Welcome back to another edition of the Fried Egg Podcast. I am joined here by Garrett Morrison, editor managing editor of The Frida Egg.
Not just an editor managing I'm a manager of editors.
Yeah, you manage my ass, you know. So we got a new podcast format here. Pretty exciting, you do.
Yeah. So this episode is going to take the form of a documentary podcast. We're basically telling the story of Megan McLaren, Ladies European Tour player at Q School and then getting some of her thoughts about the state of the women's game and some other things. But instead of presenting it just as the traditional interview, we are telling it as a story with voiceovers for me, excerpts from my interview with her, a little bit of music to
go along with the story. It's you know, it's a it's a documentary format that we're trying out here just to see how it works.
Yeah, we're gonna call them Frida Egg Stories for now, unless we come up with a better name.
If you've got a better name, let us open to suggestions.
Yeah, absolutely, I'll hate you with some swag if we use it.
That's what we can offer.
And then you got another one next week. So it should be exciting.
Yeah, if I can put it together, there'll be something that is President's Cup themed, something about Australia, and that should be pretty interesting. But I've got a massive tape to work through first, and we'll see what I can assemble.
Yeah, So let us know what you think of the new format and if you like it, let us know. If you hate it, let us know and we'll get better.
That's the idea.
I think this is pretty good though, So without further ado, here's Megan McLaren.
Frid Egg requires a different technique. What you need to do is actually square the face so it'll dig down underneath that bad.
Lie and propel that ball right out onto the green. Here's the thing.
Playing out of a buried lion of bunker is completely different than playing out of a nice clean lion a greenside bunker.
You need to be aggressive on any shop, whether it's sitting cleanly. For it's Friday Egg, well we've all faiked it. The dreaded Frida Egg not to be feared though.
It's actually a pretty easy shot to hit.
Megan McLaren was a standout golfer in college. She turned pro after graduating and now she's one of the top players on the Ladies European Tour. But before all that, Meg was a Harry Potter geek.
I remember I must have been I don't know how old. I was pretty young, like seven or eight or nine or something like that, and like this Harry Potter grace was taken over the whole of England. And this was somebody who absolutely loved reading. And for whatever reason, I had this like, I'm not gonna like Harry Potter. Harry Potter's not for me. Harry Potter's for like, you know, weird people who were into things that can never ever happen in real life, you know. So I was like
completely refused, point blank to even try it. And I remember one night, I think my mum had put like some clean washing on my bed or something, and on top was the Harry Potter book, like the first one. So I was like, okay, fine, you know I'm gonna hate this, but whatever, I'll try it. And I could not put it down. I was like, you're stereotypical, like falling over myself reading a book. I took it to school, I read it in the cars. Even if I like felt sick, I just you know, and that was it.
I was hooked, and the magical adventure may have extended a bit beyond childhood.
And I would even I remember like, I'm probably going to get myself into I'm going to get abuse for this now. But I remember coming back from college and I saw, I really want to read something, but I've got nothing to read. And I remember reading all of the Harry Potter books from start to finish that summer, like it just it's one of those things that once, once you're in it, you're in it.
Obviously, Meg had a passion for reading, and over time, as it often does, that turned into a passion for writing. Four years ago, the age of twenty, she started a blog at megmaclaren dot com. She's kept it up to this day, and it's it's great. It's this lovely account of a young golfer coming of age. She's not afraid to take on big issues like the gender gap in professional sports, but mostly she writes about a very personal subject, the inner life of an athlete who's fighting to get better,
and she does that really vividly and movingly. More and more people have been discovering Meg's blog, and she's happy about that, But the basic motivation of her writing is the same as it always has been.
It's just me trying to make sense of things, and in its simplest form, that's exactly what it is.
Part two Q School. On David Verity's TV show, Phil Nicholson said that in golf, to be successful, you have to be either really smart or really dumb. I don't know if that's true, but it should be clear at this point that Meg McLaren is in the really smart camp. That's part of why I wanted to talk to her. I was curious about how such an introspective person went about the job of a professional golfer. I mean, it's got to be exhausting, right in golf often helps not
to think, not to be too in your head. At the same time, golf is a complex game. If you want to understand it, it helps to be bright. A few weeks ago, Meg put her mental skills to the test. She spent most of October in the United States for LPGA Qualifying School. Right now, Meg makes her living on the Ladies European Tour or LT and she's doing well, but she's looking for more.
You know, at the end of the day, I want to test myself against the best players in the world, so that would mean playing on the LPGA.
In women's golf, the LPGA Tour is where big time careers are made. The lt just can't offer the same degree of security. So Q School was a major moment in Meg's career, potentially a turning point. What made it even more exciting was that she was on a role coming into Q School. She had just gotten a solo third at the Hero Women's Indian Open and her game felt strong.
