Jenny Shin wins the ISPS Handa Women’s Scottish Open for her first LPGA victory since 2016.
courtesy ladies european tour
GAILES, SCOTLAND | Ten years after her first and only win on the LPGA Tour, 33-year-old Jenny Shin won last week’s ISPS Handa Women’s Scottish Open at Dundonald Links by two strokes from a sister Korean, A Lim Kim. Shin had led from start to finish, only on Saturday evening she left her fans feeling as nervous as she sounded herself.
In discussing the third-round 71 which followed her opening 66 and 67, she said, “There were times when I was looking down at the ball but I couldn’t see it. I was getting ahead of myself. There was too much thinking going on, so it’s really chaotic in there [my head] and I don’t know how to explain it.”
If you look up overthinking, one of the main recommendations seems to be that you should find a distraction when, surely, an extra distraction was the last thing Shin needed. However, the good news was that she slept well on Saturday night when she doubted if she could sleep at all, and was feeling pretty good about her chances after Sunday’s first five holes left her with an eight-shot lead.
Horror of horrors, she then made three bogeys in a row as Thailand’s Pajaree Anannarukarn and Kim gave chase.
That nasty little interval over, the tide turned at the ninth where she chipped from the dip to the left of the green to 7 feet and holed for her par. “After that, I told myself, ‘I can still play, I can still putt.’”
Now, there was a spring in her stride and in everyone else’s – and that’s how things continued. After an outward 39, she started for home with two birdies in the next three holes, and her two bogeys at the 16th and 18th were not of any consequence. Her score was a 75 and her overall tally was 9-under-par 279.
“I feel I have earned this …. This time, I felt in control, I knew what I was doing.”
Jenny Shin
She was sprayed with a mix of water and champagne by her Korean friends and such was the icy chill in the wind that her teeth began to chatter.
In 2006, at age 13, Shin was the youngest ever to win the U.S. Girls’ Junior championship, while her first LPGA victory came at the LPGA’s 2016 Volunteers of America Texas Shootout.
To her, this victory at Dundonald was 100 percent better. “I feel I have earned this, whereas where I was in my life personally when I won in ’16, I didn’t really want to play golf. I was having a very difficult time being on tour and the win came out of nowhere, I came from behind to win and I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I was just playing golf. This time, I felt in control, I knew what I was doing.”
As for those crazy nerves of the third day, it seemed that they could have disappeared for life.
Kim, the runner-up, closed with a 68, while Anannarukarn (74) finished third, four strokes back.
American Lauren Coughlin, who won the Women’s Scottish Open two years ago, finished in a share of fifth place with Japan’s Miyu Yamashita, who won last year’s AIG Women’s Open at Royal Porthcawl. Coughlin was far from displeased with herself. “I was just trying to hit as many fairways as I could and the same with the greens. And if I missed them, I was trying to miss them in the right spots.
“Every now and then I felt I had a pretty good feel for the wind and how everything was going.” Namely, with the Solheim Cup coming up. “The Solheim is always my No. 1 goal, so [it’s] nice to have some good form going into it.”
At Royal Porthcawl a year ago, Yamashita never smiled until she holed the putt she needed to win. And that was the point at which the photographers got the pictures they had been seeking all week.
Yesterday, she explained why she is now smiling rather more. “I’m nowhere near as nervous as I was then,” she said with a chuckle.
To be honest, the rest of us never knew that she had felt nervous in the first place. The Japanese press corps who had come over to Wales in the hope that she would win had explained that Japanese golfers were not expected to laugh and smile as Hinako Shibuno had done while winning the 2019 AIG Women’s Open at Woburn. A pity, because everyone had enjoyed her cheerful mode of play.
When it came to hitting her second to the home green at Woburn, Shibuno had called to her caddie and said, “What if I shank it?”
Mercifully, that didn’t happen.
Lewine Mair
