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International fights like the Solheim Cup take hold of a player like nothing else in golf. Sweden’s usually stoic Maja Stark felt herself transformed by last year’s competition in Spain. “I never really do big gestures and stuff when I make a putt [but] all of a sudden at Solheim, I just started screaming and fist pumps and everything. I had no idea that was going to come out. So I know that that might happen this week.”
Stark and the rest of Team Europe let the emotions flow on that famous Sunday last September, having fought back from 4-0 after the opening foursomes in one of the most enthralling stories in this rivalry’s long history. Players flooded the 17th green after Carlota Ciganda putted the birdie that beat Nelly Korda and ensured Europe retained the cup, in the only drawn competition in Solheim history.
A year on, Europe’s task is to manage their emotions as they face not only a determined Team USA, desperate to win their first edition since 2017, but a spiky, hostile home crowd at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, Virginia. A quirk in the calendar caused by Covid means that only 12 months have passed since the last Solheim Cup, as the biennial competition flips from odd to even years. The emotions are still raw.
“This team is hungry,” is how US captain Stacy Lewis put it.
USA arrive as the favourites to end their losing streak not only by virtue of a vociferous home crowd, but because they have the stronger team on paper. In Nelly Korda and Lilia Vu, the US have the best two players in the world this year, and world No 1 Korda is fired up after letting victory slip away in that famous match with Ciganda on Sunday at Finca Cortesin.
“Whenever you get to wear the red, white, and blue and stars and stripes, there’s a different meaning to it,” said Korda, who has never won the Solheim Cup despite a positive personal record of won seven, lost four, halved one. “You're playing not just for yourself, but for your captains, for your team-mates and your country, and there’s just nothing like it. We have got some unfinished business.”
Korda has deployed the smoothest swing in golf to astonishing effect this season, with seven wins on the LPGA Tour. She is expected to reprise her fruitful partnership with Allisen Corpuz in Gainesville after they won both of their foursomes matches in Spain.
“Obviously I haven't been on the winning side, but every experience I've had in the Solheim Cups has been an amazing one,” Korda said. “I think it’s something super-exciting too and refreshing to have a team-mate, have team-mates and captains and people to lean on when you normally don’t.”
The raw numbers might suggest Europe are already beaten on every metric, with only four players inside the world’s top 30 compared to America’s eight. But that brings an expectation on the American team to end their drought, and with it a certain pressure that captain Lewis has tried to soften. She has installed a karaoke machine on the US bus to bring out the fun in her team.
“It’s like getting ready for final exams at school,” Lewis said. “Hopefully there’s a pretty good party on Sunday night. They want to have fun doing it. I don’t feel any pressure when I’m in that team room or when I’m around the girls. I don’t think they feel pressure.
“If we win, we stop the streak. If we lose, the streak keeps going. I would love to stop it, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t see it as pressure. What I’ve seen at Solheim Cups and teams that I’ve been on, the [winners are] ones that are more relaxed.”
Europe captain Suzann Pettersen may not have quite the same star quality in her ranks but she can lean on the intangibles: experience, unity, matchplay nous and a winning mentality sown and grown by recent wins. Ten of Europe’s 12 players in Virginia retained the cup a year ago.
“It’s nice to get this going again,” Pettersen said. “It feels like we just left Spain and we need to keep the momentum rolling. Playing away is a tough task to get this done for the fourth time but the players are up for it.”
Europe certainly can lift the cup again, despite the odds against them, and win an unprecedented fourth successive Solheim Cup. But to do it, they will have to tame a crowd like no other on the calendar.
