Almost forty years ago, I faced a relatively inconsequential dilemma. Should I go with my friend Javi Aguado to spend the afternoon at Juvenalia, a fair for kids and teenagers held every year in Madrid, or should we opt for the cinema? In the end, the pull of one of the titles showing on the Gran Vía in Madrid during that 1986 Christmas, Aliens, won us over.
Despite arriving with the supposed burden of being the sequel to a classic (Ridley Scott’s Alien), the film managed to captivate us immediately. When the marines entered Hadley’s Hope, the colony they were supposed to investigate, the two teenagers were deeply engrossed in the plot and seemed to be two more privates in the company led by Lieutenant Gorman. As you probably know, the xenomorphs soon appeared, and a brief, frantic, and fierce skirmish ensued in the base’s tunnels. When the action erupted, I felt for the first time something that, unfortunately, hasn’t been repeated too often since: I didn’t know where to look. That’s how overwhelming, dizzying, and adrenaline-pumping the situation on the screen was for that fifteen-year-old boy. So unforgettable, as is evident… since it has come back to me four decades later as I write these lines.
You’ll allow me the crude and out-of-context comparison, as cinema has little to do with sports, and more specifically with golf, but I have the same feeling when I see, week after week, the achievements of this new generation of players, whether in the amateur or professional realm. I don’t know where to focus my attention because as soon as I get distracted, one of them lifts a trophy or stars in a historic moment.
Carla Bernat, Julia López, Paula Martín, Carolina López Chacarra, Andrea Revuelta, Cayetana Fernández, and Rocío Tejedo are starring in their own version of the title of this column, and with their “everything everywhere all at once,” they are giving us joy week after week… as well as allowing us to glimpse the brilliant future that women’s golf has in Spain.
Since the days of Marta Figueras Dotti, the first great sharpshooter of Spanish golf, and despite the gaps and some exceptions, we cannot complain about the different generations that the Spanish talent pool has produced, especially the golden generation formed by Carlota Ciganda, Azahara Muñoz, Beatriz Recari, Belén Mozo, Marta Silva, and other contemporaries, but our instincts tell us that we are on the brink of something very special.
Behind these successes is the tireless work of those involved (at club level and in the university sphere), the RFEG (currently led by the vice president of the RFEG Mar Ruiz de la Torre and the president of the Women’s Committee, Covadonga Basagoiti), and the regional federations.
In addition to the players’ talent and undeniable effort, it is clear that when there are resources, results are achieved, and those results attract public attention. We see it in golf, in women’s football, in the recent and spectacular achievements in athletics, or in many other sports (women have won more than 50% of Spain’s medals in the last six Olympic Games).
As Mike Whan, the current CEO of the USGA and former head of the LPGA Tour, stated shortly before the US Women’s Open, “if women’s golf were stocks, I would buy.”
Despite systemic inequality, despite players still facing greater difficulties in finding sponsorships or support, despite lower prize funds, despite the efforts they must dedicate to tangential aspects to secure a future, which, let’s not deny, can affect their professional performance, Spanish women’s golf faces a bright future thanks to this spectacular generation and the girls following in their footsteps (Adriana García Terol, Marta Muñoz, Liz Hao, etc.).
If I were you, I would pay close attention, even though it may sometimes be difficult to focus and we may not quite know where to look.
