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.
Laura Davies has converted her home garage into a pro shop/trophy room of sorts. There’s a bike in there. A radio. There’s even a Juli Inkster golf bag. The pair of World Golf Hall of Famers exchanged bags in Sweden after the Solheim Cup one year. If, heaven forbid, there was a fire, one of the first things Davies would grab out of that room is the Solheim Cup replica trophy that was given to all the participants at the inaugural event in 1990.
“That’s by far my most favorite,” she said.
It’s also where her golf clubs sat for months on end collecting dust during the coronavirus lockdown. That is, until Wednesday, when she took them out for a 12:30 p.m. tee time with her brother at the local club, Sutton Green. Davies, 56, happened to co-design the course with architect David Walker in the 1990s.
England opened up golf courses for the first time on May 13. Prior to that, Davies’ only golf had consisted of hitting chip shots off a mat into an umbrella in her garden. She quickly found that exercise to be rather pointless, though.
“This is the longest I’ve gone without swinging a club at all,” said the winner of 87 professional events worldwide.
Davies last teed it up at the ISPS Handa Women’s Australian Open in mid-February. Since then she’s been at her home in Ripley, a small village in Surrey, England, where she lives with her 82-year-old step-father Mike. Davies’ mother, Rita, died in December from complications caused by a perforated bowel that was so well hidden it took too long for doctors to discover. Davies keeps pictures of her mother all over the house.
“Last year was such a horrible year seeing her suffer,” she said.
“I’m so glad she wasn’t still going through her troubles with all this going on. The thought of her being in hospital without us being able to visit her …”
Rita actually compiled a short and successful record caddying for her daughter, to the tune of two runner-up finishes in her three stints at the job. At a tournament in the Netherlands one year, Davies was in the penultimate group in the final round with her mum pushing the clubs on a trolley. After Davies finished up the hole and walked off the green, she turned around to see that her mother had placed the flagstick inside her golf bag by mistake. The final group stood waiting in the fairway for something to aim at.
“Mom had to bolt back and put the pin in,” she recalled.
Rita would’ve been 84 last March.
With Mike unable to leave the house at all, Laura has done all the grocery shopping for their house and for Betty, their neighbor.
She’s also been nursemaid to Murphy, their 12-year-old dog who snapped a ligament several weeks back. Because Murphy can’t make it up the stairs, Davies has been sleeping on a mattress on the living room floor the past month.
“He’s a lovely little chap,” she said, “but he’s hurting.”
Davies has given the kitchen a fresh coat of paint along with several outside walls. She planted vegetables in the green house and filled the flower baskets.
“I’ve just picked my first cup of radishes to go in the stir fry,” she said.
There are three large TV screens across the living room wall. She keeps them all going at once, with the volume cranked up on the middle one.
“To kill the boredom,” she said, though it’s been tough with no live sports on offer. Davies has relived plenty of Liverpool games, several Masters Tournaments, a couple of Solheim Cups. She particularly enjoyed watching her singles match against Inkster at the 2011 edition in Ireland. (Inkster and Davies halved).
“I don’t get too carried away watching myself do anything to be honest,” she said.
Davies served as a vice captain to Catriona Matthew at last year’s spectacularly dramatic European victory at Gleneagles in Scotland.
“We looked all the more dead and buried on the TV coverage than we did when I was there,” she noted.
Ok let’s see how much we can raise for the NHS. A Solheim Cup 2019 Vice captains bag with a set of Lynx blades a Driver and a putter. Midnight Sunday is the cut off. pic.twitter.com/malJWh7y66
— Laura Davies (@LFCLJD) April 14, 2020
Davies keeps her gold medals from the 1987 U.S. Women’s Open and 2018 U.S. Senior Women’s Open in a glass cabinet inside the house along with her U.S. Women’s Open replica trophy. It wasn’t until a decade after she won, when compatriot Alison Nicholas claimed the U.S. Women’s Open and had a replica trophy made, that Davies even knew such a thing was possible. She quickly had one made as well.
With both senior majors canceled for the season and most of the Legends Tour schedule done for the year, Davies hopes to get back on the LPGA this summer. The tour is scheduled to resume in mid-July at the Dow Great Lakes Bay Invitational July 15-18. Because Davies hasn’t qualified for the field, someone would need to choose her as a partner. She’s not banking on that happening.
If it’s possible to compete in the Marathon Classic and ShopRite and not have to go into isolation before getting back for the Evian, Scottish Open and AIG Women’s British, then Davies will play that entire stretch.
She’s guessing there’s a 50 percent right now that the Women’s British will be held at Royal Troon in late August.
“Premiere League football will be the first sport to get underway at the professional level,” said Davies. “If they start playing, then I think golf and tennis and sports like that will quickly follow.”
With hiring a private jet beyond her personal budget, Davies said she’ll be quite happy to drive 15 hours between events to avoid commercial airports and airplanes. This, of course, coming from a woman who was awarded the DBE, or Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, by the Queen in 2014.
“You won’t take it for granted,” said Dame Laura Davies of getting back to her day job. “Playing golf tournaments will be more of a privilege than just what you do.”
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