CROMVOIRT, NETHERLANDS | Anne Van Dam, the 30-year-old captain of Europe’s Junior Solheim Cup team and an assistant to Europe captain Anna Nordqvist in the follow-on Solheim Cup set to begin Friday, could not have painted a more alarming picture of the first tee at Bernardus Golf in the Netherlands, site of this year’s match against the United States.
“I think it’s the biggest first tee in history,” said Van Dam, whose charges fell to the Americans in the junior match on Tuesday. “There’s going to be 3,000 fans on it, which is obviously absolutely crazy.”
Van Dam – who hails from the host country, played in the Junior Solheim Cup in 2013 and competed in the senior edition in 2019 – went on to say, “The nerves you feel on a first tee are something I can’t even put into words. You don’t feel any part of your body, you just feel absolutely sick. It’s like you’re about to throw up.”
Her choice of words was not so very different from those of Luke Donald in his first Ryder Cup in 2004. Europe’s current Ryder Cup captain had felt “sick to my stomach” and further described the occasion as an “unmatched source of anxiety.”
Van Dam’s warning should at least have encouraged those 3,000 fans to stand well back. Meanwhile, for the good of those players who are feeling nauseous, she recommends a prompt switch of thoughts to the opening drive. “It’s got to be a good one because it’s a tricky, tricky first shot at Bernardus. You have to hit it straight because there’s heather on either side of the fairway. You go in that [stuff] and you can’t attack the green with your second.”
How that vision of the fans at Bernardus differs from what things were like for the first Solheim Cup at Lake Nona in 1990. Then, there were only a handful of spectators. Even so, Dame Laura Davies, a winner of four majors and nowadays a celebrated Sky Sports commentator, had first tee nerves to the point where she hit her opening drive in singles with a 5-iron. When that happened, Rosie Jones, her opponent, had the gall to ask, “Do you have a screw missing from your driver or something?” Davies responded with the words, “I don’t need a driver to beat you.” And she didn’t, beating Jones by 3 and 2, though the Americans won the overall match to the tune of 11½-4½.
While Davies, when armed with a driver, will often hit off the deck rather than a tee, it has nothing to do with nerves. It’s just how she hits the ball best. However, there are plenty of players who, in Solheim and Ryder Cup circumstances, are in so much of a hazy, crazy state that they struggle to put a tee in the ground.
“I’ve always said that if I’d had to put it on a tee in ’18, I don’t think I could have done it.” – Justin Thomas
Stewart Cink, on his 2002 Ryder Cup debut at The Belfry, surveyed the bedlam on the first tee and found himself in the throes of panic. Having decided that the opening drive in foursomes was not for him, he turned to his playing companion, Jim Furyk: “I need you to hit the first shot. I don’t know if I can do it.” Furyk obliged.
Justin Thomas, when he played in his first match in 2018 at Le Golf National, hit a 5-wood off the first tee: “I don’t use a tee peg when I do that. I just kind of put it on the deck and dig a little thing in the ground with my club and set the ball up on it,” he explained.
“I’ve always said that if I’d had to put it on a tee in ’18, I don’t think I could have done it.”
It was that same year that Tiger Woods acknowledged that he was on the verge of sickness. He tried to put it down to excitement, only then he hit on the idea that first-tee nerves were roughly the equivalent of the pressure that can knock you for six towards the end of the final round in a major. Hank Haney, when he was Tiger’s coach, said that the two of them would go to the practice range before a Ryder Cup and Tiger would hit one perfect shot after another. But when it came to teeing up for real, his shot wasn’t half so good.
Georgia Hall, who has participated in five Solheim Cups but was omitted from this year’s following the recent birth of her first child, said that playing in the “Celebration of Champions” match ahead of the 2022 Open at St Andrews with Woods and Rory McIlroy had stirred the nastiest nerves she had ever known.
So aware was she of R&A members peering through their bay window and spectators looking down from the mighty stands that she began to wonder if Tiger and Rory were just cardboard cutouts. “I had this urge to touch them to see if they were real,” she said.
The Independent reported in 2018 that coaches and sports psychologists working with both Ryder and Solheim cup competitors frequently reported seeing players’ hands visibly shaking as they attempted to tee up for a first time.
Before last year’s Ryder Cup, Luke Donald’s virtual-reality headset strategy went down well with McIlroy, who said that it was better to experience the sights, sounds and harsh insults beforehand. He even instructed the tech team to go “as close to the bone as you like” with the simulated abuse.
Close to the bone though they got, they weren’t the best match for the more raucous of the Americans at Bethpage Black.
Meanwhile, U.S. Solheim Cup captain Angela Stanford’s idea of what any poor soul might want to try at a time when he or she is on the brink of sickness is to stick with their usual procedure and swing really hard.
“Do that, and the chances are that you’re going to hit the ball,” she said.