As she reaches a milestone birthday, we share the untold stories of Karrie Webb’s brilliant career.
The 1986 Queensland Open – held ironically at Coolangatta-Tweed Heads Golf Club, which sits on the New South Wales side of the Tweed River – is considered by some to be the tournament where Greg Norman’s superstardom was officially born. He was a star before that, sure, but this was Norman’s first tournament on home soil as a newly minted Open Championship winner. A major champion hot off a sensational year.
But the state’s 1986 Open was a pivotal moment for another Queenslander, only this one was 11 years of age and craning her neck in the gallery to get a glimpse of the Great White Shark, and two-time major winner David Graham. The two were headlining the field. Norman lived up to his billing with a six-shot victory – his fourth win worldwide in five months after the PGA Tour’s Kemper Open, Las Vegas Invitational and The Open at Turnberry.
Watching Norman blast his way to second home state open win in three years changed the life of budding junior golfer Karrie Webb. “That was the first professional event I ever attended, and I just loved the whole atmosphere,” Webb recalls. “I loved that people came and watched top golfers. So, when I got back to North Queensland, I told my parents I wanted to be a professional golfer. I just knew it.”
Only there was a problem.
Webb was from Ayr. It’s a town that still has a population of only about 9,000. It’s 90 minutes south of Townsville and 1,250 kilometres north of Brisbane. Webb was discriminated against for living in a remote part of the country. And if it weren’t for her dogged determination, a winner of 41 LPGA Tour events may never have been unearthed.
“I didn’t make Queensland teams early on, when I really should have,” Webb recalls. “The QLG (Queensland Ladies Golf) association didn’t want to pay for the extra flight for me to get anywhere because I had to fly from Townsville. They’d have junior squad and state squad camps but instead of flying me down, I think they thought they could break me.
“If I didn’t attend the state camp, they thought they wouldn’t have to select me. So, they’d only provide a bus ticket. I can’t believe I did this, but from age 14, whenever a camp was on, my mum would put me on a Greyhound bus on a Thursday night and on Friday night I’d arrive in Brisbane, where my great aunty would pick me up. Saturday and Sunday was squad practice. Then, on Sunday night, my great aunty would put me back on a Greyhound bus and I’d get to Townsville Monday night. I had to miss two days of school and travel 24 hours each way. There were no mobile phones then.
“But I knew if I didn’t attend the squad practice, I’d miss selection in the Queensland teams. My parents couldn’t afford to fly me down, but they were good enough to let me have the two days off school. My school was great about it, too. I got good results, and as long as I was doing well academically, they overlooked my attendance record. Those junior years made me a grinder and a battler.”
Off the tips
Ayr Golf Club, a par 71 measuring just shorter than 5,200 metres, is the home course of World Golf Hall of Fame member Webb. Usually, tour players hold the course record at their home club. But Webb doesn’t, and there’s a good reason.
“No, I think the best I ever shot there was 69 and someone’s beaten that now,” Webb laughs. “Once I got to a certain handicap, I stopped playing from the ladies’ tees. I wanted to be a professional golfer, so I thought it was important to start challenging myself. I never went super-low after that, and I wasn’t allowed in the men’s comp. But I’d play the boys and the men in money games every Friday. In the beginning, I lost quite often.”
Webb didn’t know it at the time, but one silver lining of foregoing the ladies’ tees would pay dividends when she eventually joined the LPGA Tour. “I was just one of the boys; we would give each other a hard time with sledging, so you had to overcome a lot, mentally,” says Webb. “But don’t worry, once I started breaking par around the age of 14 and I started winning, I gave it as good as I got it.
“The best thing was, I wasn’t a very good long-iron player as a teenager and every time I’d pull out a 3-iron, I’d hear about how poorly I had hit the last four 3-irons. But if you ask any of the women I played against once I was on the LPGA Tour, they’d say I was one of the best with long irons they’d ever seen.”
Although Webb’s ambitions to become a professional started to take shape, she didn’t have any women idols to look up to. It was the 1980s; women’s golf was light years behind where it is now – and the same can be said of how women’s golf is covered.
“It wasn’t until years after the 1986 Queensland Open that I saw live professional women’s golf,” recalls Webb. “So, Norman was someone I really looked up to. Seve Ballesteros, too. For me, encyclopaedias were the only way to read about women’s golf and even they didn’t have much on the subject. I knew about Jan Stephenson and that she was an Aussie accomplishing great things in the US.”
