Ashleigh Buhai overcame 15 years of expectation when she won the AIG Women’s Open in a four-hole sudden-death play-off on Sunday to become the major champion everyone always thought they knew she could be.
Buhai became the second South African woman to win a major golf championship after Sally Little won the LPGA Championship in 1980, and the Du Maurier Championship in 1988. Alison Sheard won the Women’s Open in 1979 before it was considered a major championship. And when Buhai turned professional at the age of 18, there were many who believed she was ready to be South Africa’s next golfing superstar.
“It’s been a long journey,” said an emotional Buhai after her victory. “You know, I turned pro when I was 18. I was kind of expected… there was a lot of things expected of me. I won straight off the bat on the Ladies European Tour. But this game has a way of giving you a hard time.
“I’m just so proud of how I’ve stuck it out. I have said the last four or five years, I’ve finally started to find my feet on the LPGA and felt I could compete, and although I’m 33 now, I feel I’m playing the best golf of my career.”
She turned professional in 2007 after a successful amateur career during which she became the youngest player to win the Ladies’ South African Amateur Stroke Play and Match Play titles. She won her third event as a professional, the 2007 Catalonia Ladies Masters, to become the youngest ever professional winner on the Ladies European Tour. She secured her LPGA Tour card in 2014, and her closest taste of victory on that circuit came at the 2020 Cambia Portland Classic where she lost a play-off to Georgia Hall.
Now, over 200 starts later on the LPGA Tour, the best golf of her career brought her her first title – and it was a major.
“My thought this week was 40 per cent to the top because that kept my rhythm and then everything else falls into place,” she said. “As long as I have soft hands and 40 per cent to the top, then I felt I was in control.”
It also helped that she played the difficult 18th at Muirfield particularly well – as she had to do it five times on Sunday. “I hit that fairway every day,” she said. “It favours me. I fade the ball, wind off the right. I call it my little punch shot, put the ball back in my stance and I just hit it low.”
It helped even more that she is particularly good out of the sand, because she needed one of the great bunker shots in South African golf history to pull off that play-off victory. She said: “I don’t want to brag, but my caddie said to me on the last one, ‘Show them why you are number one in bunkers this year.’” And she hit a recovery from the bunker on the final play-off hole to inside two feet – a shot worthy of a South African major champion at Muirfield.
“To follow those two greats, Gary Player from 1959 and Ernie Els from 2002, two of my idols growing up, and for us to play here for the first time at Muirfield, making history, I’m very, very honoured and very, very proud to be South African right now,” she said.
After such a long career on the LPGA Tour without a victory, she could be forgiven for thinking the pressure of those expectations of her youth had not served her well. But, instead, she took action to try and find a way to start realising the weight of South African anticipation.
“I started working with a sports psychologist, mental coach, someone called Duncan McCarthy in February this year,” she said, “and if you told me then that I would be sitting here, I would never have believed you with the mental state I was in.
“I had been swinging good for a long time and could not keep myself in the moment. He’s given me the tools, we say, to stay in the moment, and all I can control, and stay away from outcome. We get so lost in what can happen, and sure, it’s easy to drift and you’re going to go there, but as long as you bring yourself back, it’s fine.”
The way she brought herself back after a triple-bogey seven on the 15th showed just how fine everything has become. “I was just like, okay, it is what it is. Get back in it,” she recalled. “It would have been very easy to panic and probably come home in an ambulance. I didn’t panic, which I thought was huge, and just tried to make a good swing on the next and just try to make good swings coming in to give myself a chance.”
Now she has that major championship behind her name, those expectations will not go away. Any South African sportsperson knows that success breeds even more expectation. But with her new tools and her obvious talent, it probably won’t be too long before those expectations are met once more.
“It’s been a long journey, but man, it’s all worth it right now,” she smiled.
