Tee to Green
Your weekly guide to golf
Stephanie Meadow will make her 16th Major championship appearance alongside fellow 20x20 ambassador Leona Maguire in the KPMG Women’s PGA at historic Aronimink Golf Club in Pennsylvania this week. But having gotten engaged to boyfriend Kyle Kallan in April and taken her golden retriever Dallas on the road, she has found ways to enjoy family life away from the pressures of big time Tour golf
IT’S been a while since my last column but so much has happened that it only feels like last week. The big news is that I got engaged to Kyle back in April and with him also caddying on tour, it’s been a busy time for us on the road. It has been a weird year with Covid interrupting the schedule for so long, but we are getting used to the new normal with testing every week. And our dog is with us too, which is a nice distraction. It makes it so much fun. You can have a more normal life, which is great. So while it sounds like a lot of work taking a dog on tour, it is actually refreshing not to have golf be the only thing you have to do.
There are a lot of people on tour who love dogs so Dallas has lots of aunties and it’s very rare for him to be alone for more than four hours. Basically it is no different to somebody who works from nine to five. Having a dog can make a lot of things disappear. If you have a bad day at the course, your dog doesn’t care what you shot.
My golf hasn’t been quite where I want it to be so far this season but I have only missed one cut, so that’s very encouraging. There have just been two weeks where something was a little bit off, so the goal is to pull it all together in the same week.
While it has been good enough to make cuts, I have not been having great weekends so hopefully this is the week to turn that around. I had a bad week with the driver at the ANA Inspiration but most of my problems have been putting. I am probably losing two shots a round on the greens with short putts and haven’t been holing a lot under eight feet. So I worked on that yesterday with my coach Terry Rowles, changing grip and putting a new putter in the bag so hopefully that will make a difference.
To play well, it doesn’t matter how well you are hitting it, you have got to make putts and I just haven’t been doing that.
Aronimink is going to be a great test for the KPMG Women’s PGA, that’s for sure. The greens are ginormous with a lot of slopes – 20 feet of break on a 40 footer is not unusual.
But the fairways are wide open so it is definitely going to be a second shot golf course.
There is going to be a lot of emphasis on putting because even if you hit a good shot, it can quickly slope away from the pin, leaving a lot of 40 and 50 footers.
The course is a 6,577-yard par70 and it’s playing long with the driver only rolling five to eight yards. I hit a lot of hybrids into a lot of the par-threes and it was a five-wood for me to the 18th so I don’t know if it is going to play any harder.
The good thing for Leona and I is that we have played our way into all the majors so far this year, which is step one. Just to play a golf course like this is amazing. It’s probably amongst the top five courses I have ever played and the PGA always takes such great care of us. The food is unreal, which makes a big difference. So it’s all there for a great week and now we just have to go out there and give it a run.
It was great to see England’s
Georgia Hall and Mel Reid win on tour the last two weeks so hopefully it will be the turn for the Irish soon. We’ve played with them for years and it’s an eye-opener in that you think, well I can do that. You don’t want to get frustrated by it. It just shows you that you can do it. I have played with them a hundred times, so if they can do it, why can’t we. I haven’t spoken to Leona about it but
I am sure she feels the same.
It’s another chance for us to showcase the 20x20 campaign, which is doing so much to promote women in sport.
I’m the touring pro for Galgorm Castle and it was great to tune in to the Dubai Duty Free Irish Open and see Shane Lowry wear the 20x20 logo. I messaged him to thank him for doing it but it’s clear that he gets it too now that he has a daughter. He understands and loves the campaign and what it is trying to achieve. And it is great to have someone on the men’s side shout it out in the golf world. It’s a really big deal.
Hopefully Leona and I can put the logo front and centre this week. I just need to see a few putts drop.