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Leonie Harm is single-minded on two fronts, if that makes sense.
As a golfer, the 22-year-old German wants to win majors; as a biochemistry and biophysics graduate, Harm has her heart set on making a difference in cancer research. During lockdown, meantime, she has been working as an intern for the CureVac AG company in Tübingen which is in the news for its work in developing a vaccine for COVID-19.
“Because I'm an intern, I’m not working in a high-security lab and I don't have any major responsibilities,” Harm said. “My role is to help the scientists to do their jobs more efficiently. However, I can’t tell you how amazing it is to be spending time and energy on things that mean so much.”
Harm’s love of golf came largely from her parents but gathered impetus as she lay in recovery after an accident in which a motorist knocked her to the ground while she was out jogging. The paramedics at the scene said she had no more than a 1 percent chance of survival and, when she arrived in hospital – her condition included brain damage and broken bones – the medical staff put her into an induced coma.
"I don’t want to be defined by what happens to me in life. I want to be defined by what I make happen.”
Leonie Harm
During the weeks ahead, nothing would stir her golfing thoughts more than the Junior Solheim Cup. She had been on the radar for a place for the team of 2013 when the accident happened, but she was still going to be eligible for the 2015 instalment at her home club, St Leon Rot, and duly made that her goal.
In what was dubbed a miracle recovery in Die Welt, Harm was out on the practice ground seven weeks after the accident and, as you will have guessed, she made that match of ’15. In addition, she won that summer's German International Girls’ Open and the German Ladies’ Amateur championship before taking up the golf scholarship dimension to her four years at the University of Houston at the start of 2016.
Just as her Solheim Cup experience – when she was not playing with the juniors, she watched USA defeating the Europe in the main match – served to strengthen Harm’s golfing resolve, so the death of her mother in 2016 made her all the more determined to make the most of her academic strengths. By then, her mother, grandmother and great grandmother all died from cancer.
At Houston, where she was the lead player on the women’s team, she missed more practice time than her teammates because her course load was so tough. Here, though, she was thrice blessed in having a coach in Gerrod Chadwell who understood.
Chadwell – whose wife, Stacy Lewis, a two-time major winner, had graduated from University of Arkansas with a degree in finance and accounting – had no desire to dent either of Harm's twin aspirations. “He was an absolute rock,” she said of her coach. “I was often the last to arrive and the first to leave the practices, while there were times I would have to fly in late to matches because I didn’t want to upset my professors. Gerrod never minded any of that.”
The main thing Harm learnt during her college years was how to make a good fist of “a crappy hand,” and how to keep her act together when she wasn’t as sharp as she could have been. “If anything, I grew as a player,” she said. “I had to get the ball in the hole, and I got quite good at it.”
It was during that period that she had an interesting encounter with Germany’s Bernhard Langer. He was playing in that week’s Insperity Invitational at the Woodlands (Langer won that event four times) and, during the course of a dinner party, he showed her his yardage book.
“I’d never seen so many numbers in my life as he has noted on the first page alone,” she said. “When I commented on it, he told me that while he expected to hit the odd bad shot, he never wanted to drop a shot because he didn’t have the necessary information.” Even though she herself plays more by instinct than anything else, Langer’s attention to detail is something she will never forget.
In 2018, Harm’s boyfriend of the moment told her that she should turn professional. Reluctant though she was to go along with his recommendation, she finally laid down her terms. “If I win four times in my senior season, I’ll turn,” she said with the confidence of one who thought that that could never happen.
As it turned out, she won four times – the British Women’s Amateur championship was among those victories – and then she won some more.
She prepared to make the switch at the end of 2019, but when she failed to negotiate the first round of LPGA qualifying she took aim instead on the Ladies European Tour. Her boyfriend’s next suggestion – that she could fly back and forth to see him – was a step too far. As far as she was concerned, that was not a realistic option. Romance over.
After making the cut at her first LET tournament in Australia and in the couple of events which followed before the tournament season came to an abrupt halt, Harm followed her father’s advice to spend lockdown in Germany rather than heading to Houston to work on her game.
When boredom struck, she found herself a new boyfriend and applied for a job. In the case of the latter, her father marvelled at her optimism at a time when so many Germans were losing theirs. But Leonie being Leonie, she scanned the papers and found an advert for an intern at CureVac AG. She sent in her application and, a phone call later, the job was hers.
Harm revels in the eager anticipation that is everywhere apparent at her place of work, though she makes plain that a vaccine development is always a long process: “Every day, I think of how honoured I am to be there, especially for the kind of practical experience I’m lucky enough to be getting.”
What makes Harm still more at ease with her current position is that she will never have to stick with one or other of her ambitions.
“Now is the moment to see how far I can take my golf and, in the case of the cancer research, there’s going to be plenty left to discover when I get started on that,” she said.
People might ask if one tough career isn't enough, but you only have to look at Harm’s mix of extreme highs and lows to understand what goes on in her head.
"I don’t want to be defined by what happens to me in life,” she said. “I want to be defined by what I make happen.”
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