You go from thinking I've got to try and figure out what the number is going to be and just you know, get by on that to thinking, actually, you know what, this is just like another tournament that I can try and win or try and see what the lowest score I can I can have each day.
Is that confidence got Meg through Stage two of Q School in Florida and into the final Q Series tournament. The Q Series format is a recent innovation, actually just introduced last year. Basically, instead of a regular seventy two whole event LPGAQ School now finishes with Q Series two weeks, eight rounds, one hundred and forty four holes. Top forty five and ties receive LPGA cards, So yeah, it's a grind.
It's incredibly hard, Like there's nothing I've ever played like that before, you know, like can golf. Obviously every shot counts, but this just feels like every counts to an even greater extent because it's just there's so many players around
you and everybody's just out for themselves. Like it's the atmosphere is quite hard to describe because you know that your entire year is dependent on it, So it's not you know, it's not a case of Okay, we can pick ourselves up and we can go again next week or the week after or the week after that. It's just like the here and the now is so important. It's incredible during that two week stretch, how many girls
I saw crying at different points. And that's not just when it's all over, like that was, you know, in the car park after four rounds, or after five rounds, or after six rounds. It's just it's just so mentally exhausting that you know, people just can't always cope with it.
This year's edition of Q Series was held at Pinehurst Resort between October twenty third and November two. As soon as it got underway. Meg knew that she didn't have her best game, but she hung in there, right on the bubble, hovering just above even par.
There's a lot of different ways to shoot level par or one over par, and sometimes it can be a fantastic one over par, and sometimes it can be you know, that could be the absolute highest score you could have shot. Almost every round, I sort of went to two or three over par and somehow found a way to shoot. I think I shot one over for the second, third, and fourth rounds. That that that in itself was exhausting, because every day I was trying to course something back.
Still, Meg kept telling herself that she didn't have to shoot lights out. The goal was just to advance.
I think the whole Q score process is a bit more about avoiding mistakes that are going to be really costly. You know, if you can keep doubles and worse off your card, then you're never going to be taking yourself too far away from from what the number is going to be.
At the beginning of the second week of play, Meg found something. The tournament had moved from the number six to the number nine course, and she had a new feeling out there, and I.
Think I shot a couple under the first day, and the second day, I was playing the best that I'd played the whole time I'd been out in the States, you know, and just having that freedom felt so relaxing in comparison to the week before.
During that second round of the week, her sixth round of the Q series, she got to three under par on the day, plus one for the tournament. Suddenly she was very much in the hunt for an LPGA membership. But then in her last four holes of the day she missed a couple of short cuts. On her seventeenth hole, she made her first double bogie of the entire tournament.
And then you turn around, you have a late finish and an early start the next day, and all of a sudden, yeah, energy is just completely gone, and you're trying to process around that you thought was going to kind of set you up for the rest of the week, and in reality, you've got to go back to grinding again.
Q school was about avoiding mistakes, and Meg was starting to make a few with mental fatigue setting in. She shot seventy five in her seventh and second last round, but the thing was she was still in it. She was seven over and it was looking like the number was going to be four or five.
And to be honest, because of everything that had happened the previous two weeks, the one thing I knew was that I could find a way to get myself back in it, however I felt.
But the next day, the last day, it didn't start how she wanted.
I played the par fives really well the whole time I was out there, because I was knocking my wedges in quite close. And I started on a par five in the last round, so knocked it to about six foot. I missed that plat for Birdie. I boged the next after hitting a bad drive, and then the next I was a part three and I hit it into about fifty foot, fancied the put for Birdie, knocked it a couple of feet past, and missed the put coming back.
So to start like that in the final round, where you know you need to shoot underpa and all of a sudden you're two over having hit one bad drive, that was you know, it was tough to kind of care my way back from that.
She tried, though, as she had done all week, Meg kept herself afloat, hacked my.
Way up one hole, hold a fifteen foot of the pass, I was like, you know, got three holes left. If I can find two birdies, I might have a chance. And on my sixteenth hole, I think it was I hit my drive into trouble, had to chip out and ended up making double. And that was finally the moment
where I knew I couldn't do it. You know, so you're you're there for however many holes, one hundred and something holes, and there's finally a moment with only kind of half an hour left, where you know it's gone. So whenever that hits you, it's kind of like a
that's a pretty tough one to describe. It hits you all at once, that all of that energy that you've spent trying desperately to keep yourself in it, you know, it's just gone, and it's like you can feel all of that rushing out of your body kind of you know, it's the most flattening experience. And yet I think I think I birdied the next and it's just like it's one of those moments where you walk off the green and it's like, what, you know, what even is this
game that we play? Sometimes I remember my Caddy turned to me after so I made double on sixteen, birdied seventeen and I probably had barely said a word in that space of time, and he turned to me and he just looked at me, and he was like, please just say something, like say anything so I know where you are. You know you've got you got so much running around your mind, but the reality is you're just exhausted.
