DailyExpertNews
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undeserved. Anxious. cheater.
From two-time winner of the Ladies European Tour (LET) to Wales’ first-ever Solheim Cup player, there were many ways for spectators to label Becky Brewerton in 2012, but none came close to the way she described herself.
Previously a great amateur, Brewerton had traveled the world for eight years to compete at the top of women’s professional golf. Then, almost overnight, her game disappeared.
Regular top-10 rankings became fleeting and then no more, and as Brewerton’s ranking dropped, so did her income. Soon without a place to live or a car, she was delivering parcels and takeaways, completely abandoning any vague hopes of a professional golf career.
How could an elite athlete who has spent countless hours honing his craft suddenly become nearly paralyzed by fear and anxiety every time she enters a competition? And more importantly, how do they overcome that fear of returning to the highest level years later?
In January 2012, Brewerton enjoyed a quiet Sunday afternoon in Spain before deciding to go for a bike ride. A small rock on a corner later, the 29-year-old flew over the steering wheel, her hip slamming into the curb.
She cut her head and ripped off half the skin on her right hand, the crash was so severe it left a dent around her hip joint large enough to fit her entire thumb.
But barely two weeks later, despite looking more like a recently defeated boxer than a golfer, a bruised Brewerton stumbled on a plane to Australia to play a torrent of events down under.
Four events, four missed cuts: The quintessentially consistent Welsh woman soon found herself in unfamiliar waters of form, drowning in similarly unfamiliar feelings.
If she stepped over the ball, her mind and limbs would completely disconnect, seemingly on a whim and with increasing regularity.
Approaching the first tee, Brewerton was often greeted with a tight chest and palpitations, as the task of simply hitting the ball where she wanted became extremely daunting.
“Although it was a physical fall I had, it didn’t feel like the physical part of the injury was causing a problem. It felt like my ghost; I was scared,” Brewerton told DailyExpertNews’s Alex Thomas.
“Maybe it was partly the shock that something like this happened, but it was the first time I felt really scared on the golf course.
“I closed my eyes and it was like there were cars driving at a thousand miles an hour all the time. I just couldn’t think clearly because if I had thought clearly I would have realized something was wrong and I would have tried do something about it instead of just carrying on.”
While she believes it was a mistake to run back to the game so soon after that fateful bike ride, she acknowledges that not everything felt right as she reflects on her psychological issues, even as she reveled in her success.
Even when she stormed onto the stage as European Women’s Amateur Champion in 2002, finishing second in two LET events at just 16 years old, Brewerton fought her doubts.
Two Tour wins in 2007 and 2009 did little to quench such feelings. Even as she made history during those years to reach the pinnacle of the women’s game and twice represented Europe at the Solheim Cup, Brewerton’s internal struggle continued.
“Because I didn’t talk about that at the time, there was a part of me that thought, ‘I’m just weird or I’m just weird,’ or people will think I’m weird if I say something.
“I just thought: one day this will all go wrong.” My biggest fear was that I didn’t know if I could be the player I wanted to be.
“I always doubted myself and it was very much like the imposter syndrome… ‘I don’t deserve to be here, I don’t belong here, I’m not as good as all the other players out here.’
“Even in tournaments where I won, I obviously enjoyed it, but there was a part of me that always felt, ‘Did I deserve that? How did I do that?’, because I didn’t believe I could.
“And then suddenly it’s like it builds up and builds up and one day it was like the glass got a little too full and everything just shattered.”
Brewerton traces its roots back to childhood, where an ingrained attitude of ‘just keep going’ overwhelmed all thoughts of asking for help.
When golf became a full-time profession, her sense of self became dangerously intertwined with results.
“Even some people who were my friends, and no one does it intentionally, but everyone always wants to know how your golf is,” she said.
“No one ever asks how you are, so you feed the story that your whole identity is in it whether you play well or not.”
This connection proved devastating when Brewerton’s form went into free fall.
After achieving five top-10 finishes at the LET in 2011, over the following nine seasons, she would achieve the same feat only three times, and after 2014.
At the Ladies European Masters in 2016, all of Brewerton’s fears were brutally expressed. After being obsessed with making an embarrassing score for weeks, a self-fulfilling prophecy told her by officials that she could not return for round two after shooting 88 on opening day.
Still, it was this new low that marked a turning point for Brewerton.
“It was weird, when it actually happened it was almost a relief that it was done,” Brewerton recalls.
“I didn’t have to obsess over it anymore, because the worst had happened and lo and behold, nothing terrible happened – I was still alive, still healthy.
“You build these things up like, ‘you’ll never be able to do anything again,’ and then, once it happens, you realize, ‘Okay, that’s it, now it’s time to move on.'”
In Brewerton’s own words, she had bottomed out.
She played only a handful of events in the following years, working for Amazon, Deliveroo and in a golf club’s pro shop. Without a place to live, she stayed with a friend and former physical trainer for two and a half years.
Despite her struggles in the game, Brewerton never fell in love with golf.
Working other jobs acted as a “reality check” and offered a perspective of how lucky she felt to be a professional athlete. While doubts remained, Brewerton was encouraged to start over.
Paradoxically, that meant less golf.
Looking back, Brewerton believes she has often been guilty of overtraining, at the expense of working on the mental side of her game. She eschewed her tournament appearances, began journaling and meditating, and began working—and sometimes brutally honesty—with a performance coach.
“Sometimes it’s hard to be deadly honest because it’s disturbing, so it’s hard to talk about it,” she said. “I kind of had to get over the shame, if you will, of being afraid of getting angry in front of other people.
“It takes a lot of time to change your thought process because if you think deep in the back of your mind that you’re not very good or you’re making it hard on yourself, you can’t just turn it off. If you could do it, anyone could.
“You see, my golf got so much better because I practiced less and my body didn’t hurt as much and was actually healing the stretch that made the biggest difference.”
After returning to LET qualifying school towards the end of 2021 to get her Tour card back, Brewerton found herself enjoying tournament golf again.
Returning from an event in November, Brewerton set to work on a blog post titled “How did I get so bad at golf?”
The response was emphatic, with the rejuvenated golfer stunned by the echoes of similar experiences among fellow golfers.
Comfortably within the top-20-ranked players on the LET, Brewerton is having her best season in a decade, with three top-10 finishes highlighting a flurry of top-25 outings.
While she dreams of a return to silverware, the 39-year-old is aiming for a success beyond victories.
“Deep down, I would love it if that happened. But the flip side is that if I start to get obsessed with that, I know it’s the route that led me to those dark places in the first place,” she said.
“It’s weird, sports. You live for those moments when you are in those pressured situations, and yet when you get there sometimes you interpret that as a nervous feeling that you don’t want to or you get all the big pumps of adrenaline and you start to doubt yourself, too though you have done all the work you do to be in that position in the first place.
“So I definitely promised myself, hand on heart, that I’m not going to interpret that feeling as a bad thing because this is what we live for.”