As usual, Web rolled up her sleeves and tried to do something about it. “I can’t remember what golf magazine it was, but I wrote to the editor and asked for more women’s golf content or, at the very least, if they could post scores from women’s tournaments. I think they reprinted the letter, years later.”
Webb has blazed the trail for not only women’s professional golf in Australia, but internationally as well. The LPGA Tour is now a lucrative circuit packed full of stars. The coverage is widespread but remains a work in progress. In the 1980s, however, making a career from professional golf was not considered a possibility for women – let alone a good idea. Certainly, not in remote North Queensland.
“My parents always believed in me,” Webb says proudly. “They just told me I needed to do well in school and anything else was totally up to me. It was other adults I grew up around who would say to my parents, ‘Are you really going to let her believe she can do that?’ Quite honestly, when adults would say that, what were the chances it was going to play out the way it has? More than one in a million? Coming from where I came from, and being a woman, there were plenty of hurdles. But none of the obstacles I jumped ever felt like obstacles to me. If they were pointed out to me, it just made me work harder. Throughout my childhood, I definitely had to prove people wrong, and it made me stubborn, I think. Obstacles were just a thorn in my side and I wanted to win the battle.”
Quite the Gap Year
After several years of 48-hour round trips on Greyhound buses to Brisbane, Webb felt minor pressure to move to the big city in order to have more resources at her disposal as she geared up to turn pro.
But it would have meant changing coaches from Kelvin Haller and Webb did not want to do that. So, she stayed in Ayr for the first year after high school. “I stayed at home in Ayr, rent-free,” Webb laughs. “My mum owned a fish-and-chip shop and that was open for morning tea and lunch. So, I worked there part-time and I also had a job behind the bar at the golf club. I also worked some hours in the pro shop. All three of those jobs were fine when I had to travel for golf tournaments.
“My second year out of high school, I moved to Townsville and worked at Willows Golf Club in the pro shop. When I turned pro [in 1994], I had $200 in my bank account, but it cost more than that to join the ALPG. So, I had to borrow money to even join.”
Now 20, Webb was a fully fledged professional golfer. In itself, that was an achievement for a young woman from Ayr. But it wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg.
Webb had sold almost all her possessions and borrowed money from her grandmother to fund her journey. She travelled to Portugal for the qualifying school ahead of the Ladies European Tour season in March 1995. She got her card, but the season didn’t start until May. So, Webb hopped over the Atlantic Ocean to play a handful of events on the secondary women’s tour in the US.
Webb was in Ocala, Florida, for the 1995 Ocala Futures Classic and she was billeted with Craig and Debbie Mueller as a host family for the week. Craig was Ocala’s chief firefighter at the time and had not heard of this young phenomenon from Australia.
“She was a shy kid from a small town who had sold everything she owned and borrowed money from her grandmother to set out on this journey,” Mueller told Golf Channel writer Randall Mell. “The only thing she really brought with her was this confidence in her ability to play professional golf.”
It was only Webb’s third professional tournament in the US, but she demolished the field to win by eight shots and collected her first winner’s cheque on US soil for $US4,500. She remains friends with the Mueller family to this day.
With the confidence of a US victory under her belt, Webb travelled back to Europe and hit the ground running. She would record a huge victory by blowing away Annika Sorenstam and Jill McGill by six shots at the Women’s British Open at Woburn Golf Club, although it was not yet a major championship. “I still had to go to Q-School in the US,” Webb laughs. “But I was set up financially to be able to focus on playing and competing.”
Winners are grinners
Webb had grinded her entire childhood and high school years just to be able to turn professional. So, when the grafting began to pay off – literally – the young Queenslander rewarded herself.
In the 1994 Australian summer of golf, Webb played her first two tournaments as a professional – the Australian Open at Royal Adelaide and the Australian Masters at Royal Pines.
“At the Australian Masters, I ended up finishing second to Laura Davies and I won $A25,000. I thought I was a millionaire,” Webb laughs. “I had worked so hard for so many years, it was really satisfying to see it pay off. I don’t know how many times I went to an ATM just to get an account balance.
“I didn’t waste much time spending it; I went and bought a Tag Heuer watch and because it was just before Christmas, my family got pretty good Christmas presents. My mum didn’t want me wasting it, but with $25,000, I thought I was made. I wanted to treat my family.”