It's just like you completely spent because you've given so much and you know that it's there hasn't been enough.
In that moment, Meg ended up with her second straight seventy five. She finished ten over five shots away from getting her LPGA card. Now that a couple of weeks have passed, Meg has had some time first not to think about it and then to reflect on what went right and what went wrong. Ultimately, it came down to something pretty simple, missing short cuts.
And it's not something that I would kind of do in my game in general, but it's just something that crept in. Whether it was like a mental thing or the kind of toll of the whole year finally kind of caught up with me, and that's where it showed itself.
Maybe it would have helped to be really dumb as Phil says, or at least to be able to just empty the thoughts from her head. Maybe. But if Meg's active mind got her into a bit of a hole at Pinehurst, it could help her get out too.
Those two, well three weeks, including second stage, probably taught me more about the game that I have right now and where that can get me than any other stretch of tournaments I've ever played, because sort of, in the reality of it, those courses out in America don't suit me because they're long and it's it was soft, and it was wet and it was cold, and that's not really the game that I play. But I kind of I coped with that far better than I thought I could.
And the thing that let me down, that really the only thing that stopped me from performing how I could have, was an area of my game that's usually a strength.
Part three. What's next? Despite the disappointment, there are a lot of positives for Meg right now. Just by advancing into Q Series, she earned status on the Symetra Tour, the feeder tour for the LPGA, so she has options Next year. She's likely to play a few tournaments in the States while staying busy on the lt AS I mentioned before, Meg has found success on the Ladies European Tour. This past season, she was fifth on the Order of Merit. She also won the Women's New South Wales Open in
Australia for the second year in a row. For Meg, the lat is starting to feel.
Like home once you find your feet in Europe. You know, it's such a place of belonging and of kind of growing together with other players. You can kind of push each other and compete with each other and not feel like you're all enemies at the same time. I think because a lot of girls are in similar positions. So you've got a base in Europe somewhere. You know, a lot of girls probably still living at home or with
their partners. You're looking for ways to keep the costs down because you're not playing for that much money, so you spend a lot of time on the same flights or getting airbnbs together, and cooking together and traveling together and going out to the you know, like the welcome receptions for tournaments together. So you just get used to
spending time together. So it does, you know a bit of a cliche to say it's like a family, but that's who you spend most of your time with so you better get on with each other or it's not going to be that much fun.
One reason the LAT feels like a family is that the players fight for each other, and one reason they fight for each other is that they have to. In recent years, playing opportunities on the LAT have dwindled, the schedule has gotten shorter, and since there's not much TV coverage of the events, sponsorships for the players have been few and far between.
I'd say the biggest difference in what I've seen anyway in America versus Europe, or in the men's game versus the women's game, it's the level of swanship there is. You know, it depends who you are and who you meet, but it's a lot more based on that in the women's game than it is with the big companies or equipment manufacturers kind of just paying you to play their equipment.
That doesn't happen in the women's game in Europe. There will be a fraction of girls in Europe that get paid to play equipment.
In addition to that, there are big disparities between men's and women's prize funds. On the men's European Tour, the average tournament perse is around three million euro, and that excludes majors and wgc's. On the Ladies' European Tour, the average non major purse is about eleven percent that size,
a bit above three hundred thousand euro. To put this in more personal terms, for winning the Women's New South Wales Open, Meg MacLaren earned about the same amount of money as burn Rithammer did when he tied for twenty seventh place at the Portugal Masters in October. What all of this means is that it can be tough for players on the LT to break.
Even, but you're probably looking at you know, maybe about fifteen fifteen thousand for the year, just in in traveling costs. If you want to earn that back, you're probably looking at coming top twenty in good events or top ten in the smaller events. So I mean, it's like anything. At the end of the day, if you play well enough, you'll be fine and you can make a good living in Europe, just as you can make an amazing living
in America. But as soon as things take a downward turn, or you miss a couple of cuts in a row, all of a sudden you're watching your back and you're thinking, can I afford to go here for a week of practice, or can I afford to bring my coach out, or can I afford to go and see the physio. That's whenever things get tough.
To be clear, Meg counts herself lucky that she gets to play golf for a living, but she also thinks it's important to call out the inequalities between the men's and women's games. When she does, her Twitter mentions take a turn for the unpleasant.
