LINKS PLAYERS MAGAZINE, 2018 ANNUAL EDITION
SHINING STAR
By Jeff Hopper
If anyone knows what it means to paint flags on your cheeks and wear red, white, and blue ribbons in your hair, it’s Paula Creamer. But with six Solheim Cups under her belt, the beloved former US Open champion needed help landing a spot on the team for 2017. She hoped for a captain’s pick.
If anyone knows what it means to shine in golf’s biggest moments, it’s Juli Inkster. A winner of seven major championships, she is focused, gutsy, and universally respected. More than that, she was the captain Creamer needed to come through for her. In time Inkster did,
Creamer responded with excellence, and maybe the biggest winner in all that was a Solheim Cup rookie, Austin Ernst.
We’ll assume you know little about Ernst. Beyond the top three or four American women, you have to be an avid LPGA fan to recognize some of the names on the Solheim Cup team. The LPGA is a marvelous tour these days, with more and more well-supported events and an amazing international influence. But it is also highly competitive, with a range of winners so broad it’s hard to know the good from the great.
On the US side in 2017, the second and third top point earners, Stacy Lewis and Gerina Piller, had a combined one victory in the preceding three years. Teammates Angel Yin, Lizette Salas, and Ernst possessed two total career wins among them—and none since 2014.
It’s not that this was a bad team. In fact, it was made up of extremely consistent players who proved themselves on Tour week after week. It’s just that no one will fault you if their names are unfamiliar to you.
Let’s change that. Let’s introduce you to one of the game’s feistiest spark plugs.
Austin Ernst grew up in South Carolina, where her father was a club professional. With freedom to play as much as she wanted, Ernst fell in love with the game, progressing into tournament play at a young age. She was competitive even then.
“My dad tells a story of when I was eight,” she says. “I finished second at one of our state events. He called me and asked how it went. I told him I was second and he replied, ‘That’s good.’ And I said, ‘No. I didn’t win.’”
The winning would come.
I think at the end of the day, the biggest thing is that I play golf, but I don’t let golf drive my life. It’s what I do, not who I am. I am a follower of Christ and I know that’s what defines me whether I shoot 66 or 76.Unlike some outstanding young players, Ernst chose college, knowing she wasn’t ready to go straight to the professional ranks—though that’s where her goals were. At LSU, she found her way early, winning the NCAA individual championship as a freshman in 2011. And she enjoyed more than the golf.
“I loved the non-golf part of college more than I liked the golf part, honestly. I think just being able to go and kind of grow as a person for two years—well, for me, two years. Those two years were really good for me because I needed to be independent and accountable.”
Ernst still didn’t consider herself Tour-ready after those two years. She wanted to be closer to home, working with her dad on her game and hoping to transfer to Clemson. The transfer clearance didn’t come through and she figured she’d give the Q-Series a shot. Maybe she was more ready than she knew.
To her surprise, she made it through the final stage, earning her Tour card for 2013.
“At the time I thought it was the end of the world when I didn’t get released for transfer,” she recalls. “Looking back on it now, that was definitely a God thing, because my original plan was not to go straight to Q-School. But that was how it worked out.”
Her 2013 looked like a lot of rookie seasons do, with plenty of missed cuts and only two top-10 finishes. But she stuck for the next season. That year, 2014, when she otherwise would have been a college senior, she started with very little to get excited about. By mid-summer, Ernst had no result better than a tie for 18th. August brought more of the same: 29th, 71st, 34th.
Then came Portland.
When she talks now about what she says to players just coming out on Tour, Ernst says she tells them, “You just need to stay positive. You can have a great week, and even win one week, then miss the cut next week.” She goes on to observe how on the PGA Tour, it’s not uncommon for a player to miss a number of cuts right before a win. The truth is, Ernst could be speaking out of her own experience.
The last week of August in 2014, she strung together four rounds in the 60s on a course where she had gained confidence with a 62 the season before. Then she bettered I.K. Kim in a playoff that lasted only a hole. At the time she told reporters, “I knew that I didn’t have to do anything special today, because I had three really good rounds to start with. Coming down the stretch, I was very proud of how I handled everything.”
What she did was special enough, providing the catapult to a career that hit its apex at the 2017 Solheim Cup in Des Moines, Iowa.
Maybe it’s not every little girl’s dream to go to Des Moines. But if you’re a golfer and you know anything about the Des Moines Golf & Country Club, you might be tempted. The club has a 120-year history, with its first course designed by Thomas Bendelow before 1910. In the late 1960s, 36 new holes were put in place under the direction of the emerging Pete Dye. The first of those courses hosted the US Senior Open in 1999. A property big enough to accommodate more than 50,000 fans a day, the club gained immediate respect as a proper host for big events. In 2017, the Solheim Cup came calling.
Golf’s cup matches are a patriot’s delight. The Ryder Cup matches have become the sport’s wildest spectacle, and the Solheim Cup mirrors its madness: fans in team regalia, orchestrated cheers, and all the nationalistic pageantry one can muster. The essential difference, of course, is that it’s the ladies who come to play.
