Sharp takes her best shot at return
Without full LPGA Tour status, Hamiltonian not giving up just yet
By the time the LPGA Tour’s season has two tournaments in the books at month’s end, Alena Sharp will not have touched a golf club since Christmas.
Talk about a dry January.
The 40-year-old Hamilton native, who has made the arid air of Arizona her home since turning professional 20 years ago, has reached a crossroads in her career. After two years of many missed cuts and few good finishes, Sharp does not have full LPGA Tour status for the first time in a decade, and she can’t be certain of how many starts she’ll get this year on her number in the veteran’s category or through Monday qualifying.
But since failing to regain her card at LPGA Tour Q-Series in mid-December, and then stressing about the setback over the holidays, Sharp has wanted to think about anything other the sport she’s loved since she was a kid shagging her own golf balls on the range at Brantford Golf and Country Club.
“I can feel that my stress level is down. I’m not thinking about my putting every day like I was after Q-school through Christmas,” she said Sunday evening while sporting a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey to support the hometown team of her wife, Sarah. “It’s been nice to not do anything.”
The putter. Putting. Short putting. That’s been the booby-trap tripping up Sharp on occasion throughout her golfing odyssey. She has persevered in the past and even excelled on the greens, but the yips — an almost unspeakable word in golf — is an affliction that never fully vanishes, and some time in 2020 Sharp missed a couple of short putts and then a couple more and then it was a full-blown thing all over again.
In the past she’d overcome the yips both through dogged practice and repetition and with a quiet-eye technique whereby she was able to put her focus elsewhere — the yips being a mental, not a physical, ailment. This time, without the benefit of seeing her Vancouver-based coach, Brett Saunders, because of the pandemic, her stress skyrocketed, such that she eventually took a leave from the game, posting a heartfelt message on Instagram in August saying she felt “frustrated, angry and depressed.”
“It was a compounding of things that led to a lack of trust and a lack of confidence with my putting that started in 2020 and bled into 2021,” she revealed months later.
“The damage was done mentally and I just couldn’t get out of it. I worked with a psychiatrist, I talked to a therapist, I had a mental coach. Nobody can fix this but me … I practise and the practice is great but it’s a performance anxiety on the golf course.”
It’s especially maddening for Sharp because every other part of her game is great. She’s always been a terrific ball-striker, she reports her short game is as good as it’s ever been, and she’s still long enough to compete with women 20 years her junior. But not knowing if she’ll knock in that three-footer for par from hole to hole is debilitating. Her brain focuses on the possibility of missing. She worries about such putts. She fears such putts.
Golf isn’t a fair game by nature but it’s fair to call the yips unfair.
Sharp’s age is also at play. She knows she probably has only a few years of competitive golf left. She’s thinking about next steps and sees herself as a coach/mentor. Every Canadian to play on the LPGA Tour in recent years has raved about the guidance both Sharp and Sarah, who is also Sharp’s caddy, have provided them. So whether it’s a college or even Golf Canada’s high-performance program, Sharp will find herself a job when she wants one. Somebody will be lucky to have her.
But not yet. She still craves another shot at playing her best golf, another shot at finally winning an LPGA Tour event, even though that isn’t something she feels will make or break her career. The gentler side of her personality, she says, can reflect and appreciate all that she’s accomplished thus far. The gritty competitor in her just wants to play.
So she will, eventually. She won’t chase the lower-level Symetra Tour — she’s been there, done that. But she’ll play that circuit when stops are close and convenient and when she can’t crack LPGA fields. She’ll do so in February close to home and then she’ll try to Monday qualify for the LPGA event in California in March and she thinks she’ll get into the Hawaii tournament in April. And if she does so and plays well, she’ll pass many players on the pecking order when the tour reshuffles its priority list in May.
“My expectations aren’t very high for this coming season and maybe that’s something I need,” she said.
“The best years I’ve had I just didn’t think about results and last year was all about results. I say I almost acted like a rookie. I have to take my own advice that I’m giving the kids.”
But all of that will happen after she dusts off her clubs and gets back out onto the course to practise and prepare. For now, she’s still relish- ing her time away from the game. This extended rest. This clean break. This therapy. She really didn’t have a choice but to take it.