The next treat was a substantial step up. In 1996, in just her second event as a member of the LPGA Tour, Webb won the Walt Disney World event at Lake Buena Vista in the Orlando area.
“I had planned to rent in the US, so I ended up buying a house in Orlando,” she recalls. “I guess that was a pretty good reward.”
Five months later, Webb won her second LPGA Tour title at the 1996 Titleholders Championship at the LPGA Tour International course at Daytona Beach, Florida. “With my second win, I bought a BMW M3,” Webb says. She would win two more LPGA Tour events in a breakout debut season, claiming LPGA Tour Rookie of the Year honours by a country mile. More rewards came, including the purchase of a house in the West Palm Beach area, a house she still lives in to this day. “Then, other wins from there, I ended up doing renovations to the house I currently live in,” she says. In fact, Webb’s manager and family were a little concerned at the rate she was splurging.
“I didn’t comprehend early on the money I was making and didn’t understand I could completely stop making that money the next year,” Webb says with an honest laugh. “My parents were worried about the money I was spending and my agent was worried. I remember saying, ‘But I have the money!’ I never thought I’d stop making that money. I was very naïve in a good way, I think. It was me backing myself not to have lean years on the course.”
First 10, next 10
In the first decade of her LPGA Tour career, Webb would establish herself as one of the game’s most dominant players and one of the most successful sports stars from Australia. In 2004, she won her 30th LPGA Tour title before turning 30. Webb would also claim six of her seven majors before 2003. She had become a bona fide superstar.
However, Webb would hit a ‘slump’ by her standards and wouldn’t win an LPGA Tour event for almost two years. In the meantime, Webb became eligible World Golf Hall of Fame membership in June 2005. At the age of 30, she was the youngest person ever to fit the criteria. Although honoured, Webb was self-conscious of the title given her win drought.
It’s what made the 2006 Kraft Nabisco Championship – Webb’s seventh and final major win – the most fulfilling victory of her career.
“Definitely, the most thrilling win I had was when I won what’s now called the ANA Inspiration in 2006 – back then it was called the Kraft Nabisco,” Webb says of the women’s major played annually in the California desert until 2022.
Webb famously holed a 106-metre shot from the fairway for eagle at the final hole in regulation to enter a playoff with legendary Mexican golfer Lorena Ochoa. Webb then birdied the same hole, the 18th, in a sudden-death playoff to beat Ochoa for her second Kraft Nabisco Championship title.
“I had been inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame and the LPGA Hall of Fame at the end of 2005, but it was my first year on the LPGA Tour when I hadn’t won in a calendar year,” Webb recalls. “I had very little perspective as a 30-year-old, and I thought it was end of the world.
“As far as slumps go, it was the longest I’d had in my career to that point. And so even going into that week [at the 2006 Kraft Nabisco], I hadn’t had any good showings. I was in the last group on Saturday and played poorly and I was really upset with myself. To go out and still win it on Sunday, it changed my mentality completely.”
Webb would go on a tear, winning four more LPGA Tour titles in the seven months after the Kraft Nabisco. “Well, 2006 has always been one of the top three years of my career, but I think it could go up there as my best. Purely because there was no momentum coming into the year. It gave me more energy heading into the next 10 years.”
Sydney 2000
Webb’s unfathomable success on the course has brought plenty of accolades and honours away from the fairways. The biggest non-golf honour of Webb’s career came at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, where, as world No.1, Webb was gifted the honour of running the Olympic torch. The Sydney Games were held in September and October and on a balmy Thursday night, one day before the opening ceremony, the scene was set for arguably the most successful staging of the Olympics in its history.
Enormous crowds packed into Sydney’s CBD to see the 99th day of the Olympic torch’s journey across Australia. In the afternoon, Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli sang an aria from Verdi after handing off the torch to Aussie pop star Olivia Newton-John.
Webb, though, wasn’t given just any leg of the torch relay. She was given the final leg – along George St and up the steps of Town Hall to light the community cauldron. Police estimated one million people lined George St to witness Olympic swimming icon Dawn Fraser hand the torch to Webb. Try not to get goose bumps thinking of that moment.
Webb lit the flame of the community cauldron, the night before the torch would transfer that flame to Homebush, where Cathy Freeman lit the Olympic cauldron and kicked off the 2000 Olympics.
