Welcome to the inaugural issue of Australian Golf Digest Women.
To say I’m honoured to be the guest editor of this landmark edition is an understatement. But I’ll let you in on a little secret – before accepting the kind offer, I had one important question for the AGD team: “This won’t prevent women golfers from featuring in Australian Golf Digest moving forward, will it?”
My fear was this could just be a tokenistic ploy to direct women’s golf coverage away from the original masthead, which I’ve grown up reading and, yes, featured in on the odd occasion over the years! Such concerns were immediately put to rest when I was informed Australian Golf Digest Women was inspired by feedback from key industry representatives and the rapid rise in popularity women’s golf is currently enjoying in Australia. And long may it continue!
“Australian Golf Digest Women isn’t a new home for Australia’s best coverage of women’s golf,” says Australian Golf Digest editor-in-chief Brad Clifton. “It’s an additional platform to celebrate everything that is great about women’s golf in this country and, hopefully, a tool that inspires more conversation, empowerment and positive change for the industry.”
I’m in!
As my good friend and Women’s Professional Golf Association chief executive officer Karen Lunn writes from page 14, the landscape of women’s golf in Australia is undergoing an empowering transformation. Golf Australia’s 2021-2022 Participation Report revealed that more than 2.7 million Australians play golf. Encouragingly, Golf Australia’s Get into Golf program for adults grew by 65 percent with a huge 84 percent jump in female participation, making women’s golf one of the fastest growing segments in Australian sport.
Last year alone, 3,216 girls took part in My Golf Girls, a huge 183 percent increase in participation numbers year on year. And, of the 1.2 million off-course golfers across the country, 516,000 are women. Talk about momentum!
The shift in Australia to women’s sport has been really inspiring, but I feel like golf needed to play catch up a little bit… ride on the coattails of some of the other sports that have done so well providing opportunities for their women and putting them on bigger platforms.
We all suffered through COVID but one of the bright spots for golf, being an outdoor pursuit that naturally lends itself to social distancing, was that it benefitted from the pandemic. Its popularity has boomed and, as a sport, we really need to take advantage of that.
I think it’s great that young girls – and young boys – of today have female role models. Girls especially need female role models. I never really had any besides the female Olympians. They were really the only female role models that ever made it on TV in Australia when I was growing up. Soon, it won’t be young men saying, “I don’t want to watch women’s sport.” They’ll just grow up with it and it’ll just be “sport”. How all that translates in golf will be fascinating to watch, too. I think back to when I was a little girl playing golf with the boys on a Friday afternoon. We’d all pick who we were playing the final round of the Masters. I was always Seve Ballesteros or Greg Norman. I was never a female golfer. I was always a guy. Today, kids all want to be Minjee Lee or Hannah Green. It’s pretty cool.
But there’s still work to be done. The golf industry is only just beginning to realise that it’s missed out on an entire demographic for generations, that there was so much growth that could have come with investing time in getting young girls and women into golf a lot earlier. They’re coming to terms with how much healthier their golf club would be today had they acted on all this decades ago.
Someone asked me the other day what my ultimate club membership would look like. It would be a great 18-hole facility that includes a great practice facility – a good driving range with high-quality golf balls – which doesn’t happen much in Australia. It would also need a good short-game area and maybe a little par-3 course. Then as far as the membership goes, I want to be surrounded by vibrant, young members. When I say “young” and “vibrant”, I’m not excluding older people. There are a lot of young, vibrant 80-year-olds. I want a club that is open to mixed competitions all the time. There’s no “men’s day”. There’s no “women’s day”. There are just mixed competitions all the time. I want to be part of a very social and engaging club that welcomes all types of membership and has a variety of different membership offerings, including family memberships.
All this membership talk probably gives you the impression that I’m officially retired from the tour. I’d be lying if I said I don’t have an itch that occasionally needs scratching. There’s always this time away from the game where you’re like, I really want to go back and do that. Then you start practising again and realise the practising part is why you don’t do it as much because it’s just such a grind. But then being inside the ropes just feels like coming home. You haven’t done it for a while but the whole routine just comes flooding back.
So, here’s another little secret I’m going to leave you with: I think I’d like to play a British Open one more time. It’s on my radar. I’m still young enough and still feel like certain events I can be somewhat competitive in, I guess. I don’t feel like I’m playing enough to get ‘up’ in all the majors. But I feel like I can play a British Open course or links course and be competitive. Some of these other courses, like Baltusrol and the lengths that they’re playing today, I’m just not playing enough now to be sharp enough. I don’t know what the point would be to go out there and honestly celebrate if I made the cut. I’ve never played golf for that.
So, I guess the next few years will be interesting. I love playing in Australia, so I’ll definitely play a handful of times a year, but nothing more than that. I think COVID was really good for me because it made me realise that it was OK if I didn’t play golf. Prior to that, I was playing a reduced schedule and I don’t think I knew what life would be like if it wasn’t for competitive golf. COVID showed me that it’s OK and I’ll be just fine.
Besides, it’s allowing me time to do more fun things like this! I hope you enjoy the read.
Getty images: david cannon
