Catriona Matthew

As relationships with golf tournaments go, few have a more storied and intimate connection with a particular event than Catriona Matthew has with the AIG Women’s Open.

A Champion at Royal Lytham & St Annes – this year’s host venue – in 2009, Catriona had given birth just 11 weeks earlier, reigning victorious in the most unlikely and heroic of circumstances.

Yet ‘Beany’, as Matthew is affectionately known, has ties with the Championship that go beyond her fairytale victory.

Debut and early years

Catriona made her debut in the Championship as a 23-year-old amateur in 1993, before the AIG Women’s Open was an LPGA-sanctioned event, and quickly found herself walking among giants of the game.

“I remember going down and my Mum actually trolley-pulled for me that week,” she said. “It was very different those days, I remember she was very nervous.

“I think I might have played with Trish Johnson one day. You’re seeing Laura Davies, Alison Nicholas, Helen Alfredsson, all these people who were obviously that little bit older than you and had all turned pro and done really well.

"So it’s a nerve-racking experience, and you’re suddenly thrown out your comfort zone as such, from playing in amateur things to suddenly going and playing with people you’ve probably only really read about.”

Catriona performed admirably and returned to the event two years later. The Scot would finish T12, T35 and T5 over the next three years, quickly finding her feet amid high-calibre competition.

'Beany’ picked up her first wins as a professional not long after. She defeated Karrie Webb to win the Women’s Australian Open in 1996, and the week before the Women’s Open in 1998, she won the Wales Ladies Championship of Europe on the European Tour, beating her heroes Davies and Alfredsson by five shots.

Catriona missed the cut at the Women's Open in 1998 before a T68 finish and a missed cut followed in the next two years. The Championship gained major status in 2001 and that was the year Catriona really made her mark.

Holes in one and close calls

As Catriona’s career progressed, she won her first LPGA Tour event in early 2001, beating Annika Sorenstam in Hawaii. In her first three wins on three different Tours, Catriona had beaten four AIG Women's Open Champions by a total of 11 strokes.

Now showing clear signs of a potential major champion, Catriona registered her fourth top-10 in a major at the US Women's Open in 2001, and was one of the home favourites for the first major on British soil.

She started superbly at Sunningdale, and marked the occasion with a magical hole-in-one on the 15th hole in round two to take the outright lead.

Catriona held top spot on Sunday morning but she closed with a 73 while others around her charged ahead. She eventually finished five shots behind Champion Se-Ri Pak.

"I remember we had rain delays and different things there," she said, "so it was a testing last couple of days.

“I think you do learn, whether at the time you really realise you’re learning a whole lot from not winning [I'm not sure], but I think you do. When you get in that position again I think you learn from what went wrong the time before.”

Catriona would record her second Championship hole-in-one three years later, again at Sunningdale, this time on the 8th. It would be another three years until she was in contention again, this time finishing T7 at St Andrews in 2007.

Catriona's best, however, was yet to come.

Glory days

Heading into the AIG Women's Open at Royal Lytham and St Annes in 2009, Catriona was less than three months on from giving birth to her second child. Her preparation understandably took a hit.

"If we’re being brutally honest, it was zero preparation really, wasn’t it," she said.

"I think before the event I’d maybe been hitting for not long, I’d gone to the Evian [Championship] the week before to get a little warm-up, then obviously that was slightly disrupted with a hotel fire and different things."

That hotel fire in the middle of the night at the Evian Championship gave Catriona and her husband – and caddie – Graeme a scare. Fortunately nobody was seriously hurt, but the incident did nothing to raise Catriona's expectations for the week ahead.

"I think going into that week at Lytham I was probably more relaxed than I had been in ones previously where I’d obviously been playing well, and you always want to do well and perform in your home Open,” she said.

"I probably put too much pressure on myself, so that one I actually came in with so little preparation I wasn’t expecting too much. I probably came in with less pressure on myself, which obviously helped. You just wish you could have played every week with less expectation on yourself."

Catriona’s relatively carefree approach allowed her to play a freewheeling brand of golf. After a tricky start, she hit top gear towards the end of round two, carding her third Championship hole-in-one on the 12th hole en route to an incredible seven-under-par 30 on the back nine.

Catriona’s brilliance gave her a great shout of victory. She held the lead after the opening nine holes of the final round, despite not showing her best form, but the nerves were starting to get to her.

"It probably wasn’t really until that last day that I actually realised I had a good chance to win the event," she said. "I mean obviously I had a bit of a shaky front nine, and I remember playing the 10th hole, which to be fair I hadn’t played well all week.

"I had to take a penalty drop by the green, and then I actually made a really good up-and-down for bogey, and I remember my husband saying: ‘It’s not often that a bogey is a great bogey but that was a great bogey.’

"It kept me tied for the lead, and we just both wanted to push on from there, I had nothing to lose. At the end of the day no-one was really expecting me to win, so I think that kind of really settled me.

"I’d played the 11th hole well all week, and in fact I played those last eight holes well all week, so I went in with confidence, and we just kind of said to ourselves: 'We’re not going to lose this; we’re not going to lose that lead.'"

Catriona went on to have another great back nine and won by three shots, enjoying her final walk up to the 18th green to a huge ovation from the crowd. Yet the Scot knows her up-and-down on the 10th, which kept her in a tie for the lead at the time, was the momentum boost she needed.

"I think that was a huge thing," she said, “because I remember there was a leaderboard either at the 10th green or the 11th tee, so I could see when I holed that putt I knew it was keeping me tied for the lead.

"There’s always a psychological thing to be tied for the lead rather than to lose your lead altogether, so holing that … that was kind of the impetus I needed to push on."

Catriona – a two-time Solheim Cup-winning captain – went on to finish in the top-10 three more times before enjoying one final, magical Championship appearance, at St Andrews – the home of golf – in 2024 [below].

And she knows more than most how special the AIG Women’s Open is.

"Obviously as a British person the AIG Women’s Open is the one you’d want to win," she said. "I think being on courses like Troon, Lytham, Birkdale, where the men’s Open is played, just elevates the event as well.

“They're courses the public know and they’ve seen Seve [Ballesteros] playing out the car park at Lytham, for example, so they can kind of relate to the golf courses."