Thibault enjoying Augusta moment
As an adolescent, neither the Masters Tournament nor Augusta National Golf Club were of particular interest to Rosemère, Que., native Brigitte Thibault.
Oh, she was aware of them. Her parents were passionate golfers so Thibault knew that the Masters was played every spring on a famous golf course where Tiger Woods had done astonishing things. As a driven high-performance athlete herself, she admired Woods’s dominating ways. She might check in on the proceedings if he was chasing down another major. Otherwise, the tournament wasn’t on her radar.
“Not at all. Like zero,” Thibault said recently from California, where she is a senior at California State University, Fresno, more commonly referred to as Fresno State.
Thibault grew up a competitive gymnast and cheerleader, representing Canada in the latter sport. She turned to golf in her mid-teens when injuries curtailed those more physical pursuits, and her athleticism and doggedness flattened the learning curve significantly.
She won the Quebec Junior Open and Monday qualified for the CP Women’s Open only a year after dedicating herself to the game. Her rapid rise earned her a golf scholarship to Fresno State and a spot on Golf Canada’s national team.
Then in 2019, having ascended to top spot among Canadian women on the World Amateur Golf Rankings, Thibault was invited to play in the Augusta National Women’s Amateur, a new tournament created by a historically exclusive club that
has become more progressive in recent years. It was somewhat ironic for a girl who’d never given the Masters and Augusta more than a passing glance.
“It was kind of mind-blowing because I feel like it was never a dream because it wasn’t possible before, to have women there, so I guess my mind didn’t even wander there,” Thibault explained.
The 22-year-old has wandered to Augusta again. She’s in the Augusta Women’s Amateur field this week for a second straight time — the 2020 event was cancelled due to COVID-19 — and in her words she’s a completely different person than she was in 2019.
The transformation started after that tournament, where Thibault missed the 36-hole cut and the opportunity to play Augusta National competitively. The first two rounds of the three-day event are held at nearby Champions Retreat Golf Club, with the low 30 players advancing to the final round at Augusta.
All invitees, however, are permitted a practice round on the famed layout, so Thibault tackled Golden Bell (No. 12)
and Azalea (No. 13) and all the other holes with which golf fans are so familiar. She described the day as surprisingly peaceful. Minus the patrons and Sunday roars, Augusta is about as serene a golf course as you’ll find.
“I almost felt like I was meditating for like five hours,” she laughed.
The mind is what she and Tristan Mullally, head coach of the women’s national team, tackled first. Talented but raw, Thibault’s on-course strategy, or lack thereof, held her back. She said it is comical to look at the yardage book she used during 2019 compared to what she employs now. It may as well have been empty back then given its simplicity. Now she enters events with a real plan of attack and a mindset that focuses on process rather than results. She plays aggressively to her targets, and if she misses a shot, well, that’s golf, not a catastrophe.
“Attaching a good decision to a bad shot is way less painful to deal with than managing a bad shot with a bad decision,” Thibault said.
A week after appearing at Augusta in 2019, Thibault won the Mountain West Conference Championship individual title. That was followed by an Ontario Amateur crown. Last year she won the 120-year-old Western Amateur in July and the Dixie Amateur in December. And in February, she won the Rebel Beach Invitational in Las Vegas. Along with the victories came a real sense of self-worth, she said, and a true realization of her love of golf. Travelling alone from tournament to tournament during a pandemic helped provide that perspective.
“She’s turned into a bit of an assassin,” said Mullally, noting Thibaut’s physical fine-tuning started with putting and short game and later posture and swing positions.
“I look at the goals she came into the program with early doors and how far she was away from them, and now I look at how close she is to them. Brigitte is a force. She’s someone who is going to make it on the LPGA. She’s someone who is going to learn her craft and do her things and get some wins, I honestly think that.”
Thibault will turn professional eventually. She’s signed up for a fifth year at Fresno State but will play the LPGA Tour’s qualifying school in the fall. For this week she’s determined to relish the moment more than she did in 2019. To not get caught up in the hype of Augusta. To be more present. To stop and smell the flowers, if you will. Of course, given the “assassin” she’s become, she’s not there to go through the motions either.
“If the cards turn out right for me this week then great, I’m obviously going to do my best, I’m obviously going there to maybe get a win, so I’ll see how my cards turn,” she said.