stick? Absent of any other influence, there are two main reasons why a right-handed person would put his dominant hand at the top of the stick in a reverse of the baseball grip and play “lefty.” The first is that the earliest skills learned in hockey are puck handling, which relies on the top hand, and those dexterous movements are better managed for a young player with the dominant hand. The second reason is simpler still—you hold the stick in one hand when skating without the puck, and without other instruction, most new players will hold it in their dominant hand.

Which leads to this fact: In the NHL, roughly 62 percent of players are “left-handed.” I put that term in quotes because just like with golf, the more you learn, the more foolish it feels to ascribe any handedness to a sport like hockey. It’s not just Canadians in the NHL either; Europeans are predominantly “left-handed” in hockey for the same reasons. Even sales of hockey sticks reflect the difference; this map shows that with some oddball exceptions (hello, Nunavut and New Mexico), sales by handedness differ between the U.S. and Canada, with Americans becoming more “left-handed” the closer they get to the border, and the more they know about the sport. Clearly, many Americans are influenced by the baseball dynamic when it comes to hockey sticks, right down to the nomenclature. Imagine this: your kid is getting into hockey, so you go to the sporting goods store to buy a stick…you know your kid is right-handed, so what sort of stick will you ask for? A right-handed stick.

It would easily follow, then, that the higher percentage of “left-handed” Canadian golfers can be attributed almost entirely to the influence of hockey. If you’ve played hockey first, you’re accustomed to holding a stick with your right hand at the end, and it’s only natural to duplicate that with a golf swing. And here’s something I found a bit mind-blowing: if you subscribe to the idea that most young players will choose their dominant hand as the “guide hand,” you can see why that hand would be at the end of the stick in hockey, for puck handling and grip purposes, yet be underneath the non-dominant hand in golf and baseball, since it’s the lower hand that does more “guiding” or “aiming” in those sports. Thus, what we think of as handedness in stick sports might be all about what’s most comfortable for young children.

Of course, none of this is perfect. Natural righties can be taught to hold a hockey stick with the left hand on top for strategic purposes. Different people can have different preferences; my editor Sam Weinman, a hockey player, plays right-handed, while his son Charlie, also a natural righty, instinctually plays left-handed. In fact, Charlie is a great American example of someone who seems to have followed the Canadian trajectory—he played hockey first, used his right hand at the top of the stick like so many Canadian kids, and went on to play baseball and golf left-handed despite being naturally right-handed. Sam’s other son, Will, is naturally left-handed, but plays hockey “righty” for what is likely the exact same reason; he used his dominant hand at the top of the stick.

Even in golf, though, nothing follows a totally predictable pattern, demonstrated by the fact that the majority of right-dominant Canadian golfers still play right-handed. Some may have never played hockey, and some may have been taught by professionals from the school of American or European golf. (It could get even more basic: some may be imitating a parent or older sibling or conforming to the only equipment available to them.) When you look at the PGA Tour, there are Canadian lefties like Weir and Peter Campbell, but also plenty of righties like Corey Conners, Nick Taylor, and Adam Hadwin. Yet because of hockey’s influence, far more Canadians will follow the path of the hockey grip and translate that to how they play golf. Which in turn produces more “right-handed lefties” like Weir…who, you won’t be surprised to know, grew up playing hockey.

The biggest lesson of the whole thing, though, is that it’s fundamentally a misnomer to assign “handedness” to stick sports like hockey, baseball, and golf. The way a player addresses the ball has very little to do with his or her dominant hand, and a lot more to do with culture, instruction, and initial instincts that come with the specifics of a particular sport. After all, if the majority of right-handed hockey players around the globe actually play “left-handed,” why are we even calling it “left-handed” in the first place?

In the end, the mystery of the lefty golfer is no mystery at all; the population of golfers is a hybrid mix of different influences, and north of the border, that recipe consists of a greater portion of the ingredient called hockey. Hence, the Canadian lefty golfer who isn’t a lefty at all.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com