Lorie KaneStephen Hindley
It hasn't been a vintage year for Lorie Kane, but she's showing signs that her game is coming back. The 46-year-old from Charlottetown who shot three-under-par 69 in the first round Thursday of the Ricoh Women's British Open has been working hard with Sean Foley, although the results haven't indicated the progress he feels she's made. That often happens when players are trying to make significant changes.
"Lorie and I have been doing the same thing for the last two years," Foley said in an e-mail Thursday after Kane posted her first round this year in the 60s, and at the Carnoustie Golf Links in Scotland. "It all starts with keeping her more athletic in her posture and then keeping her mobile enough to complete her full-body turn on the backswing. From that point it has been all about really working on getting her attack angle at impact a lot steeper."
Kane is 90th on the LPGA Tour's money list with $28,195 (U.S.) in six tournaments. She's won four times on the LPGA Tour, but not since 2001. Her best finish in the Women's British Open, which is always played on a links, is a T-6 in 2006 at Royal Lytham & St. Annes.
Kane's home is in Lake Nona, Fla., on the grounds of the Lake Nona Golf Club. She's not far from Foley, who of course works with Tiger Woods. He too has been slow to show progress, and nobody, not even Foley, knows when he will return to the PGA Tour. They've not hit balls for a long time, so it's looking increasingly doubtful that he will play in the PGA Championship that starts Aug. 11th at the Atlanta Athletic Club.
As for Kane, Foley said her swing "has definitely improved, but the compromise when you start with someone who has fallen so far is that the technique comes much faster than confidence and self-efficacy. So they can be doing great things but not seeing results as the results are directly correlated to confidence and self-belief."
Her round at Carnoustie should at least provide Kane a boost in confidence. But golf being golf, and even tour pros being fragile, that could change quickly. Kane could use an equally solid second round. That would give her a serious boost in self-confidence, which she could use.
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and, most recently, he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 11 books, including The Natural Golf Swing, with George Knudson (1988); Links: An Insider's Tour Through the World of Golf (1990); The Swing, with Nick Price (1997); The Fundamentals of Hogan, with David Leadbetter (2000); A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands (2001); Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); and his latest, This Round's on Me (2009). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca . You can now follow him on Twitter @lornerubenstein