Golf: Achiever with the drive to succeed

By BOB PEARCE

She has no manager and no sponsor. She can sit outside a Ponsonby cafe and drink coffee without anyone taking a second look. Even at the New Zealand Open at Middlemore, few people recognised her.

But golfer Marnie McGuire is one of New Zealand's most successful professional sportswomen. Winner of five tournaments on the Japanese professional tour, she stunned some big names with her victory in the Australian Open in 1998.

Now she plies her trade on the toughest women's professional tour, in the United States. She has yet to win, but she has had second and third placings, and ranks 63rd on the order of merit.

This Sunday she will be at the Remuera Golf Club, where she learned to play, promoting the women's game with a clinic for young players and playing an exhibition match with Lynnette Brooky, who has had similar success in Europe.

What will she tell the youngsters?

"Follow your dreams. If you have a dream to do this - or anything else - as a profession, follow your dreams and follow your heart and you can achieve anything. You really can."

McGuire is the best possible advertisement for that attitude. As a bespectacled five-year-old at primary school, she seemed the least likely to make it as an athlete. But by the time she emerged from Epsom Girls' Grammar, she had proved that her petite frame housed the kind of competitive spirit so necessary in modern sport.

As a teenager she won the British amateur championship in 1986 and she was in the New Zealand team who won the Queen Sirikit title in 1991.

When she turned professional, she was one of the New Zealand pioneers on the Japanese tour. Sheree Higgens and Tracy Hanson went in 1991 and McGuire and Jan Higgins followed the year after.

The non-Japanese had to go through a gruelling nine-month qualification process before they were accepted. For young women on their own in a foreign environment it was a huge culture shock.

"We still talk about it when we meet," McGuire says. "It was fantastic, weird, difficult. The good thing was we all had each other. If you asked me to do it now, I would never do it. But I was 22 then."

McGuire competed in Japan for seven years, finishing fourth on the rich money list one year and enjoying consistent success.

For the last two years of her stay, she was the only European competing regularly.

In 1999 she moved to the US tour and, in her first year, came second at Youngstown, Ohio, and finished 57th on the order of merit.

The move had been logical because she had graduated from Oklahoma University and earned first-team All-American honours for her golf.

But after one year on the US tour she decided to take a complete break from the game. It was not a sudden decision, but something that built up over the previous year.

"When I moved to the States in 1999 and I started playing on that tour, you would have thought it wouldn't be a learning curve. I had been successful in Japan and thought I would be successful in the States.

"But it wasn't like that at all. I don't think I've ever had that tough nature, so I think I was a little bit sensitive when I first went to the States. My learning curve was to cut out outside influences - other players, new courses.

"It wasn't that there was hostility. They're all great girls. But there's a lot of money out there and you're into it for yourself. I had the attitude that if I'm nice to you, why can't you be friendly back. But they're out there doing a job, not discussing whether you had fun at the weekend.

"I think I was very businesslike and self-assured when I was younger, but as you get older you think of other things in life than just playing this game. I wanted more than just golf and I got a little bit lost.

"I haven't given up wanting to have a life outside golf, but I've actually learned balance. It's taken me a long time to learn the balance in life."

Since she returned to the tour, she has finished 63rd on the order of merit for the past two seasons.

"I need to get off that bloody number. I'm 34 in February. I actually feel that in the last three years I've played some of the best golf I've ever played in my career. Ball-striking wise. Putting-wise.

"On the weeks when it's come together, it has been the best. In my youth I was passionate about the game and totally into it. When you get older that wanes a bit and it's more of a drive and you've got to keep yourself going. To keep motivating yourself."

In October, McGuire started working with a new coach, Chip Koehle from the Nick Faldo Institute in Orlando. She has moved house to Orlando and is trying to work out a way of keeping her swing and her results consistent.

Last season she started well in Australia and then had a solid spell of three top-10 finishes in four weeks in the States before tailing off.

"I had got really into the technical stuff and I'd almost panic when it would start going awry and I didn't know how to fix it. I didn't have drills for me to get the feel back.

"I think I have always been a natural golfer. When I was a kid, there were never a lot of technicalities brought into it. What Chip has been doing is trying to reawaken that feel which I've always had."

Like most people, McGuire is in awe at the accomplishments of the women's world No 1, Annika Sorenstam.

"I've never seen anyone who was so driven, so disciplined and we don't get to see half of it. I would love to see her work out. I'd love to know what she does, but you never see her.

"She's the No 1 in the world so everyone wants to see what she's up to. She's incredible. The way she hits the ball. How far she hits the ball."

McGuire, whose first teacher was her father David, never inherited his Scottish burr. And she remains staunchly Kiwi in her own accent and attitudes.

"I love New Zealand. I love New Zealanders. I love their nature. When I go other places, they're great people. But when you come back here, there's nothing like your own."

But she has unfinished business in the States. That petite frame has been strengthened by regular workouts and she now has a personal trainer. The determination, which has taken her from Meadowbank to Oklahoma and Fukuoka to Florida, is still there.

And when she says, "I'm going to win on that tour before my career is over," you better believe her.

Learn from the experts

Marnie McGuire and Lynnette Brooky will conduct a junior clinic at Remuera Golf Club from 2pm on Sunday and play an exhibition match from 5.30pm.

They will be at Tauranga Golf Club on Monday for a clinic at 2pm and a match at 5pm.