At any one of the recent LPGA/LET co-sanctioned women’s events in the U.K., there would have been umpteen spectator conversations along the lines of the one which began beside the short 16th in the AIG Women’s Open at Muirfield.
Spectator to friend: “Is that Sophie Gustafson caddying for Maja Stark?”
Friend: “I think so, but why? She was a British Open winner, wasn’t she? And I think I’ve seen her caddying before.”
The puzzled pair could have come to the conclusion that the now 48-year-old Swede had run out of money. After all, she was only 26 when she won the Women’s British Open at Royal Birkdale in 2000.
Let Gustafson herself set people straight. “It wasn’t because of the money that I started to caddie, and it’s not the reason now,” she said in the e-mail chat which followed our brief get-together at Muirfield.
A modest soul, Gustafson was not about to go into details of how she won more than $6.1 million during her years on the LPGA Tour and another £2.5 million or so on the LET and elsewhere. Instead, she delivered an explanation which may or may not come as a surprise. She gave up because she had run out of enthusiasm. “I simply didn’t want to play anymore,” she said. “I’d done it for too long – twenty-odd years, to be precise.”
As for her switch to caddying – a move she made in 2015 – she thought that it could not have made more sense. “For one thing, I thought that I could help players because I’d been there myself and I knew how they were thinking and feeling; it gave me a bit of an advantage over the other caddies. For another, I felt confident I’d be good at it.”
“I hadn’t expected it, but I got the same adrenaline rush I used to get when I was in the heat of battle, even if it wasn’t me hitting the shots.”
SOPHIE GUSTAFSON
That much was confirmed when she won with America’s Beth Allen in what was her first week among the caddying corps, with the relevant tournament the 2015 ISPS Handa Ladies European Masters.
Simultaneously, Gustafson found something else to like about her new role: “I hadn’t expected it, but I got the same adrenaline rush I used to get when I was in the heat of battle, even if it wasn’t me hitting the shots.”
She experienced that same high in two of the four events where she was in action this year. The first was when she accepted a request to caddie for Ingrid Lindblad at the U.S. Women’s Open. (Lindblad finished as the top amateur and in a highly creditable share of 11th place overall.)
As for the second, that was when she guided another Swede, Maja Stark, to victory in the recent ISPS Handa World Invitational in Northern Ireland. Stark, who shot a closing 63 which included 10 birdies, earned an LPGA player’s card in the process.
Gustafson, incidentally, can see Lindblad winning a major before too long, while she was equally taken with Stark’s talent. “Maja’s a great putter, and she hits her driver far and straight – a great combo. For an area where she can improve, I would say it’s with the 30- to 80-yard shots. If she can become stellar with them, she will make even more birdies.
“She’s certainly got the right temperament,” Gustafson added. “She blows a little and then it’s over. If anything, she’s a little too hard on herself, but other than that, she’s fine. She’s very determined, and the moment you tell her she can’t do something, she will prove you wrong.”
Gustafson will not, though, be Stark’s regular caddie in the States.
Home life in Gothenburg, the city on Sweden’s southwest coast where she was brought up, is far too good for her to be away for more than the occasional week. Her current hobbies are padel tennis – she plays it competitively – and carpentry. After completing a course in the latter, she started making furniture and, by way of a next step, she was able to help her partner, a builder-cum-joiner, with the construction of an additional property on their land. “I’m in my element when I’m making things,” she said.
For yet another area where Gustafson has been able to help others, it has been in mentoring those who, like herself, suffer with a stutter. In 2012, Ron Sirak, a much-respected American golf writer, presented Gustafson with the Ben Hogan Award, presented to players who overcome an injury or illness to succeed in golf. “We stood side-by-side as Sophie’s self-made video acceptance speech played,” Sirak said. “There was not a dry eye in the house.”
In writing about the golfer’s problem, Sirak passed on her story of a young lad who had at one point contemplated suicide because of the way youngsters in his age group poked fun at his stutter. Tiger Woods, when his attention was brought to the article, wasted no time in sending the child a heartfelt letter. Woods told him that he understood how he must be feeling because he used to be bullied on two fronts – for his childhood stutter and for often being the only minority player.
One repercussion of Gustafson’s stutter is that her extraordinarily successful career – she won 16 times on the LET and five more on the LPGA – received but a fraction of the attention it deserved. Hard though she tried, she was in no position, other than when she was speaking in Swedish, to make the most of her golfing feats by giving the radio and TV reporters the merry quotes they would have wanted.
Away from the stutter, there is another reason why people have never got to know her as they might otherwise have done. Namely, because she was, as many another of her generation, playing in the shadow of Annika Sörenstam.
Gustafson, if the truth be known, has never felt anything but admiration for her sister Swede. “What Annika has,” she once said, “is very good self-discipline. Not only that, but she has the advantage of thinking it’s fun to stand on the practice range for eight hours at a time hitting balls. I wish I found it fun, but to be ruthlessly honest, I never have. I practised because it had to be done.
“Nothing’s changed,” she said lightly. “Today, I might hit about five buckets on the range a year, and that’s as far as it goes.”
Mind you, she still turned out for the pro-am ahead of the DP World Tour’s 2018 Nordea Masters in the happy guise, would you believe, of a left-hander with an official 11 handicap.
Gustafson’s turn-of-the-century British Open win was a nail-biter of an affair. “My abiding memory,” she said, “is of making an eagle on the first hole of the fourth round to lead by nine, and then hanging on for dear life to win by two. I was so happy to get it done. Along with my Solheim Cup performances [13-12-6 record in eight contests], it was definitely among my proudest moments.”
The question arose as to whether she still feels a tad irked that the Women’s British Open was not given major status until the year after she won. Here, she explains that this is not something which keeps her awake by night: “I sure wish that it had been a major for me, but it’s honestly never been that big a deal.”
With things as they are, Gustafson remains in the happy position of being able to boast, “I’m the only person to have been the defending champion at a major without having won a major.”
Top: Sophie Gustafson enjoys working with rookie Maja Stark but will not caddie for the fellow Swede in the U.S.
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