PROFILE | KARRIE WEBB
Karrie On
Winning At the age of 39, Karrie Webb, a seven-time major champion, is continuing to show she has what it takes to light up the LPGA Tour, writes Lewine Mair.
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here was every reason to interview Karrie Webb in the days leading up to the recent HSBC Women’s Champions, the event they call “Asia’s major”. At the age of 39, this winner of seven majors had arrived in Singapore having just captured her fifth Australian Open and what was her 40th LPGA title around the world. Though it is not unusual for a man to be performing at or near to his best at the age of 39, the same does not readily apply to the women. Where, for example, 21% of the men in the 36-40 age-group are among their top 100 players of the moment, the commensurate figure for the women is a miserly 7%. (For the women, the most productive golfing years are those between 20 and 25 when they have 57 top-100 representatives as against the men’s 16.) Most of the women of Webb’s age will tell
you that they have had enough of the travelling lifestyle or, more likely, that they are struggling to hang on to their tour cards. Webb, at the time of the interview, could think only of positives. Her short game had continued to improve and become like an old friend, one on which she could almost always rely to dig her out of a hole. That, in turn, had boosted her confidence. She had won three times in 2013 and, when it came to her Australian triumph at the start of this year, she had signed off in style, unfurling a rush of birdies to overtake the up-and-coming Chella Choi. “The way I played in the Australian Open,” she volunteered, “added up to some of the best mental work I’ve ever done on a golf course. It’s hard to put into words, but when I’m like that there’s a quiet calm about everything that I do. I make decisions calmly and I back myself to pull off shots without trying too hard over them.” As for her enthusiasm, she said that it was very
After a lull in form Webb has been sensational over the past two years 60
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Webb admitted that there had been days when she had thought to herself, “That’s it, I’ve had enough” but added in a hurry that she had never really meant it: “The day I say it – and mean it – will be the day I stop.”
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A walk on the wild side as Webb fell out of the reckoning in Singapore (above); hoisting the Australian Women’s Open trophy for yet another time at the beginning of the year 62
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definitely intact. A lot of it, she thought, had to do with the way her game had been relatively consistent over the years and she had not been worn to the proverbial frazzle by too many highs and lows. She did not mention anyone by name, but Taiwan’s Yani Tseng would have to be a case in point. There was a time, in 2011, when Tseng seemed to be winning every other week, while there were three follow-on wins in early 2012. Then, though, the winning stopped and the player has since been tortured by a litany of questions she cannot answer as to what went wrong. Webb admitted that there had been days when she had thought to herself, “That’s it, I’ve had enough” but added in a hurry that she had never really meant it: “The day I say it – and mean it – will be the day I stop.” When the final round of the 2014 HSBC Women’s Champions came along, you had to think that this was that day. It was one which came from nowhere. She
had led at the end of each of her first three rounds, with her game serving as a glorious illustration of the various points she had made earlier in the week. Her short game was meeting with rapturous applause, while the rest of her play was even better than she had indicated. Indeed, one booming drive followed another as she plotted her way round the Sentosa course with a composure which in itself served to keep her rivals in their place. Going into the final day, she had a one-shot lead over the enduring Angela Stanford and was three clear of Azahara Munoz and Teresa Lu, with Paula Creamer one shot further back. If there is one hole among the 18 where most would anticipate a hitch, it would have to be the 13th and, sure enough, this 404-yard par-4 turned out to be the start of Webb’s undoing. Though she caught the left side of the elusive green – it is tucked between the harbour and dense trees – with two impeccable blows, the cheers which greeted her long putt across that slippery putting surface were soon giving way to a sharp intake of breath. The three-footer she had needed for the par missed with room to spare. It was when her drive at the 15th splashed into the lake that her start-of-the-week description of the 1996 Masters started ringing in this correspondent’s ears. HKGOLFER.COM
That six-footer to win the Ryder Cup “was such a fine line between being the hero and the biggest idiot,” he says.
She had recalled that fateful afternoon when Greg Norman went into the last round with a six-shot lead, only to have the collapse of his golfing lifetime against Nick Faldo. At that moment when Norman reached the turn with what was still a two-shot lead, Webb had planted her fold-up seat in a position beside the 18th green where she would be well placed to see her compatriot winning his first Masters. She stayed put until the moment word came that Norman, then two behind with three to play, had hit into the water at the 16th. At that, she packed up her chair and departed the club at a rate of knots. From that day to this, she and Norman had never discussed what happened. It was all too painful. Webb’s breakdown was happening in front of a crowd of 14,000 rather than 40,000 but the feelings it invoked were not so very different. After she had dropped a shot at the 15th, the final straw came at the par-5 18th. She was on the tee at 10-under while Paula Creamer and Spain’s Munoz were on that same figure but safely in the clubhouse. A winning Webb birdie would have left people making little more than a passing reference to the mishaps that had gone before. As it was, the portents were not good even before she launched into her tee-shot. She had had a warning for slow play at the 17th along HKGOLFER.COM
with a difference of opinion with her caddie as to whether she should go with her driver at the 18th or play safe with a 5-wood. She went against her better judgement in listening to her caddie and, to his horror even more obviously than hers, she landed in the fairway bunker. People wondered at her choice of club for the recovery and they were right to. Instead of soaring down the fairway, her ball cannoned into the lip on the bunker’s left-hand flank and stayed put in the sand. It led to a disaster of a six which would have been all the harder to bear in that the colourful duo of Creamer and Munoz were busy preparing for a return to the 18th tee for what was now a two-way play-off. Things would get worse for the stricken Webb. There was nowhere in the whole of Singapore where she could have escaped the razzmatazz of Creamer’s winning 75-footer at the second extra hole. The putt in question was a final thrust which, rather like the cartwheel the player turned over the legendary Swilcan Bridge at St Andrews in 2007, went viral. Sandwiched between Webb’s finish and Creamer’s, there had been an interview with the local media which could not have gone worse. Webb had been in no mood to smile sweetly as one member of the Fourth Estate wanted to know if the passage of time had made it more difficult to handle such high pressure situations. It was a bold question and the other writers were open-mouthed as they watched the impact it would have on its still-shaken recipient. To no one’s great surprise, Webb was in no mood to call on a string of old clichés about things not having gone her way. Instead, she let rip with a terse, “If you’re insinuating that this has anything to do with my age you can ... " It was hardly what anyone expected of this revered Hall of Famer but it was a moment which told more about Webb than anything that had gone before. You knew at once that this was not going to be the day when she would say, “That’s it, I’ve had enough!” and mean it. In what is nowadays an LPGA season of five majors, she was already steeling herself for the mother and father of replies. HK GOLFER・APR 2014
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