“Outside of anything I’ve done in golf, that’s the highlight of anything related to my career,” Webb recalls proudly. “To run the last leg the night before the opening ceremony is something you’ll never forget. And for Dawn Fraser to hand the torch to me for that last leg makes it all the more special.
“When I was standing in position on George St, waiting for Dawn, I was so amped up. It was all televised and my friend [accomplished tennis star] Rennae Stubbs was in the athlete’s village because she was representing Australia for tennis at the Olympics. Rennae was watching and I was so revved up that I was too fast. She was yelling at the TV for me to slow down – slow down and enjoy it. It was hilarious, her telling me that later on.”
A decade later, on Australian Day in 2010, Webb was made a Member of the Order of Australia for “services to golf, and to the community as a benefactor and supporter of a range of health and disability organisations”. In 2018, Webb was upgraded to an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished services to golf at the elite level as a player, to the development of female golfers, as a mentor and role model, and through charitable and community organisations”.
“I think it’s different to the Olympic torch run, purely because my agents had asked about the possibility of me running a portion of the Olympic torch relay. I was thrilled to be given the leg I got,” Webb says. “Whereas the Officer of the Order of Australia is something you don’t petition for, it is given to you. They were very, very humbling occasions because you’re held in the highest esteem in the whole nation.”
Webb has also become something of a superfan and almost ambassador for NRL team the North Queensland Cowboys. Serendipitously, the Cowboys, who are based in Townsville but represent the entire North Queensland region, formed as a club in 1995 – just months after Webb had turned pro.
The Cowboys became a second favourite team for many rugby league fans, firstly because they were heavily supported by the North Queensland region and people wanted a remote part of Australia to have a successful team. Secondly, the popularity of great player such as Matt Bowen – a Cairns native and a lightning-fast, devastating fullback –as well as Johnathan Thurston made it hard not to like the Cowboys. Thurston, a favourite of many and considered one of the greatest rugby league players ever, became the heart, soul, sergeant-at-arms and captain of the team.
The Cowboys had made the 2005 NRL grand final but lost to the Wests Tigers. That was a year after Thurston, while still playing for Sydney’s Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs, had come off the bench for the Bulldogs in their grand final victory. But Thurston felt like his 2004 premiership didn’t count, and so many NRL fans wanted a premiership win for him and for the Cowboys. They couldn’t get the monkey off their back.
Until 2015. North Queensland won the grand final 17-16 in golden point extra time in their 20th year in competition. Due to its dramatic ending, the match is considered one of the greatest grand finals in rugby league history. In the final seconds, Thurston initiated a play that resulted in winger Kyle Feldt scoring in the corner to level the scores at 16-all. Thurston missed the try conversion which would have won the match, before he atoned with an iconic drop-goal in golden point to win the finale.
Webb, a tragic Cowboys fan, was moving mountains to watch the match via a live stream overseas.
“I was on my way to Malaysia from the US, and I landed in Frankfurt Airport in Germany from New York,” Webb recalls. “I had a huge layover, like four hours, and it coincided with almost the entire match.
“So, I watched most of the game in the airport lounge. When I got to Frankfurt, I had a shower and put my Cowboys jersey on and sat down to watch it. There were plenty of other LPGA Tour players in transit with me and they were like, ‘What are you doing?’ I told them the grand final was on and not to annoy me because I had my headphones in.
“Our flight to Singapore [before going onto Malaysia] was delayed, which was good, because the match was going to overlap. But when the flight was announced as boarding, there were a few minutes to go in the game. I went down to the gate but apparently they weren’t boarding, so I ran back up to the lounge in time to watch Kyle Feldt score in the corner.
“By then the flight actually started to board and it got to last call. I had to leave the lounge, get on that flight and not be able to see golden point. One of the LPGA staff was on the flight and I had no signal on my phone, so I asked if the LPGA staffer could google, ‘NQ Cowboys Broncos NRL final’ and the search said, ‘Cowboys win in golden point.’ So, I at least knew before I had a 12-hour flight from Frankfurt to Singapore that they had won. It would have been torture to sit on that flight not knowing the result.”
Three decades after those Greyhound bus rides from Ayr to Brisbane, this was one long-haul trip Webb thoroughly enjoyed.
Feature image: getty images
