TROON, SCOTLAND | Catriona Matthew, who will be captaining Great Britain and Ireland’s Curtis Cup team this year, was studying form at last weekend’s Helen Holm Scottish Women’s Open at Royal Troon where preparations for the ’24 Open Championship are well under way. By all accounts, visitors are going to be in for a shock when they see how much bigger the event has become since the Open was last staged here, in 2016.
On Saturday, when Matthew was chatting with GGP, she was happy to be celebrating a player who already had done more than enough to pin down a place in her Curtis Cup side for the August 30-September 1 match at England’s Sunningdale Golf Club. Namely, England’s Lottie Woad.
Matthew had been in Augusta, Georgia, to watch the 20-year-old Florida State University sophomore win the Augusta National Women’s Amateur ahead of the Masters. And she was still keeping tabs on the player’s golfing endeavours after she made the 36-hole cut at last week’s Chevron Championship.
“Lottie’s success should give our team a bit of confidence,” said Matthew, who captained the winning European Solheim Cup teams in 2019 and 2021 and is the first professional to be captaining a Curtis Cup. (She played in three Curtis Cups and nine Solheim Cups.)
Of course, she would like to have seen Woad and other members of the American college contingent – players such as Ireland’s Beth Coulter (Arizona State), Aine Donegan (Louisiana State) and Sara Byrne (Miami) and Scotland’s Hannah Darling (South Carolina) – competing at Troon alongside the home-based contingent. However, she was following enough of the latter to appreciate that the standard of play among the best of them was not necessarily lower than that of those who had chosen the American path.
Here, she probably would have been thinking of players such as Lorna McClymont, Annabel Wilson and Jasmine Mackintosh, the last mentioned of whom was defending her title 12 months after playoff success against McClymont. Incidentally, the fact that Mackintosh, a music student in Aberdeen, has just released an EP as part of her college course, prompted the thought that rather more of the anxious-looking amateurs at Troon might benefit from doing what Mackintosh has done all her days in combining singing with golf.
Matthew’s only real concern at the moment is that too many girls are turning professional without being good enough to make the switch.
The captain also will have been impressed by the performance of England’s Ellie Monk, who succeeded Mackintosh as champion with rounds of 72-72-21 for a 2-over 218 total and two-stroke victory over England’s Nellie Ong and Ireland’s Kate Lanigan.
“Obviously, there are players like Nelly Korda, Rose Zhang, Hannah Darling and Woad who stand apart, but there are too many others who aren’t necessarily asking themselves the right questions before they make the move,” Matthew said. “For example, if they are winning at every level at home, do they then go over and play in Europe and succeed in finishing in the top 30 over there?”
Matthew, the 2009 Women’s British Open champion, further believes that the youngsters should be making a habit of checking their stats and asking themselves: What would these figures do for me on the LPGA Tour?
“The youngsters seem to think as one in believing that the next step on the ladder after going to college in the U.S. or here is to turn professional when the truth is that having the word ‘professional’ attached to your name isn’t going to make you a better golfer overnight.”
At Troon, there were a couple of older golfers in the field, and Matthew wonders whether having more of them – wily older souls who can put young things in their place from time to time – would help the situation.
Not that it does to go round asking such citizens for their ages, there were a couple of over-40s at Troon. One was the 45-year-old Meghan Stasi, who just happens to be the U.S. Curtis captain, and the other, Elizabeth Bird, a Devonshire champion now in her 50th year.
The reason Stasi was at Troon had nothing to do with recruiting players for her side. In fact, there were no other Americans in the field for her to worry about. Her presence was all down to how she and her husband visit Scotland every year and recently have purchased a home in Dornoch.
Bird, meanwhile, had come up from Devon with her husband, Richard, and the couple were seeing the trip partly as a holiday, and partly as preparation for the 50-and-older senior events in which Elizabeth plans to play. She and Stasi made the 36-hole cut over Royal Troon’s Portland Course, finishing T57 and T49, respectively.
“Unlike quite a lot of the girls here, there’s no pressure on me,” Bird said. “My husband carries my clubs, but he never opens his mouth. I’m afraid that some of the parents don’t help their kids by thinking they’ve got the next Nelly Korda on their hands.
“The girls hit much farther than I do, but where I can show them a thing or two is by hitting into the rubbish and still managing to get down in a chip and putt.”
Richard was inordinately proud of his wife’s efforts. As for something else to make him smile, it was the news that where they were paying £30 a night to park their camper-van, one of the Open Championship luminaries had just forked out £150,000 to rent a third of an admittedly handsome home for Open week.
RESULTS
E-MAIL LEWINE
Top: Lottie Woad
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