GULLANE, SCOTLAND | At 9:15 p.m. Sunday, when another hole would have been almost out of the question, South Africa’s Ashleigh Buhai won a riveting four-hole playoff from In Gee Chun in the AIG Women’s Open at Muirfield. The wind had dropped, but the tension was at a high as the two played the par-4 18th for what would be the last time.
David Buhai, Ashleigh’s husband and a caddie to Jeongeun Lee6, was swallowing hard; the trophy engraver was still no further forward than he had been at the playoff’s start; and the fans were torn between staying put and going home to dinner. They stayed put.
Chun opened with an error, driving into a bunker, and Buhai did as she had done on each of the three previous playoff holes in bisecting the fairway. With Chun arriving on the left fringe in three, Buhai was faced with what would in normal circumstances have been a relatively straightforward second shot. Instead, she caught the bunker on the green’s right flank, and from there came up with what she will forever view as the bunker shot of a lifetime. It stopped no more than a foot from the hole.
With Chun having made a 5, Buhai put that little one away for her winning par and pulled her cap down over her face, at least until her husband arrived to deliver a rush of kisses.
“I thought it was huge that I didn’t lose my cool.”
Ashleigh Buhai
It was a close-run thing as to which of the two players the fans wanted to win more. Though Chun, with her three majors, has a CV which is in a different league to Buhai’s, the two are as popular as each other. Put it this way: You could not imagine either being less than considerate to a playing companion.
Chun was her usual gracious self at the end. “I played a great third shot at the last, but Ashleigh’s up-and-down from sand was so good. She deserved to win.” Both, for the record, were as many as 10-under-par after the 72 holes, with Hinako Shibuno third on 9-under.
We all know that the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers was a standout among Open Championship venues and will be again very shortly. Yet what a success story it was for the Women’s Open. High-court judges – and high flyers in general – revelled in their roles as volunteers and, outside the club’s wrought-iron gates, the village of Gullane was packed with friendly faces and floral displays. Shibuno’s English may be somewhat bizarre, but when she said, “I’m having fun from the bottom of my heart,” it summed up the overall mood.
Having hosted the 2013 Open, the Muirfield members felt that the men were more about hard-hitting and the women more about tempo. Meanwhile, the accuracy of the women’s iron play took them all aback, and with it their scoring. How, they wondered, could Buhai have handed in a 64 against the par of 71 on a cold and gusty Saturday afternoon?
Buhai had the explanation: “I like to get a good flight on the ball and take the spin off it. It’s obviously pretty key.” On Sunday night, she said that was precisely how things had gone with every one of the eight drives she had hit down the closing hole over the week.
Working with a sports psychologist had done volumes for the confidence of one who, though she won three times on the LET from 2007 to 2018, had done little on the LPGA. Yet she did become one to watch after finishing fifth in the 2019 Women’s Open at Woburn after leading at the halfway stage, and there was another promising performance when she was a runner-up to Georgia Hall in the 2020 Cambia Portland Classic.
Buhai, 33, of South Africa, credited the psychologist with giving her “the tools I needed to stay in the moment… Obviously, I struggle to do it all the time, but when I stop, I start again.”
She surprised herself with how calm she stayed over the last couple of hours. Even at the 15th, where she ran up a triple bogey to lose all of what was then a three-shot lead, she handled the situation unexpectedly well.
“I thought it was huge that I didn’t lose my cool,” she said.
In truth, you could sense from the finely-timed tee shot she unleashed at the short 16th that she was not on the point of collapse.
Her husband’s feelings were always more to the fore.
“He was definitely more nervous than I was,” she said, before conceding that he had been no different at Woburn where his way of staying calm was to drink the beer he had in his backpack.
The couple headed for home with $1.095 million, which, as Ashleigh inferred, was as much down to David’s support as her play.
Lewine Mair