The Ladies’ European Tour (LET) season is finally up and running with its first two tournaments safely in the books and last week’s Italian Open was won by an 18-year old French amateur called Lucie Malchirand (photo above), who had just won the Portuguese Amateur Championship in her previous start.

Now, it’s not unheard of for an amateur to win a professional event (Bobby Jones managed it quite regularly) but it is fairly rare and those who do triumph become members of a very exclusive club indeed.  Without exception they are all already players of pedigree with several trophies and honours in their cabinets but winning at the professional level is a huge accomplishment for any amateur.

In last week’s blog I was celebrating Phil Mickelson’s sixth major victory at the age of almost 51.  His first professional victory came way back in 1991 when still an amateur and 30 years later he’s still winning professional events – and majors at that.  Perhaps this all lies ahead for Malchirand who has already represented her country with distinction and who played in the last Junior Solheim Cup.

She certainly doesn’t have to lift her eyes from French soil to find inspiration by the bucket-load.  A role model is right there for her in her own country in the great Catherine Lacoste who stunned the golfing world with an incredible victory in the 1967 US Women’s Open, in my opinion one of the greatest-ever achievements by an amateur golfer.

To date Lacoste is the only amateur winner in the championship’s 75-year history but whisper it softly, there is a slight frisson among the cognoscenti that perhaps this week will see a second amateur win the US Women’s Open which is being played at the Olympic Club in San Francisco.  Rachel Heck, a 19-year old from Memphis, has just completed her first year at Stanford and has won six of the nine tournaments she played in her freshman year, including five in a row at the end of the season, culminating in the NCAA Individual Championship.  She also won the Annika Award which is presented to the nation’s best female college golfer and set an NCAA single-season scoring record of 69.72.  And – ominously for her opposition – she has already recorded a win on this year’s venue, shooting a 66 around this beast of a course.

As if this wasn’t enough to keep her busy she has joined the Air Force ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) on campus and claims the discipline and life skills she has learned there are helpful to her in all walks of life including on the fairways.  She says being busy with all this other stuff deflects the pressure from her on the course.  “When golf is not the be-all end-all, it takes so much pressure off me.  I have a thousand other things I want to do.”  This scarily accomplished teenager is impressive, to say the least, but the odds are still against her.  It will be fun seeing how she gets on and if she will be able to join the great Lacoste in an exclusive club of two.

Perhaps one of the most heralded amateur winners of professional events over the last few years has been New Zealander Lydia Ko, who won no fewer than four times amongst the paid ranks before being able to accept a cheque.  In 2012 she became the youngest winner on the LPGA tour when she won the Canadian Open, a title she successfully defended the following year.  In early 2013 she won in her home country of New Zealand to become the youngest winner of an LET event and two years later she continued adding to her string of “youngest ever to…..” accomplishments by ascending to the No 1 world ranking.  Now 23 years old and with 16 wins, including two majors, under her belt it’ll be interesting to see if she sticks to her avowed intention to retire from the game at the age of 30.

The player Ko superseded as the youngest winner on the LET was another amateur winner of a professional event – Amy Yang, who had won the 2006 ANZ Ladies’ Masters.  Yang, South Korean by birth, took up the game at ten years of age and at 15 moved with her parents to Australia to enable her to focus on her golf.  She has subsequently built a strong career which just needs a major title to elevate that description to “great.”  You could argue a good case that she’s currently one of the best players never to have won a major.  Now 31, she could well be moving into her prime, though admittedly it’s quite tricky to determine when women players actually hit their prime, given the incredible success some of them enjoy at a very young age.

Records from the early days of the LET are notoriously sketchy, even non-existent in many instances, so I’m relying on memory here when I think of the last amateur prior to Amy to win on the Ladies’ European Tour.  If I’ve overlooked anyone – apologies, but I think that honour must go to Gillian Stewart, one of Scotland’s finest, who won the 1984 European Open at The Belfry.  As with many of the other amateur winners, that victory was a portend of things to come, ushering in a very successful career in the paid ranks.

We have been lifelong friends and last played golf together the day we went into our first lockdown back in March 2020.  We have a few games arranged for later this month at the glorious Royal Dornoch, Brora and Skibo, to name but a few.

Can’t wait.  Can’t wait to take the money!

 

Well, oh happy day, I woke up early yesterday morning, excited, nervous, full of anticipation for a special day that was a year in the making – it had been postponed for 12 months because of the pandemic – and it was here at last.  A bit grey and cloudy to begin with – the day not me, though that’s a fair description of my usual morning state; not at all like a former flatmate who used to wake up cheerful and chirpy, smiling and singing (in tune no less) and drove the rest of us, all waking grumps, to growls, then howls of fury.

But I digress, as usual.  The Romans liked long, straight roads but I prefer byways to highways and adore twists and turns, nooks and crannies….No wonder I never get anywhere on time nor anything finished….I just stop.  Sometimes even in the right place.

