There are weeks that change a career and then there are those that change an entire life. For Maja Stark, this week in Wisconsin both have happened.
The 25-year-old Swede has claimed perhaps the most prestigious title in women’s golf this Sunday, the U.S. Women’s Open, and she did it carrying something much heavier than a bag of clubs: doubt. Between 2021 and 2023, the young Stark accumulated seven professional victories, between the LET and the LPGA, but since February two years ago, she found herself a bit more stagnant and without touching metal.
This season her best result had been a fifth place in the T-Mobile Match Play and with three missed cuts along the way in the LPGA. She wasn’t going through the best of streaks.
“Just last week, my confidence was on the floor,” she confessed after her victory. “A good friend told me a few days ago: you have to trust yourself, and that’s what I tried to do. I wanted to be proud of myself and for my team to be proud too.” The key worked. You never know when a piece of advice at the right moment or the right words in a moment of need can influence people so much.
However, the US Open didn’t seem like the best test to put doubts to the test. The length of the course, the hellish greens, and a rough that makes you sweat are not, a priori, the best context to silence the inner monologue. Quite the opposite. For the Swede, it was curiously a balm, a medicine.
Maja had felt the vertigo up close: “The reality is that I was worried because I felt it would be a long time before I played good golf again. This is huge, surreal I would say.” And that’s how golf is, sometimes when expectations roll on the floor, that pressure that grips and squeezes until you’re breathless is unconsciously released.
And the challenge of Erin Hills was fierce. “Probably the hardest thing was the greens,” admitted Stark. “The USGA just loves to make things difficult for us. They place the flags on small mounds, and they look terrifying. In fact, I’m exhausted…”
She doesn’t say it with lament, but with the raw realism of someone who has survived a brutal week. Because, yes, the flags were on slopes, the greens were fast and treacherous, and the course was unforgiving. But in the end, Stark won. Not just against the course, but against her own fear.
“I didn’t see the scoreboards until the 17th hole. I took a look. It was nice. I wasn’t as nervous as I thought I would be. I felt like I had some control over my game.” The wait on the 18th, while Julia battled against Erin Hills, could have felt eternal, but she had an infallible weapon: “My caddie is a show, he could go into comedy and he was making jokes the whole time and made it go by quickly, so it wasn’t that hard.”
It’s no coincidence that the most repeated word in her statements was “confidence.” In a sport played in silence and lost in the mind, Stark found a way to keep believing. This Sunday her name has been engraved on one of the most iconic trophies in women’s golf. Maja’s story will remain as a reminder that sometimes, you just need someone to tell you: trust.
