Australian Open: Aussie golf star Minjee Lee fought the schedule and her putter during her first round at Victoria Golf Club
A tired Minjee Lee fought through the 18 holes to open her Australian Open campaign, in a round which raised more questions about her putter and also the new dual gender format.
Like the doors being flung open for the Boxing Day sales or the gates opening at Flemington on Cup day, there are rushes on a golf course too.
In Australia, they usually shadow a man with a mullet. Each time Cameron Smith finishes a hole, or the galleries think they know how he will finish a hole, they rush off to the next to get the best vantage point. It drives course marshals mad, the ones who demand people be statues until the last putt of the group has been sunk. Stay still, dammit!
In the group behind Smith on Thursday during the opening round of the Australian Open, two-time major champion Minjee Lee pulled her own crowd, albeit a fraction smaller. And so they scampered every time they thought the hole was over, seeking the next viewing platform.
Yet you can’t, and shouldn’t, turn away from Lee at the moment. She’s a brilliant golfer tortured by a common problem: her putter. No hole is done until it’s done.
“I thought there was no way she would miss that,” gasped a fan after being told Lee pulled a near kick-in par putt on the previous hole.
She did.
And it happened too many times at Victoria Golf Club as one of the great mysteries of Australian sport appears set to linger for another year: how has Lee not won her national championship yet?
Granted, this year the hurdles are significant, and perhaps unfair.
She sleepwalked through sections of her first 18 holes – barring three straight birdies in a mid-round flurry – and you could hardly blame her.
The insistence the men and women play this as a dual gender tournament has pluses, but the dissenting chorus is growing louder. It’s from both sexes, too.
The men want a different course set-up to really test them, the women just want to be able to see it before they tee up in the first round (with preferably a different date early in the New Year).
Lee jetted into Melbourne on Wednesday with Hannah Green and Grace Kim after the LPGA’s season finale. It’s akin to Pat Cummins arriving in London a day before opening the bowling in a Test at Lord’s. It doesn’t quite seem right.
Lee couldn’t even find coffee to wake her up at 5am on the way to the course on Thursday for her morning tee time. She could have requested a friendlier first round afternoon start, but didn’t. No quarter was asked, and none given.
“I’m pretty tired,” said Lee, still smiling after a two-over 74 left her in a different postcode from overnight leaders Su Oh and Korean amateur Hyojin Yang (-7). “I was yawning on the course. It was pretty bad. I probably wasn’t 100 per cent on.”
But could you really blame her?
Which brings us back to the putter.
If there is an Achilles heel in the game of one of Australia’s greatest sporting exports of the past decade, it’s the flat stick. She doesn’t necessarily look nervous, but you feel nervous just watching her stand over little tiddlers.
She asked her caddie, Brad Beecher, for his advice as she lined up putts on almost every hole on Thursday. All player-caddie dynamics are different. But how often does Smith call his looper, Sam Pinfold, over for a quiet word on the greens? Nearly never.
“I’ve hit the ball pretty consistently,” Lee said. “I can still get it close with my irons and drive it onto the fairway, but my putting has been a little on and off. I’ve been a bit streaky. I’ve been testing some putters. Some work and some don’t. It’s been that kind of the year.
“I wasn’t here early enough to practise. I would have liked to have had more prep on the greens.”
Perhaps her indifference to the format and its place in the schedule was best shown in how late Lee committed to the event. As Golf Australia searches for mid-year signings to pump up interest in the event, Lee was one of the last to be announced. From here, she faces an almighty task to be the first local to win the Patricia Bridges Bowl in 10 years.
She might not feel completely better until Friday or Saturday, maybe even Sunday. By then, it might be too late.
“I don’t know if I’ll feel normal for a few weeks to be honest,” she said. “[But] I’m really loving my time here and I really enjoy coming back. I don’t want that to taint the experience I’m having.”
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