And I've said that before, and I've been I've been quoted as saying something along those lines before. And the amount of abuse I've had on social media and stuff for just saying something like that that it blows me away. You know, people will say it's it's just economics, and it's about people paying for what they you know, like marketing, exposure and all the rest of it, which which I understand.
You know, if we're not being shown on TV week in, week out, then then why would manufacturers pay us to play their equipment if nobody's going to see it? But I think it is. I think it runs a lot deeper than that.
Basically, Meg doesn't think it's good enough just to say, well, the market has assigned of value to women's golf, and that's just how it is. She believes we can change things, but she doesn't put the onus solely on manufacturers, or is solely onto her leadership, or solely on the media. She argues that it needs to be a collective effort that we all need to do a little better.
There's so many different angles that you can look at it from that it becomes a hard issue to kind of pinpoint a solution. But then at the same time, if everybody just did things slightly better. So I'm talking about the media, the players themselves. You know, we can market ourselves better or push for what we think we
deserve a bit stronger. You know, if the people who run the organizations, if they pushed a bit harder, or if equipment manufacturers wanted to put in a little bit money, or use some female athletes in some of their marketing campaigns. All these things from so many different kind of investors in golf, you know, they could all make a difference. If everybody did a little bit, it could end up
having a significant impact. But I think it's got to be a sort of combined effort and not just one or two different branches trying to push for change at the moment.
Fortunately, there's reason for hope. Just before Thanksgiving, the LT announced that it had formed a joint partnership with the LPGA Tour. While the details of that agreement have yet to be spelled out exactly, earlier reports suggests that persons on the LT will grow, and players are excited about all the possibilities. Still, there's plenty left to do. The biggest hurdle is that, in general, the golf world tends
to treat the women's game as secondary. That's an old and tenacious mindset, and obviously Meg thinks all of us do what we can to combat it. But that's not just because it's the virtuous thing to do or something. It's more that if we don't follow the women's game, we're missing out on a lot of good golf and a lot of good stories, really for no good reason.
It's not a simple case of saying, well, women's golf is boring, or women's golf is less entertaining, or women don't hit it as far. The amazing thing about golf as well is that there's so many intricacies to golf that make it compelling to watch, that make it entertaining, that make somebody who plays off twenty five able to relate to a professional golfer. It's unlike any other sport in that regard, and I think women's golf in particular has so much to offer to the casual golf fan.
You know, it's a shame that it isn't seen more, that it isn't exposed more. I think people would be amazed at how much they could learn from it.
Part four in between. Meg didn't set out to become a spokesperson for gender issues in pro golf. Just happened because she walks through the world as a woman and a golfer, and she reflects intensely on her experiences. At some point she realized that not everything is as it should be. If you look at her blog, you can see this realization happening, this growing understanding of her world and her place in it. You can also see from the very beginning a real desire to figure things out.
When Meg started the blog, she was at college in Florida, far from her home in England, and she was confused, but she was determined to try to make sense of it all.
I think it was just kind of dealing with being a college athlete in a country that you're not from, and then going back home and kind of dealing with more life at home, but also being a golfer as well, so competeing all over the world. But it was like having all these different lives that kind of intersected but then also you know, like collided at the same time. Like sometimes they just didn't they didn't add up.
The different parts of Meg's life still don't add up. Really. She's under no illusion that she has it all figured out, and often she feels like she's in a permanent state of transition. Her very first blog post, for example, was about being twenty years old and feeling in between in between two countries, in between childhood and adulthood. Then one of her most recent pieces is about standing in immigration lines,
another space of transition. It occurred to me that this is what it must be like to live as a pro golfer. You're constantly in transition. You're constantly in the process of becoming something new and trying to understand more and trying to do better. Right now, for instance, Meg MacLaren is between the disappointment of Q School and the open possibilities of the rest of her career.
And maybe life is just like that for everybody. You know, you never I don't know. Even if people are settled and have their routines, I'm not sure everybody is ever really completely grounded or completely Yep, this is everything that I wanted from life, right here and now in front of me. That's kind of the beauty of it as well. And I get to do that through golf, and I'm incredibly lucky to do that through golf. And I suppose golf itself is you know, it's another version of that.
Every round of golf has those in between moments and you're trying to deal with one moment to the next, you know, without getting ahead of yourself or without thinking too much about what's just happened. You know, there are so many similarities with what you go through in daytime a life, or as you transitioned from a child to a teenager to a college student to an adult, you know, and then it's like different levels of being an adult
as well. So it's I don't know, I guess they kind of mirror each other in lots of different ways.
This episode was a Frida Egg production. It was created and hosted by me Garrett Morrison, with editing from Jay Vierick. Our executive producer is Andy Johnson. Thanks for listening. This was obviously something new for us, so let us know what you think and whether you'd like to hear more