Georgia Hall knows what it’s like to struggle as a golfer before you make the big time, but it’s her experiences that have made her stronger and determined to succeed.
Georgia Hall knows what it’s like to struggle as a golfer before you make the big time, but it’s her experiences that have made her stronger and determined to succeed.
By Lewine Mair
Here's a teaser of what Georgia Hall had to say when she was interviewed by Women & Golf columnist Lewine Mair in the next edition of Women & Golf, on sale Friday 15 February.
Every Korean on the LPGA will have been pushed to a greater or lesser extent by her parents. There is no doubt about that. Some of the girls will practise for 6 or 7 hours at a time with their fathers and/or mothers watching over them. In many cases it works, though, recently, other nationalities are making a good fist of playing catch-up, with particular reference to the Thais.
You ask the 22-year-old Georgia Hall if her parents pushed her and she shakes her head “My parents encouraged me more than anything else,” she says. “If it was a cold, wet day, my dad might have said something, but I needed that. I needed to practise all I could because I always had this dream of wanting to win the British Open with my dad on the bag and my mother in the crowd.”
Father Wayne, she explained at a recent luncheon laid on for herself and Francesco Molinari as the two British Open champions of the moment, was a three-handicap man with a set of ideas which were very much his own. For instance, instead of joining a club, he played on a range of different courses near the family home in Hampshire. And when Georgia started to get keen, he encouraged her to do the same.
Hence the reason that when she started to play in junior tournaments and matches, she was never thrown by the look of a different venue. It was a tale to put one in mind of how Wally Booth, father of Carly, gave his daughter a great start by laying out a nine-hole course on his farm where the greens were minuscule. Needless to say, Carly’s iron play was an early strength.
In Georgia’s case, there was only one thing to slow her progress. A lack of money. Wayne, a plasterer by trade, struggled to afford the costs of subsidising his promising offspring.
When we had time to chat following the brunch, I asked if she could revisit some of her toughest times. She could hardly bring herself to do so but, after wincing at the memory, she went into details of the hell-hole where she was billeted for the 2013 British Women’s Amateur on the Machynys Peninsula.
“It was horrendous,” she began...
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