GULLANE, SCOTLAND | Nelly Korda and Minjee Lee may win major championships, but we can safely say that neither would last five minutes on the U.K.-based reality show “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!”
To explain, it was during the course of their pre-tournament news conferences at the AIG Women’s Open at Muirfield that the two showed themselves to be among the LPGA Tour’s most serious arachnophobes.
All the usual arrangements had been made for a player and the conference convenor to sit side-by-side at a desk, which, perhaps for the purposes of accommodating an electric cable, had a hole the size of a squash ball in its top.
A venomous Brazilian spider once arrived in London via a bunch of bananas, but this chap, legs and all, was not too much bigger than a ball marker.
The Korda conference was barely under way – she was talking about the change of climate from one practice day to the next – when a spider popped up through the said hole and the American emitted a seismic yelp. “Oh, my God! That is a huge spider right here!”
The convener happened to be an Australian and, as one who knew her spiders, she was able to reassure Korda that her life was not in danger. (A venomous Brazilian spider once arrived in London via a bunch of bananas, but this chap, legs and all, was not too much bigger than a ball marker.) Again, like any other U.K. spider, it did not pose any kind of a threat beyond a little nip. The convenor flicked it gently from the table, and that, presumably, was the end of the matter.
It was not. Korda, who would have preferred for the official to come up with a more permanent solution, was soon in even more of a state. “It’s worrying when it disappears,” she said. “That’s what I don’t like. It’s somewhere under the table. It’s just not the kind of situation I want to be in.”
The player made her escape, and the spider saved its next pop-up-show for the arrival of the U.S. Open champion Minjee Lee. Though this proud Australian would never have dared to make a fuss, her shaky voice told its own story. Afterwards, she conceded that she had never had any altercations with spiders in her homeland, but she hated them nonetheless. “I was really struggling to concentrate,” she said.
A couple of hours later, the convenor crawled under the table to catch up with the spider and move it along before it could make for trouble when the R&A hierarchy arrived for their media session.
Wherever the insect was heading, no one was unkind enough to suggest that it might find a new base in Muirfield’s 18th hole – and time its next appearance to coincide with some poor arachnophobe preparing to tackle a 2-footer.
Lewine Mair
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