Ernst and Yin had never played the matches, but their records bore them out, even if they didn’t quite squeak in on points. Inkster chose them as her first captain’s picks.
Then there was Creamer, whose game was not on form but whose past in this event was illustrious. The pink-loving fan favorite had to wait a bit longer, landing a spot when Jessica Korda pulled out because of injury. Korda’s disappointment would prove to be Ernst’s blessing.
Inkster made sure when it came time to play that her rookies were covered. She paired Yin with Salas, who was playing for the third time, and Ernst with Creamer, who was back for a lucky seventh go-around. Ernst could not have been happier.
“Playing with Paula, that was the biggest highlight in general,” she says.
But there were also some wonderful moments.
Early on Ernst may have shown some jitters. In Friday’s foursomes, she and Creamer lost to Anna Nordqvist and Georgia Hall, 3&1. They stormed back on Saturday morning, though, blitzing Mel Reid and Emily Pederson, 5&3. Then came the pleasures of Saturday afternoon.
Ernst and Creamer were paired in four-ball, this time taking on the European duo of Karine Icher and Madelene Sagstrom. Ernst rolled in a birdie putt on the first hole to get the match well-started for the Americans, but the Europeans squared the match at the third.
At the fourth, a par-5, Creamer reached in two, with a makeable eagle putt. Ernst put her second in a greenside bunker. But when she came out just under the hole, Creamer sidled up to her. “Trying to steal my thunder?” she asked with a smile. Then she slammed home her eagle putt and the Americans were back on top.
Two holes later, Sagstrom’s birdie squared it again, but then Ernst made birdie at seven and Creamer at eight. At 2-up, the Americans would not trail again. That didn’t mean the match was secure.
On the fourteenth tee, the lead was still 2-up and Ernst pulled an 8-iron to take aim on the 161-yard par-3. The shot never left the flag, skipped up to the hole, and rolled just over the edge. An ace would have won her a car. All the birdie got was a halve. Still 2-up.
At fifteen, Ernst got in trouble off the tee on the par-5 and Creamer found herself in trouble around the green. The Europeans were in close for birdie and the momentum was set to switch. This time, Ernst faced a delicate chip. But she hit “a perfect little kinda bump” that zipped straight to the cup and fell in.
“That hole is kind of an amphitheater and there’s so many people around,” Ernst describes with relish. “It got so loud. It was such an exciting moment, such a pivotal moment in the match, to make that shot and pull it off and to see how pumped Paula got. That was really cool.”
Cool indeed. The Americans matched Icher’s pars on the next two holes and the match was over. The next day, the team would secure the Cup, halving the singles matches to come away 16½-11½. Ernst was a Solheim Cup rookie no more.
It’s hard for any golfer to keep their emotions in check. When it comes to a super-charged showdown like the Solheim Cup, the highs and the lows will always be visible. It’s what fans love about these events. But the same can be said for Sundays at most Tour events, when the players near the top have one thing in mind: victory. It can be tough to tame one’s nerves under such circumstances.
When Ernst won in Portland, she knew where to go for the calm she needed. She’d been going there since she was a teenager, maybe even a child.
“I remember on Sunday I had the lead early in the day. I got it after five holes. And I remember praying just for peace,” she says. “I didn’t pray to win. I just prayed for peace and for God to help me be calm and whatever happens happens. That’s what got me through that day.”
Ernst says she accepted Christ—what she describes as believing “that Christ died on the cross and gave his life to wash our sins away”—when she was 15 years old. When she got to college, she connected with Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and she has sustained her faith through involvement at her home church in West Palm Beach, Florida, where she now resides, and the weekly Tour Fellowship.
“One of the hardest things about being on Tour is that we can’t go to church on Sunday because we are playing golf on Sunday,” she explains. “So we have Tour Fellowship.”
The Fellowship is led by long-time chaplain Cris Stevens, and meets on Tuesday evenings, away from the heart of competition. Additionally, players may meet in smaller groups for Bible study.
And Ernst follows a personal path of developing her faith. “I try to have quiet time in the morning. It’s difficult sometimes when there’s early tee times, but I just try to carve out 15-30 minutes a day where I can spend my time in Scripture. Even if I can’t go to a church service or catch one online that week, I still have that time to spend in the Bible.”
In this way, you might say that Ernst approaches her life with Jesus in the same way she approaches her golf. There, she says, “I think that what’s so appealing about golf is that even when you play really well, you can always play a little bit better and you can always keep improving.” And in a life of faith, there is always room to grow as well.
Austin Ernst is still young, as a woman and, in many ways, as a golfer. But she carries a perspective that keeps her life in balance even during her life’s most demanding moments.
“I think at the end of the day,” she says, “the biggest thing is that I play golf, but I don’t let golf drive my life. It’s what I do, not who I am. I am a follower of Christ and I know that’s what defines me whether I shoot 66 or 76.”
The end of that proverbial day might be a good one or a bad one, but either way Ernst knows how she’ll handle it. It’s what leads her to say, “I love the game. I mean I’ve had bad days and golf will drive you crazy some days. But there’s nothing else I’d rather do. Right now, this is kind of where I want to be and where I should be.”
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