Anne van Dam’s putting had become such a point of frustration that she actually thought about taking a break from the LPGA. Something drastic needed to be done, so she closed her eyes and hoped for the best. Seriously.
“I just started hitting some putts with my eyes closed,” said van Dam, “and just felt way more comfortable.”
The 25-year-old Dutch player ran into Suzann Pettersen this week at the Dow Great Lakes Bay Invitational, and they talked about the unusual practice. Pettersen told van Dam about the time she closed her eyes and won six tournaments.
“At one point it just gets really mental,” said van Dam. “If you can’t see what you’re doing, you just trust your inner instincts.
This week van Dam has teamed up with longtime best friend Sophia Popov for the Dow team event. She had a handful of important putts in Wednesday’s opening alternate shot format and made them all dead center – eyes closed.
Known for having one of the most enviable swings in golf, van Dam ranked first on the LPGA in driving distance at 292 yards but 156th in putting average and 137th in putts per greens in regulation.
“I had multiple rounds in a row where I hardly missed a fairway or hardly missed a green and was three-putting from 10 to 15 feet,” said van Dam. “At one point you just kind of feel hopeless. You don’t really know where to go.”
She missed them in all sorts of ways – long, short, left, right. It wasn’t the yips, she said. More like a negative spiral of thoughts that began with venues earlier in the year that featured poa annua greens.
What started out as a drill blended into competition, and the fix came just in time for a run of big events. Van Dam will become the first Dutch golfer to compete in the Olympics next month. She actually qualified for the 2016 Summer Games in Brazil but was unable to compete because she wasn’t ranked inside the top 100 in the world at the time, which is an additional requirement from the Netherlands National Olympics Committee.
Van Dam, a five-time winner on the LPGA, thought the same might happen again this year after she dipped to No. 145 in the world. She was actually inside the top 100 for the original cutoff before the Tokyo Olympics was postponed to 2021.
The Netherlands made an exception for van Dam this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“They’re only sending athletes that have a good chance of finishing in the top six,” she said.
That’s easier to determine in other sports, of course. Popov won the AIG Women’s British Open last year when she was ranked outside to the top 300 in the world.
“Obviously for golf,” said van Dam, “it’s a hard decision to say when do you have a good chance.”
A positive-sounding van Dam views this recent dip in her career as part of the process. If everything always came easy, she said, it could get a little boring. She looks at the downtimes of a Jordan Spieth or a Rickie Fowler missing out on majors and knows that struggles come to everyone.
“My game is way too good to play like that,” she said.
At last, things are looking up.
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