SUNNINGDALE, ENGLAND | For 20-year-old Lottie Woad, who is the No. 1 female in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, the cumulative effects of a busy golfing summer were not something she intended to address at last weekend’s Curtis Cup at Sunningdale Golf Club.
To give just the tip-top results of her extraordinary season, she won the Augusta National Women’s Amateur, finished runner-up at the NCAA Championship playing for Florida State and went on to make off with the Smyth Salver, awarded to the top amateur at the AIG Women’s Open, at St Andrews after tying for 10th among the professionals. Five days further on and she was teeing up for Great Britain and Ireland against America in the Curtis Cup.
It was Justin Rose, the 2013 U.S. Open champion, who spilled the proverbial beans. Rose, who belongs to the same Excel Sports Management group as Woad, caught up with her at the end of a first day at Sunningdale in which she and Sara Byrne had collected a half-point in the foursomes and a win in the four-balls. (The latter was the point which had raised a super-human cheer as it enabled GB&I to match the Americans at 3-3 going into Saturday.)
“That was terrific, simply terrific,” said a beaming Rose. “Now you need to go to bed and get some sleep.” Then, as he allowed a cluster of spectators in on the conversation, he added, “You’re tired out!”
Woad looked at him and laughed. “I wasn’t going to tell anyone that,” she said. (Her rendition of her state of health had been that she was feeling great and still had plenty of adrenaline in her system.)
“That’s so typical of Lottie,” Rose said. “She never makes excuses. She’s an amazing person and an amazing golfer.”
Even if her short game on Friday morning was not always as sharp as Byrne’s, Woad nonetheless was only a foot away from an ace at the 15th, and 2 feet from another at the eighth in the afternoon.
Rose, as one would expect, knew a thing or two about the after-effects of having a great week: “Lottie’s winning of the Smyth Salver and that top-10 finish at St Andrews was the stuff of childhood dreams. Sometimes you can keep going after that level of performance, but it’s just as likely that you don’t have too much fight left in you. I know myself that if I’d won this year’s Open at Troon, I’d have needed to take the summer off.”
Though Woad will not be 21 until January, she could hold her own in any conversation with the game’s leading lights. Scott Barham, the assistant professional at her club, Farnham GC in Surrey, less than 30 minutes’ drive south from Sunningdale, can tell you why: “She’s been taught by Luke Bone, our head pro, since she was 7, and she is always popping into the professionals’ shop. To talk golf.”
“Her level of focus is insane. She’s got the best short game of anyone, and she deserves it.”
Scott Barham
Lottie knows her own game inside out and can keep you posted on where and when she mastered this and that. It was in winning the 2022 Girls’ Amateur Championship at Carnoustie that she learned to play the knockdown shots at which she nowadays excels. And it was from playing alongside the professionals at this year’s majors – a result of her ANWA victory – that she has started to see bunkers in a different light. “The pros,” she said, “are always trying to take them out of play, and it makes sense."
Again, as a member of the England Golf programme, she has been making good use of their sports’ psychologist facility. Performance director Nigel Edwards asked for such an expert to come on board in 2012, the year he joined the organisation. The staff work in tandem with a company called Grey Matters, and the man who has been schooling Lottie for the past two years is one James Austin. Best of all, he has helped her to get over her mistakes rather faster than used to be the case. You still see her fretting over the odd shot, but today she straightens herself up and does a couple of breathing exercises.
“Her level of focus is insane,” marvelled Barham, her Farnham friend. “She’s got the best short game of anyone, and she deserves it. Before she went to Florida State, she would be out practising every day before she went to school, and she’d be back for more later. When she’s on the putting green, the members are spellbound as they watch her from the lounge window.”
A few years ago, when Barham was the junior members’ captain at the club and Woad his vice-captain, the two had matching 75s in the mixed Junior Club Championship, only for Woad to win on a countback: “It was hard for me but good for her!” he said jokingly.
Though she could obviously turn pro straightaway, Woad is sticking with her original plan of completing her sports management degree at Florida State while carrying on improving her golf both there and under the eye of coach Bones at home.
Which brings us to the point that she is not the only member of Farnham to have been a standout in a Curtis Cup context.
Back in 1952, Elizabeth Price bagged what was the crucial point at Muirfield in GB&I’s first victory since the biennial event’s inauguration in 1932. When she retired, Price started writing for The Daily Telegraph, though never did she come across a story as arresting as the one which attached to her singles against America’s Grace DeMoss.
Price was 1 up with five to play when she showed signs of cracking, driving into one bunker and knocking her second into another. The DeMoss drive, in contrast, had bisected the fairway, and it was as its owner stood to her second that one of England’s leading male amateurs advised everyone waiting around the green, “Only a socket can save us now.”
Barely were the words out of his mouth than DeMoss hit a shank which, according to the late Tom Scott of Golf Illustrated, “will for all time be immortal.” It whipped at right angles into the rough. Shot No. 3 barely moved at all; shot No. 4 was as dramatic a shank as its predecessor.
The crowd looked on in silent sympathy.
Two up instead of all square, Price finished the match at the 16th.
What with its heavy reliance on shanks, or sockets, this was no tale to tell before today. More to the point, you wonder how it affected the play of those who were there to witness that sorry scene.
E-MAIL LEWINE
Top: Lottie Woad "never makes excuses," according to Justin Rose.
OISIN KENIRY, R&A VIA GETTY IMAGES