The right place this time was Edgbaston GC, that wonderful green oasis (is that tautology?) in the middle of Birmingham and I arrived in plenty of time, without diversion or deviation, to take my place in the Ladies Am Am as Team McFarland’s MGP  – aka Mystery Guest Pruscilla.  The eccentric spelling, which has irritated the spell check no end, was courtesy of Pat, our hostess with the mostest, who got everything else right.

Pat, nee McFarland, now Hales, is one of numerous cousins from that clan/tribe/nation state, many of them excellent golfers and she had roped in two of the Irish branch, who’d known Maureen and me from our junior golf days, hence my invitation.  (For the long-suffering loyal blog readers who are not golfers, Mo is a professional, so is ineligible for amateur events like, well, am ams.)

Heather, nee McFarland, now Kitson and a member of Cranleigh in Surrey after a life well-travelled (Dubai, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Bermuda – I think, my head was spinning like a globe trying to keep track) reckoned that we hadn’t seen each other for 50 years.  Her sister Marilyn, a Henderson since marrying Gordon in 1976 (I even unearthed some snaps of the wedding) had been marginally more accessible.  Now a member at Craigavad, more formally Royal Belfast, she is also captain of Ireland’s senior women – hard to come up with a designation that doesn’t sound vaguely ageist but she’ll be in charge (?!!; have you met the Irish seniors?) for the home internationals at Woodhall Spa at the beginning of August (4th-6th).

That should be some jamboree because the senior men will be there too – and the girls and the boys and the women.  Let’s hope they allow spectators because it’ll be a feast of golf.  And if my research is correct, Marilyn’s mob, who are the European champions, will be chasing their fourth title in a row.

The crack was good at Edgbaston, the golf less so.  We had one birdie between us (thank you Pat), not too many pars and realised, shamefacedly, that we hadn’t been on the green at any of the four par 3s.  No 2s for us, then, though when we got in, we were told there’d been lots of birdies at the short holes.  Baffling!  Congrats and kudos to Judith Waterhouse, fellow member of WHGC and beginners bridger, for being on the winning team with 83 points.  We didn’t even win anything in the raffle.

Whatever, it really couldn’t have been a better day – there were even hugs.  Thanks team.

Meanwhile, at the Olympic Club in San Francisco, the US Women’s Open is under way and Mel Reid, one of the blog’s favourites (we have a few), had a 67, four under par, to set the standard.  She had a bit of a course/major strategy session with Brooks Koepka prior to the championship and is trying to channel her inner Brooks (he’s won four major titles so far, including two US Opens).  She’s also making a statement, as is her wont, with her headgear.

In the past, she’s gone logo free, to highlight the lack of support for women from sponsors but now she has the backing of PEGA and they’ve gone a step further by giving their logo a rainbow makeover (just about visible in the pic above), in support of Pride Month.  Mel, who is gay and a great advocate of inclusivity and diversity, is proud of the fact that this is a first for golf, notoriously mealy-mouthed when it comes to such matters.  She’s determined to do her bit “to try and change the world and make it a bit of a better place”.

Go Mel and go PEGA.  I’d never heard of them until a few days ago when I got press releases from the European Tour and the PGA of America telling me that Pegasystems Inc, “the software company that crushes business complexity” had become “a worldwide supplier of the 43rd and 44th Ryder Cup”.  That’s this one, at Whistling Straits later this year, all being well and the next one, in Rome, in 2023.

Frankly, the press release was too complex for me but the company will apparently help its clients “stay streamlined, agile and ready for what’s next”.  Interestingly, it also said, “Ryder Cup spectators, golfers and event staff have likely already used Pega in their daily lives, including when they travel, use a credit card, call a company for service or perform other everyday tasks…”  There you go.  Time for me to stop and prepare for whatever’s next.

Delighted to see, though, that Portmarnock GC, that erstwhile male bastion, has voted to become gender neutral.  Don’t quite know how that’ll work in practice but it sounds like a belated move into the 21st century.

Finally and because I’ve had such a good day, here are some wise words from a wee book that always cheers me up and revives my optimism.  It’s by Tal Ben-Shahar, Ph.D and is the antithesis of a happy-clappy, trite-tripe self-help book.

He reminds us that, “A happy – or happier – life is rarely shaped by some extraordinary life-changing event; rather, it is shaped incrementally, experience by experience, moment by moment…..

“…..we must first accept that ‘this is it’ – that all there is to life is the day-to-day, the ordinary, the details of the mosaic.  We are living a happy life when we derive pleasure and meaning while spending time with our loved ones, or learning something new, or engaging in a project at work.  The more our days are filled with these experiences, the happier we become.

“This is all there is to it.”

Not entirely sure he’s ever played golf but have a good day everybody, let’s do our best to enjoy every moment.