Kiddie shack tricky for moms
Pregnant Piller outlier after finale where teens outnumbered mothers
NAPLES, FLA.— The 9-year-old girl waited expectantly for Gerina Piller to emerge from the scoring area after her second round at the LPGA’s Tour Championship last Friday.
The young fan, Gianna Clemente, has replayed dozens of times the recording of Piller’s eight-foot putt that clinched the United States’ victory at the 2015 Solheim Cup.
Although Piller’s 3-over 75 at the Tour Championship at Tiburon Golf Club featured no such highlights, she smiled when she saw Clemente, who wore a sponsor’s visor that was identical to hers. Piller posed for a photograph and conversed briefly with Clemente, who then pirouetted away in pleasure.
With little fanfare, Piller walked away from golf after the tournament. The LPGA will open the 2018 season in late January without Piller, who is pregnant with her first child. She said the Tour Championship would be her last event for the foreseeable future.
If she makes any tournament appearances between now and her due date next spring, it will be at a men’s event to cheer for her husband, Martin, who plays on the PGA Tour.
Piller had no timetable for her return but said she was not done with competitive golf.
“I’m not just giving everything up,” she said.
At 32, Piller is an outlier in the LPGA. In under-30 representation, the tour’s tee titans could give Silicon Valley’s under-30 tech titans a supremely competitive match. The 74 players who advanced to the seasonending event here averaged 27.3 years and included more teenagers (three) than mothers (two).
Unlike Piller, who competed in several sports when she was young and did not take up golf until she was 15, the young girls she is inspiring are training like pros from an early age. They are embodied by Clemente, who started playing when she was 2, was winning tournaments at 7 and completed a three-hour range session in the morning before spending the afternoon watching her idols play.
The winner of the Tour Championship, Ariya Jutanugarn, is 21. With a birdie-birdie finish on Sunday, she defeated Jessica Korda, 24, and Lexi Thompson, 22, who won the seasonlong Race to the CME Globe and its $1-million (U.S.) bonus.
Sunday’s finale marked the conclusion of one of the most rousing LPGA seasons, one that crowned 22 different winners, produced 12 players with a sub-70 season-long scoring average and gave rise to 17 players who earned at least $1 million in prize money. Of those 17, nine were 24 or younger.
Twenty-five years ago, the LPGA was in the vanguard of working mothers in sports, offering daycare for players at its domestic tournaments beginning in1993. But a funny thing happened on the way to making the tour child-friendly: Young- sters took over the sport.
Lydia Ko earned the first of her 14 LPGA titles at age 15. Thompson broke into the winner’s circle at 16. Morgan Pressel became a major champion at 18. In 1997, the year Ko was born, tour winners averaged 31.4 years. This year, it was 26.9.
“That shows the evolution of the game and the tour,” said Karine Icher of France, who is 38 and one of the mothers in the field. Her daughter, Lola, was born in 2011.
In 2003, when Icher joined the tour, “There was probably 15 kids,” in the daycare, she said. “When Lola was born, there was probably six, seven. And now there are mainly only two.”
She added: “The daycare is open to kids but also now to brothers and sisters. There’s a brother of a player who comes who is 8-years-old. There’s going to be more brothers and sisters than kids.”
Icher credited her longevity to the fact that her husband is her caddy. Making her career a family affair has made her career possible, she said.
“The girls out here now, when they have a child, they just quit and stay home or some lose their card,” she said, referring to the players’ playing privileges. “It’s not easy to do both.”
In the past decade, golf lost Annika Sorenstam at 38 and Lorena Ochoa at 28 because neither wanted to juggle career and family. Martin Piller recognized that the decision to start a family would affect his wife’s golf career significantly and his not much.
“Certainly there’s no easy way to go about it,” he said from Sea Island, Ga., where he was competing in a PGA Tour event concurrent with the LPGA’s Tour Championship. “So it was pretty much her call whether she wanted to have a kid.”
When Piller started sharing the news of her pregnancy during a tournament last month in Malaysia, people in the close-knit LPGA community naturally wondered: Will she ultimately follow the example of Sorenstam and Ochoa and leave competition behind? Or would she carry on like Cristie Kerr, who has won multiple times since the birth of her son, Mason, in 2013?
“It’s a wild card to me how much she’s going to want to even return,” Golf Channel reporter Jerry Foltz said.
His colleague, Karen Stupples, juggled competitive golf and motherhood for a few years after her son, Logan, was born before retiring to the broadcasting booth. She noted that Kerr had won two majors and held the world No. 1 spot before becoming a mother.
The Tour Championship was Piller’s 160th start and she is still searching for her first victory.
“Cristie Kerr has great self-belief,” Stupples said. “I think Gerina doesn’t really have that belief in her own abilities.”
Could motherhood unleash Piller’s potential by loosening her grip on golf?
“It’ll give a different purpose to her, and I think she won’t really care if she wins or not,” Stupples said. “That may be the only reason for it to work.”
“The girls out here now, when they have a child, they just quit and stay home or some lose their card. It’s not easy to do both.”
KARINE ICHER
LPGA TOUR PLAYER