ST. ANDREWS, SCOTLAND | Esther Henseleit could have been hiding in Hell Bunker for all we knew of her before she had that closing 6-under-par 66 at Le Golf National to win an Olympic silver medal in the recent Paris Games. Although the 25-year-old German was outside the top 100 in the Rolex World Rankings at the start of 2024, she began last week’s AIG Women’s Open ranked 29th and the certain owner of a place in the European Solheim Cup side which will meet the Americans next month at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, Virginia.
For Henseleit, her English caddie/fiancé Reece Philips, and seemingly so many others, it was a result to have prompted disbelieving laughter. After all, she had slipped outside the top 30 of that 60-strong Olympic field after nine holes of her third round. But that was the point at which a small voice inside reminded her of the target she had set herself eight years earlier. The target in question had been to represent Germany in the 2024 Olympics; now, it was about not wasting the opportunity.
After turning that originally mediocre-looking third round into a 69, she followed up with the 66 which left her two shots behind her friend Lydia Ko. “I was happy for Lydia to beat me,” said Henseleit. “It took her into the [LPGA] Hall of Fame and was a key moment in her career I wouldn’t have wanted her to miss.”
Finishing second at a regular tournament is not usually a headline-maker, but when Henseleit was also the runner-up in the Women’s Scottish Open at Dundonald one week later, a second-place finish assumed a new importance. It was the result she needed to stop the disbelieving laughter. She was the real thing.
“It’s so much more important to have your partner caddying for you than someone random. When you’re spending up to eight hours a day with your caddie, you have to get along.”
Esther Henseleit
Henseleit had been a bit of a Charley Hull in her junior days. Like Hull, who was a member at Kettering, she played at a club – Golfclub am Meer, near Bremen – where she was the only girl among a group of boys. No less than Hull, she enjoyed that arrangement for a very good reason. She had the beating of the boys and, to use her own words, “the boys didn’t like losing.”
At that stage of her golfing journey, Henseleit would happily hack out of woods and streams, and was forever arriving home in filthy shirts and shorts. Her mother used to get irritated, and because of it, Esther banned both parents from watching her until she started to play the game via the fairways.
That was when the family moved to Hamburg and the then 13-year-old Henseleit started playing for the Hamburger Golf-Club Falkenstein’s highly successful Clubteam German. She was also included in a German junior programme which involved travelling to girls’ championships and team events all over Europe.
Linn Grant, the Swede who will be a teammate at the Solheim Cup, remembers Henseleit well from a match – maybe a Germany versus Sweden affair – in which they played against each other in the foursomes.
“Esther and her partner each made an eagle on the way to beating us, and both times Esther apologised for what they had done, and meant it,” Grant said with a chuckle. “She’s a lovely person.”
Henseleit turned professional in 2019 and claimed her maiden victory at the Magical Kenya Ladies Open in December of that year. Only one of 5-feet-10-inches could have looked so much at home clutching a tall bronze trophy featuring the head and neck of a giraffe. It’s maybe not surprising that Lexi Thompson, who is much the same height, has been moved to follow this equally long-hitter on Instagram. “What always strikes me,” Thompson said, “is how hard she practises.”
Henseleit and Philips have been dating since 2021 when Philips, a PGA professional, arrived on the LET to do a spot of caddying at a time when coaching jobs were few and far between because of COVID. Philips helped his partner with her swing and, before too long, he became her coach and caddie. “I’m his full-time job now,” she said, delightedly.
The arrangement could not be working better.
“It’s so much more important to have your partner caddying for you than someone random,” she said. “When you’re spending up to eight hours a day with your caddie, you have to get along. You’re wasting your time if you don’t. It’s thanks to Reece that my bad weeks are better. He cheers me on all the time, and what a difference that makes.”
The two are to be married at the end of the year, with Reece having handed over the ring when they were on a romantic stroll while staying with Henseleit’s mother in Germany last Christmas.
The above begs the question as to whether more men might like to give up their jobs to caddie for their talented golfing partners. Twenty or so years ago, most men would have snorted at the very idea.
Yet it was happening even then. Graeme Matthew, for example, has always caddied for his wife, Catriona, whom he met at Stirling University. Today, there are plenty more.
Some couples will part company in instances when they could do with two sets of incomes, but in the case of Ashleigh Buhai, who won the ’22 Women’s British Open at Muirfield, she and her husband, David, like to have weeks together and weeks apart.
“How it all started,” said the 35-year old Buhai, “is that David gave up playing golf himself [like Esther’s fiancé, he is now a PGA professional] to make my life easier when I started out. I’ve been incredibly lucky, and I can’t thank him enough.
“No one’s ever asked David why he did what he did, and I’m sure that no one ever would. Not nowadays.”
E-MAIL LEWINE
Top: Esther Henseleit and her fiancé/caddie Reece Philips show off her silver medal.
Kevin C. Cox, Getty Images