The “Stuck at Home With” series profiles players, caddies and staff in the women’s game who are making the most of an unprecedented break in tour life due to the coronavirus pandemic. New stories will be posted every Tuesday and Thursday.
Bugs Bunny was on the TV when Brittany Lincicome answered the phone. These days she’d rather watch baby Emery’s shows than the news anyway.
“It’s always so negative,” she said.
This week, Lincicome should be at her favorite stop on the LPGA. If she ever moved away from her native Florida, it would be to Rancho Mirage, California, where the ANA Inspiration is held every spring. Lincicome dug out one of her champion robes from the closet and put it on at the request of an art-seeking writer. All week memories have been popping up on her phone in the time-hop app. The championships dinner would’ve been Monday night. Lincicome, of course, is a two-time winner.
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Round 1 would’ve started today.
Lincicome hasn’t had much time to think about what an ANA Inspiration in September might be like. If the championship is held without fans, she said LPGA photographer Gabe Roux might have to get a shot of her air high-fiving her way past the grandstand on the 18th green, as she did during a playoff against Stacy Lewis in 2015.
“Would our parents be able to go?” she wondered.
Just the thought of daughter, Emery, being able to come greet her on the 18th there – she’ll be walking by September – makes her heart flutter. If she won for a third time, maybe she’d wade into Poppie’s Pond, like Pat Hurst, with Emery in her arms.
The coronavirus has given Lincicome, 34, the gift of added time with her first-born. Emery sat down in the family pool for the first time a couple of weeks ago wearing her tiny pink sunglasses and bucket hat. Lincicome is rather amazed by the fact that she never tries to take either of them off.
To save money, and perhaps kill time, Lincicome and her sister-in-law, Bianka, started making baby food at home. They’re pureeing everything from pears to squash.
“Come to find out it’s more expensive to make it than it is just to buy it,” she said.
Bianka has been staying with Lincicome and her husband, Dewald Gouws, for over a month now with travel back home to South Africa becoming more complicated due to the pandemic.
Lincicome has a cast on her arm for the next two weeks. She thought it was a case of Mommy Thumb, but is now unsure after her doctor said that usually a cortisone shot clears it up. She has seen two different specialists so far and was scheduled to see a third in Phoenix before the LPGA was postponed.
“I can play,” she said, “it just hurts like crazy.”
Not long ago, Lincicome went to nine different grocery stores in the span of one day looking for supplies for herself and her parents, who run a daycare. She worries about her how the coronavirus would impact her father, who has asthma and tree allergies.
With the meat department shelves so bare these days, the couple spend even more time on the water in Lincicome’s 24-foot Sheaffer boat, christened “Taking Relief” by a Twitter follower.
“When I was having it built years and years ago, I would go over every now and again,” said Lincicome, of the facility near the Tampa airport. “You could watch the process when it came out of the mold.”
These days they’ve been catching tripletail, red grouper, hog fish and a good deal of snapper. Fishing for supper is an ideal way to practice social distancing.
There are days Lincicome wonders if the LPGA will play at all in 2020. While she’s soaking up every second at home with Emery and her husband, she’s eager to get back to work. The next event on the LPGA schedule is about 40 minutes from her house in Belleair, Florida. At this point though, it’s hard to believe that the inaugural Pelican Women’s Championship will take place in mid-May.
At the beginning of the year, Lincicome promised her husband that she wouldn’t play more than two weeks in a row with Emery on the road. That might prove difficult in the back half of 2020 with events piled on top of each other.
In an ideal world, Lincicome said, she’d like to have her second child in the fall of 2021.
Does her husband know about this plan?
“I’m not getting any younger,” she said, laughing, “so he’s got to get on board.”
After taking maternity leave in 2019, Lincicome wants to get back inside the ropes as much as possible before taking another family leave.
But for now, she’s doing her part to flatten the coronavirus curve, enjoying all the little things at home that travel takes away.
She certainly has the perfect robe for it.
This is the third in the Golfweek “Stuck at home with” series. Click here to read more.
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