Suzann Pettersen has announced her decision to create a talent management group. It goes under the name of VOXA, which the late Bobby Jones would have recognised at once as a Latin derivative for the word “voice.” Just in case anyone wants to learn from that great master, he would study Latin and calculus on his way to a tournament by way of keeping his mind active.
Pettersen’s agency will be run in conjunction with 54 (formerly Performance54), the sports and entertainment agency closely aligned with the backers of LIV Golf.
At the time of writing, the larger-than-life Norwegian had recruited five players for her group: European Solheim Cup star Carlota Ciganda (Spain), 2023 KPMG Women’s PGA Championship winner Ruoning Yin (China), three-time LPGA winner Gaby Lopez (Mexico), Ladies European Tour winner Shannon Tan (Singapore), and Ashley Lau (Malaysia), who won her first professional title in Australia last year.
Pettersen can be charming and she can be intimidating. In which connection, it comes as no surprise to hear she thinks she might have the edge over others in the management field. Even now, she suspects she has “gotten into some agents’ heads,” as she told one interviewer.
“Throughout my career, I’ve always asked myself how I could make an even bigger impact.”
Suzann Pettersen
Her stated aim is to bring on her quintet as a team and improve their profiles along the way. “Throughout my career,” she explained, “I’ve always asked myself how I could make an even bigger impact. Competing at the highest level takes not just talent but the right support network.”
Interesting stuff to which one obvious answer is that she could not have made a bigger impact than she already has.
In the 2015 Solheim Cup at Golf Club St Leon-Rot in Germany, it was for all the wrong reasons.
America’s Alison Lee had been picking up her “gimme” putts in the Saturday afternoon four-balls when neither Pettersen nor the then very junior Charley Hull had given permission. When Lee made the same mistake again at the 17th, Pettersen claimed the hole. She and Hull went one ahead and made it two at the 18th.
Far from celebrating that victory, the rest of the Europeans were so embarrassed that they did not have the heart for the singles. From being four points clear going into that last series, they ended up losing, 14½-13½.
However, by the time it came to the 2019 Solheim Cup at Gleneagles in Scotland, Pettersen had put things to rights. Firstly via an apology and, secondly, by holing the 7-footer on the home green which would regain the cup for Europe.
That gutsy and glorious putt turned the two-time major winner into an overnight hero who would go on to become the Solheim Cup captain in ’23 and ’24.
Jamie Spence, the former DP World Tour player and current TV pundit who interviewed her on the 18th green that day at Gleneagles, liked the sound of what she has in mind. “I’d certainly listen to what she has to say,” he said. “She might not be for everyone, but she’s a great competitor with a matching mindset.”
Yet as everyone knows, it is not necessarily the players who get the most points for themselves and their teams who make for the best leaders of men or women. The effect they have on their charges matters as much as anything else.
Pettersen thought the atmosphere she had created during her captaincy years had been great, others not so much.
Last year at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, Virginia, Ireland’s Leona Maguire, for one, was soon admitting she was not happy at the way she had been left out of the Saturday foursomes and four-balls without being told why.
Ask any past Solheim Cup captain and she will tell you that imparting bad news to a player is never the easiest thing to do. Yet it has to be done.
Beth Allen, the first American to win the LET Order of Merit (2016), learned a lot about leadership when, after being included in Juli Inkster's list of “possibles” for the American Solheim Cup side of ’17, she departed the tournament scene in favour of coaching. (She nowadays heads the Urban Knights women’s golf programme at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.)
“In 20 years of competitive golf, I never switched off. ”
“I’ve learned so much about myself along the way,” said Allen. “In becoming a college coach, it took a lot for me to learn what it was to genuinely help others; you have to be able to communicate with them, and not everyone is given that gift.
“It’s a wait-and-see situation with Suzann. She can be like other great champions in coming across as a bit intimidating. But for all I know, she may turn out to be the best person in the world to head a talent management group, though I wish she had chosen to go with a European company rather than one mixed up with all the LIV hassle of the moment.”
That motherhood could have contributed to a degree of mellowing on Pettersen’s part is something which she would explain in an interview of not so long ago. She was not about to claim it had made her a different person but how it had given her a bit of space in which to look at herself from the outside.
“In 20 years of competitive golf,” she said, “I never switched off. Yes, I had injury problems but, when you’re injured, your golfing brain keeps grinding.” She added it was only when she had Herman, the first of her two children, that she was able to “step out of the bubble I’d been in and was almost able to laugh at my old intense self.”
In terms of how she is going to contribute to giving her players a better profile, she maybe needs to work on a better profile for herself.
That she has a winning stare to match her smile is something which the odd journalist knows only too well.
Back in ’15, when the various writers working at the Evian Championship were wary of asking Pettersen a few follow-on questions from that year’s Solheim Cup drama, an old-school journalist, one who had worked in war zones, offered to lend a helping hand.
Though this most obliging of fellows was kitted out with all the right questions, it took but a single glare from Pettersen to leave him stuttering to the point where he could not deliver them.
E-MAIL LEWINE
Top: Suzann Pettersen brought her intense personality as a player to her role as captain of the European Solheim Cup team in 2023-2024.
David Cannon, Getty Images