ST. ANDREWS, SCOTLAND | Stacy Lewis’ first observation on the eve of this week’s AIG Women’s Open at St. Andrews concerned the color of the links. Back in 2013, when she won the championship, the grass was brown and dry. Now, it is soft and green, which is what the R&A wanted when the forecast was so fearsome an affair as to put one in mind of the European Tour’s 1973 John Player Classic at Turnberry.
That was the week when the then golf correspondent at The Scotsman adjusted a line from that old seafarer’s hymn to suggest that locals had gathered in the church to pray “for those in peril on the tee.”
The other thing to have changed since 2013 is Lewis herself. Breaking into the most cheerful of smiles, this winner of 13 LPGA titles conceded to being “a much more balanced person than I used to be. I made a lot of sacrifices to be the world No. 1, and I’m glad I did what I did. But the trouble back then was that everything revolved around me and my golf.”
At 39, Lewis finds that everything revolves around her 5-year-old daughter, Chesnee. “She’s my priority. Having a child and playing competitive golf at the same time was tough at the start, especially in weeks when my parents weren’t around to help. The worst days were the ones when she would wake up at 6 in the morning and I wasn’t off the tee until 1 o’clock.
“Of course, it was tiring, but it gets easier, and I’m certainly not about to say that you can’t win when you’re a mom. It’s 100 percent possible. I know because I did it myself in 2020 at the Scottish Open at the Renaissance.”
In her press conference, Lewis picked out Scotland’s Catriona Matthew, who will turn 55 on Sunday and is a member of Lewis’ group for the first two rounds this week, as the player who had done most to inspire her when it came to blending motherhood with golf. Not only had Matthew, who is playing in her 30th and last Women’s Open, teed up in the 2009 championship at Royal Lytham and St. Annes 11 weeks after giving birth to Sophie, the younger of her two daughters, but she had made off with the trophy.
“How Catriona did that, I’ll never know,” Lewis said. “I couldn’t even swing a club 11 weeks after Chesnee was born.
Matthew, who had her husband, Graeme, on the bag then and now, has poignant memories from that week of weeks. She, like Lewis, had been able to draw on parents for help. They did all the night feeds until it came to the small hours — 3 a.m. — of Monday morning. That was when mother and daughter sat at the table with the trophy and enjoyed a cup of tea apiece as Catriona fed Katie.
The sun was beginning to wink through the clouds above the Old Course on Thursday morning, but if there were any delays, Lewis and Matthew were never going to be short of things to talk about. Motherhood and the proliferating number of golfers who have followed in their footsteps over the last few years — Jessica Korda, Inbee Park, Hee Young Park, Sophia Popov and Mel Reid, to name just a few — could have been one topic of conversation; captaincy, another.
Matthew, who captained the winning European Solheim Cup sides of 2019 and 2021, is taking on a similar role as her task in the amateur game as captain of Great Britain and Ireland’s team in next week’s Curtis Cup match against the U.S. at Sunningdale in England.
The women’s amateur game, similar to that in the LPGA and LET, has undergone some dramatic changes in recent years. Matthew acknowledged that some of today’s amateurs are as professional as the professionals. They, too, have their own teams, with coaches, psychologists, dieticians, et al., lending advice.
Is it all getting just too serious, what with the girls sometimes having the look of youngsters sitting for exams rather than playing the game for fun?
Matthew can see a potential problem. “What they all need to do is find the right balance,” she said. “All the better ones are aiming at playing as professionals nowadays, but they need to work out if that’s what they really want to do.”
To her bemused embarrassment, Matthew’s girls, both still at school, are not much interested in playing golf themselves, and that though they have always had the children’s course at North Berwick on their doorstep.
The microphone handed across, she asked, “Can we have a swimming pool if you win?”
Chesnee, on the other hand, is mad keen already. She practices alongside her mother on a daily basis and nominates her driver as her favorite club. The girl and her father, Gerrod Chadwell, the head women’s coach at Texas A&M University, attended Lewis’ press conference on the eve of the championship and, toward the end, the child was persuaded to do as the media in asking her mother a question. The microphone handed across, she asked, “Can we have a swimming pool if you win?”
Lewis, who was hardly thinking that winning was on the cards at a time when she is preparing to captain the Americans in next month’s Solheim Cup, felt it safe to answer in the affirmative.
However, it’s just possible that Chesnee may not need her mother to buy that pool. Judging by how the women’s prize money has tripled – to $9.5 million this year – since the R&A began its partnership with American International Group, an American multinational finance and insurance corporation, in 2019, she may well be able to afford one for herself before too long.