Georgie Bingham: my spectacular LOVE/HATE relationship with Lexi
Lexi Thompson reacts on the 15th green during the final round for the 2022 KPMG Women's PGA Championship at Congressional Country Club on June 26, 2022 in Bethesda, Maryland. (Photo by Darren Carroll/PGA of America)
OH MY!
SO much I could write about. Matt Fitzpatrick watching his own bunker shot 9 million times after his first major win, The F-bombs and tears of Haotong Li, Padraig Harrington in the winners circle at the Senior US Open, But it has to be Lexi Thompson. It can’t be anyone else.
I have a spectacular LOVE/HATE relationship with Lexi. Digging someone out days after they collapse in the final round a major, especially when they haven’t won one since 2014 may seem like a cheap shot but I don’t find anyone in the women’s field as frustrating or fascinating as her. I am also beginning to wonder how the hell she’ll get another Major win over the line.
Thompson is a sponsor’s dream. She is beautiful, talented and has a picture perfect swing. BUT - I don’t like, and have never been convinced by her rhetoric. She appears to me, as someone whose privilege is so ingrained that problems are never addressed and it’s never her fault. I certainly don’t feel she has learned enough from her former controversies to say she’s made any positive changes. Maybe she doesn’t feel she needs to. That would be fitting.
Golf is the most honest of sports. Get a reputation as someone who is just ONE percent less than the 100% honesty required and that’s enough to tarnish your reputation. No one in golf ever goes for the “sorry, my mistake” line AFTER an incident (Lexi has btw) because you police yourself in golf and it’s your job to call out your own mistake or face looking like the 28 handicapper who walks into the rough with a ball and hole in their pocket and ALWAYS, miraculously, finds their wayward tee shot.
“She’s a wonderful golfer, it’s the Lexi being Lexi I find hard”
Her wrap sheet of incidents is long now - there’s the incident in the rough at the Women’s Open at Royal Troon in 2020 (remarkably unpunished) that made social media go bonkers, the 2017 incident where she’d marked her ball wrongly on the green on the penultimate day of the ANA championship and was penalised 4 strokes and lost in a playoff. There’s just silly crappy arrogant behaviour like not bothering to shout FORE RIGHT on the tee at the Solheim cup and then being shirty at a marshall who did - because in fact, the ball did land really near some spectators. Or, I can’t EVER get over the tale of a driver ferrying the clubs of 38 players from France to England being made to wait while the Thompson team retrieved her passport from her bag meaning the bus was 6 HOURS late and all the players who were without their clubs missed their chance of a Monday practise round at Woburn in 2019. An incident, naturally played down by her agent.
I think about how much I pull for Rory McIllroy to win another major. I didn’t always - there was a time when I wasn’t sure he was helping himself, but I have seen him mature, and grow and take responsibility for his shit. I have also seen him learn “I am enough” and seen him do things that make people love him. If I compare him to Thompson who’s major winless streak is as long as his, I don’t find myself plugging for her so much anymore. She’s a wonderful golfer, it’s the Lexi being Lexi I find hard. My LOVE/HATE seems to have peaked at serious frustration at a phenomenal golfer I now find really hard to like.
Georgie Bingham, broadcaster and journalist, writes a bi-weekly column for The Cut Stuff. She’s golf obsessed. She’s ready to go behind the tour.
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