Waiting

Looking back is rarely helpful in professional sport. Whether it’s to reminisce or to learn or to wallow, it probably means there’s some level of dissatisfaction or mistrust in your current situation. Sure you can take notes about what you’re doing and feeling, and the effects of those, but it would take a level of meticulousness probably only found on the uppermost 0.5% of the autism scale to be of tangible benefit in this sport. Because for every swing feel that connects and every practice drill that influences, there are innumerable thoughts and feelings so fleeting during tournament golf that trying to fit them to a current or future version of you would be like trying to catch smoke.
(The fact some friends and I recently googled “quick autism test” while at a tournament possibly says more about the trappings of the sport of golf than our actual personalities, but that’s for another time).

Whether I should be looking back or not, I still open the Timehop app most days. Which is how I know that a year ago I was driving round a waterlogged course in Australia for a solo practice round; the same course I’d won at two years prior, about as far removed from a winning mindset as it’s possible to be. I spent the entirety of that Wednesday agonising about whether to pull the trigger on withdrawing from the tournament, because I was so far down my personal black hole of despair that I couldn’t fathom a scenario in which I would feel anything other than worse about myself after playing. But I also couldn’t quite shake the ingrained belief of most professional sportspeople that not going out to play; not showing up, would be akin to giving up: and that’s not what professional sportspeople do. But sometimes you do have to let go of the rope you’re clinging to to understand that there’s an anchor attached to it. I shot a traumatising, disorientating round of 80, drove back to my airbnb, changed my car hire and flight home, and only found out they’d had to shorten the tournament to one round as I arrived at the airport 300 miles away.

I wouldn’t wish those feelings on anyone, yet I sat in the locker room at various intervals yesterday wondering – trying not to wish – if anyone had any reasons for withdrawing and consequently bumping me into the field from my isolating first reserve spot.

This has simultaneously been one of the weirdest and emptiest weeks of my career. It went from an extremely chaotic 48 hours of trying to decide whether to travel to South Africa and all the logistics that went along with that – how late should I leave booking my flight? If I wait till Tuesday the return flight gets ridiculously expensive… can I get in the Monday qualifier for the following week? If I can get in that can I get a flight home from Cape Town instead of Johannesburg? Should I book that for after the qualifier or after the tournament? How does that affect what flight out I book? Can I get in the official hotel? And on and on and on… from that chaos to the emptiness of warming up for a round you’re not going to play alongside 66 people, and then another 66 people a few hours later, who are.

But I never really expected to be in South Africa for these two weeks at all. That determination had already been made by how I played last year, and the order in which I shot my scores at Q School. When the margins can really be that fine it makes you appreciate that analysis and contemplation is often meaningless – what matters is the bigger picture and what that looks like for you. As I was going round in circles with a Virgin Atlantic representative about the £280 flight cancellation fee that they don’t actually charge, I struggled to shake the weight of emptiness tugging at me. But I eventually realised that there are some patterns my brain continues to make, and sitting helpless in a hotel room while a tournament is going on and no longer being part of it was a familiar one.

But that pattern was last year. I’ve done an immense amount of work to change the things that brought about those feelings last year; the things that led me to feel like every time I stepped foot on the golf course things were going to happen to undermine and contradict every belief I’ve built about myself and my ability to play this sport over the last ten years. I also have to do work to not look back to the player I was ten years ago when I was winning college golf tournaments, or six years ago when I sort of but not really got close to Solheim consideration, or three years ago when I was a breath away from winning three times in one season.

Timehop told me that six years ago this week I was busy trying to articulate what it meant to have women’s golf put on a pedestal with the the first major mixed professional golf tournament, and the first edition of the ANWA, and the first women’s major of the year. I was also busy shooting back to back 65s and ultimately coming second in the Jordan Mixed Open. That will always be the most bittersweet week of my life. But does it do anything to my future to look back at it in too much detail? I’m not the same person, or player, as I was then. I’m also not the same person or player as I was this time last year.

Maybe looking back can give you some insight sometimes. But not being the same doesn’t mean you can’t be better. Here’s to that… and to next week.