WALTON-ON-THE-HILL, ENGLAND | Competitors in last week’s AIG Women’s Open are doing their best to ensure that female golfers are not about to become extinct. The majority have witnessed amazing changes for the better since they started on their golfing journeys, with the 26-year-old Lydia Ko setting the ball rolling. She talked of how, when she was growing up in New Zealand, she always saw rugby, cricket and netball as the women’s sports “which mattered.” And the ones which made the front pages of the New Zealand Herald.
Thanks to Ko, women’s golf now matters in the land of the silver fern.
Bob Charles, winner of the 1963 Open, inspired Ko, and she, in turn, has inspired all those youngsters who have been following her progress since she won the first of her 26 professional titles at age 14.
“It’s the growth of the game that interests me,” Ko said. She cited how people who do not know the first thing about golf might nowadays slip Charley Hull’s name alongside that of Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy if they were asked to name a handful of the game’s stars. She was equally taken with the rising number of little girls who come out to watch the best players.
England’s Hull is enjoying the same buzz. She thinks she was born lucky, because when she started hitting balls at Kettering Golf Club, there was a never-ending supply of boys with whom she could play. “Laura Davies has always been my hero,” Hull said, “but it was because I played so much with boys that I turned into the golfer I am today.”
Georgia Hall, for her part, said she would love “to have been like Charley” in terms of having a corps of playing companions of her own age. “I didn’t know any other girls – or boys, for that matter – who were interested in golf. At my club, I was always the only girl in a group of women,” she said.
Today, in her role as an R&A ambassador, Hall advises parents of would-be golfers to seek out one of the kids’ clubs which are beginning to pop up all over the U.K., especially in the London area.
Among the Americans at Walton Heath, Lindsey Weaver-Wright said that she contributes to the growth of the game by giving of her time to the kids who ask for her autograph, and by schooling the parents with whom she plays in pro-ams.
“The pro-am contingent,” she said, “are less interested than they used to be in seeking tips for themselves. They’re desperate for me to tell them how to make the game click with their daughters. And when they go on to ask what the daughters should practise the most, my usual answer is that they should put the emphasis on fun rather than hard work.”
Like Hull and Hall, she thinks that nothing works better than encouraging kids to learn with a party of friends. “That way, they can play golf and develop a social life at the same time.”
Weaver-Wright, 29, practised what she preaches. She played in numerous junior mixed USGA team events as a child. At 12, she fell into golfing chat with one of the boys; at 17 she started to go out with him; today, she and Zach Wright, a former Korn Ferry Tour player, are married and expecting a baby boy at Christmas.
Jin Young Ko, from among the South Korean fraternity, smiles when being asked what she has done to make what was once an alarmingly parent-driven sport in her part of the world more appealing. Ko is no different from the rest of her compatriots in having a host of young fans, and the first thing she tells them is that they should find a balance in their lives.
“My parents,” she said, “were a little like Se Ri Pak’s in wanting me to play golf all the time because they wanted to make me perfect. In fact, they’re still a bit like that. But when, in my first 10 years of playing as a professional, I had no more than a 10-day break from all the hard work I was doing and started to get more injuries, I suddenly found my voice. I said to my parents, ‘I am always getting injuries, and I need more time off.’ Then they began to understand.”
As to how the next generation of talented Koreans should find the balance she recommends, she says they should read plenty of books “and make themselves a boyfriend.”
The Swedes, of whom there were nine in the field at Walton Heath, have had an innovative way of handling sport. On this occasion, Patrik Jonsson, who coaches the Swedish national women’s team, provided details of how he now has two layers of equally promising juniors waiting in the wings thanks not least to November and December camps at which all age-groups come together.
“The older girls,” he said, “are like big sisters. They’re grateful for the help they’ve had across the years, and they’re proud of their role in helping to bring on the next layers.”
He picked out Lisa Pettersson as the player to give GGP an update on how the generations interacted. “The younger ones,” said Pettersson, a 28-year-old who competes on the LET, “ask us a lot of questions and, for me, there’s one question that stands out above the rest. They want to know if I used to be afraid of losing, which of course I was. I let them know that it’s mostly only you and your parents that care if you’ve had a bad round.”
Meanwhile, the R&A has played its part in growing the women’s game. Last Wednesday, when R&A CEO Martin Slumbers and Peter Zaffino, chairman and chief executive of U.S.-based insurer AIG, talked of the future of the Women’s British Open, Slumbers said he was targeting a crowd – one of the family-orientated variety – which would be closer in size to the 265,000 which turned up for the recent Open Championship at Royal Liverpool.
Yet maybe the reason so many families were out in force at Walton Heath was because the 50,000-odd crowd was so manageable. “It’s not too stressful for the parents, and it’s not stressful for the kids,” said a father of three.
Another spectator, who was doing a spot of eavesdropping, suggested that the men’s Open would make for an altogether more attractive day out were children to take the place of the raucous, beer-swilling element.
E-MAIL LEWINE
Top: Céline Boutier signs a cap for a young girl before the AIG Women's Open at Walton Heath.
TRISTAN JONES, LET