MAUREEN MADILL COLUMN: OPEN GLORY AWAITS AT RIVIERA
Maja Stark with the Women’s World invitational trophy. The Swede is the defending champion at this week’s US Women’s Open (Photo: Tristan Jones/ LET)
GUEST COLUMN: BY MAUREEN MADILL
Sweden’s Maja Stark is the defending champion at this week’s US Women’s Open which is being played at Riviera Country Club, nestled in the swanky district of Pacific Palisades, around half an hour from the centre of Los Angeles.
The feisty Solheim Cup player has had a quiet enough year since her big breakthrough in Wisconsin last year but she’s certainly not out of place on the short but high quality list of Swedes to have lifted this major. The trailblazer was Lotta Neumann who won wire to wire in 1988 at Baltimore Country Club, one of the first 100 courses to be established in America. It was Lotta’s maiden victory on the LPGA and when she hoisted the trophy aloft she made history by becoming the first Swede, male or female, to win a major title.
It’s easy to consign a career and a life to statistics and Lotta’s 27 worldwide victories and six Solheim Cup appearances as a player roll off the tongue easily enough. However, add to that her achievement of being the first European Solheim Cup captain to win a contest on American soil, which she did in 2013 at Colorado Golf Club just outside Denver, and you can see the widespread influence she has had on the game.
In the 1980s and 1990s the powerhouse that was Swedish golf was just gaining momentum and quality players rolled off the yellow and blue production line with tremendous regularity. It was from this hotbed of potential that arguably the greatest Swedish talent of all was honed and burnished. A young, shy Annika Sorenstam turned professional in 1992 and recorded her first professional win in December 1994 in Australia, at Royal Adelaide.
It was in June of the following year, however, that she really lit the blue touchpaper, winning her first LPGA event and her first major, the US Women’s Open, at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. That year she won the moneylists on both sides of the Atlantic and the professional career of one of the best women ever to play the game was launched. She forged a successful defence of her US Open title the following year at Pine Needles in Southern Pines, North Carolina and completed the hattrick eleven years later in 2006 at Newport Country Club, Rhode Island. Three US Open wins leave her trailing only two players in the history of the women’s game, Americans Betsy Rawls and the incomparable Mickey Wright, a fellow career grand slam winner, both of whom won four of their national titles.
By the time the Swede was finished playing she was globally known by the single moniker, “Annika.”
This championship, first played in 1946, is being played for the 81st time this week and Sweden’s three players with their five wins place their country third in the league table of titles won by nationality. Top of the list, unsurprisingly, are the Americans with 53 wins spread between 34 homegrown winners but it is the South Koreans who are leading the modern-day charge with ten of their elite players scooping eleven titles, all since 1998.
Kudos to England who are in fifth place with those memorable victories of Laura Davies in 1987 and her colleague, Alison Nicholas, a decade later, in 1997. Laura triumphed at Plainfield Country Club in New Jersey in an 18 hole play-off against two-time champ JoAnne Carner, known to all and sundry as Big Momma, and Japanese superstar Ayako Okamoto.
SWEDISH LEGEND
Maureen with Lotta Neumann at the 2019 Solheim Cup. Ten years previously we were both members of captain Alison Nicholas’ backroom team at Rich Harvest Farms in Illinois.
A swashbuckling, effervescent career followed for the hugely talented and exciting Davies and galleries followed Laura wherever she went. Her competitive playing days are behind her but she’s an invaluable member of the Sky Sports commentary team providing unique insights on the game. To this day, if you mention “Laura” everyone knows instantly to whom you refer while some close pals call her “Damo”, an affectionate reference to her title of Dame of the British Empire.
The week after her US victory I remember Laura returning triumphantly, cradling the trophy, to St Mellion where we were playing the Women’s British Open. In a portent of things to come Ali won that particular week but our championship, alas, had not at that stage been accorded major status, so the diminutive Yorkshire woman had another decade to wait before grabbing that major championship.
The sister, Patricia, has always declared that the Nicholas triumph at Pumpkin Ridge, for her, surpassed any major victory by any European, man or woman. Alison found herself up against the darling of American golf, Nancy Lopez, who at 40 years of age had done everything in the game – everything that is, except win her own national title. She had been runner-up three times and was roared on by understandably partisan galleries. That week in 1997 she became the first player in championship history to break 70 in all four rounds, but still it wasn’t enough. Alison tapped in from a foot on the final green to record an epic one-stroke victory.
France is the only other European country to record a win in this venerable championship thanks to the incomparable Catherine Lacoste who won in 1967 in Hot Springs, Virginia. She remains the only amateur winner of the championship.
So, at the moment, it’s nul points for Scotland, Ireland and Wales at the US Women’s Open and, unfortunately, there’s not any great reason to think that’ll change this week. There’s many a savvy fan, however, keeping an eye on Englishwoman Lottie Woad, who is building a strong major resumé in her, as yet, brief professional career. Her last three major appearances read 8th, 3rd and 7th proving what her amateur career suggested – that she has the game for the biggest stage of all.
It will be intriguing to watch who can add their name to this illustrious roll of honour and to watch their careers unfold. Can the defending champ Maja Stark emulate Annika by winning in consecutive years? Can she, indeed, chart a career that merits her being universally known by her first name alone – like Annika and Laura?
As a footnote, last week I received a message from my painter, out of the blue, which, without preamble, read: “In an Irish pub in Lower Bridge Street, Chester. Photo on wall. Apparently Laura has been in twice.”
To my knowledge my painter isn’t a golfer but I knew instantly who was in that picture. I got him to send it through to me.
Yep, there she was – the 1987 US Women’s Open Champion.
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