“Sometimes things have to get ugly before they get better.”
The words of golfer Leonie Harm, who won her first Ladies European Tour title in May, cementing the 28-year-old’s achievement on home soil at the German Masters as one of the most inspirational sports stories of the year.
In 2013, aged 15, Harm was hit by a car driven by a drunk driver, who was travelling at 44mph, when crossing the street in her native Heidelberg, a city in south-west Germany. The paramedics, arriving at the scene to see blood dripping from both her ears, feared the teenager would not survive.
The injuries were multiple: a fractured skull, broken hip, ankle, ribs and a collapsed lung. She spent five days in an induced coma. When Harm woke up, she had no memory of the incident, just a bad feeling something serious had happened. The last thing she remembered was her mother, Desiree, telling her to “sleep fast,” just like she always had before bedtime.
Seven weeks later, Harm was back on the golf course.
But the “ugly” that Harm describes in our interview is not just about her near-death experience.
In 2014, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Two years later, in the summer of 2016, she passed away. Harm was 19.
“My brother (Steffen) and my dad (Hans-Dieter) were quite shocked by how quickly it happened,” Harm says. “But my mom and I were really close, to the point where I was maybe the one person she did confide in that it was serious and it was gonna be over within weeks, not months.
“I saw her suffer to the point where the life she was living towards the end wasn’t a life that she wanted for herself. It was a lot of pain.
“Obviously, losing a parent under any circumstances, at any age, is never good. It’s always awful. It’s always a horrific loss. It always hits you. But I had the chance to say goodbye. We were all in the same country and maybe her body was waiting for that to be able to say goodbye.”
Harm pauses. The memories, the grief, the emotion of it all is flooding back. “And I’m crying again, man.”
After Harm’s golfing career ends, she wants to dedicate her life to cancer research. A biochemistry and biophysics sciences graduate of the University of Houston, during the COVID pandemic she worked for biotech company CureVac AG trying to find a vaccine candidate.
But she started contemplating a life away from the sport much earlier than she had anticipated when, in 2024, she felt her swing was broken beyond repair.
Leonie Harm plays a shot on the 12th hole during the first round of the 2026 Aramco Championship at Shadow Creek Golf Course in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Harry How / Getty Images)
It was during a trip to Saudi Arabia to caddie for a friend that Harm —who won several titles as an amateur before turning professional in 2020 — met PGA coach Scott Edwards at Riyadh Golf Club and her fortunes began to change.
Edwards asked if he could examine her swing. By this point, she said, she thought her time as a professional golfer was all but over.
“I fell into a pattern that I just couldn’t fight my way out of anymore,” Harm says. “And then 2023 and 2024 was just a struggle. Some health complications came in and my mental struggles were really, really bad. There were some demons I still had to work through. That all kind of came out and I was just miserable the whole time. I wasn’t getting any better.”
Harm was hitting golf balls for up to seven hours a day trying to recapture some form. “If you’re investing the majority of your energy into one specific thing and not only do you not see improvements you see it decline, you go crazy. I definitely went crazy,” she said.
“He said the things you’re trying to do, your body’s not able to do. He took a couple of measurements and said ‘let’s try and find an alternative route that works with my body rather than against it.’ His approach to the swing just clicked with me in a way that I was able to see improvements immediately.”
What Harm was dealing with was first-tee nerves at every hole.
“It got so bad. It got to the stage where I couldn’t even feel my body or my swing or anything, I was just a complete blackout. It turns out those might have been panic attacks,” she explains.
“My brain just couldn’t separate the fear because I’ve never processed through the emotions that actually went on in my body that are attached to that event (being hit by a car). And because I never processed through it, my body just held on to that as this massive trauma. The fear of actually dying and the fear of ‘there’s a bunker over there on the right side’ was the same level.”
But she came out the other side.
Her two birdies on the final two holes at Green Eagle Golf Courses near Hamburg in May for a closing 69 to win the German Masters by a stroke was a victory celebrated by everyone who knows her and her story.
One of those people who revelled in Harm’s triumph was a woman listed in the 2013 accident report as “Marie W.” Harm fell right into the path of Marie who, by the luck of the universe, was on a gap year training as a paramedic in the German army. Had she walked down another street that Friday morning and not been there to help keep Harm awake as the blood poured, the outcome would more likely have been fatal.
On seeing the accident report, Harm’s mother recognized Marie’s name and realized she was in the same elementary class as Harm’s brother, Steffen. Desiree reached out to thank Marie for saving her daughter’s life.
“We’ve become good friends since, we meet up frequently. I’m indebted to her but she never makes me feel like that ever. She just generally cares about me,” says Harm.
Next month is the 10th anniversary of the death of her mom. She is already reflecting on what she would have made of her career.
“My mom was always just someone who made sure we had high expectations of ourselves, to hold ourselves to a really high standard,” says Harm.
“Being grounded and humble was her most important value. Her biggest fear would have been to have arrogant children.
“I don’t really think my mom would be all that much caring about me winning tournaments. I hope she’d be proud of the person I became. And I think, overall, she would.”
This week Harm will be playing at The Evian Championship in France for the second time in her career — she failed to make the cut in 2021. It is her fourth appearance at a major, with a best of tied seventh at The Open in 2021 at Carnoustie, and is overjoyed to be back on the biggest stage for the first time in four years.
“It was never really about winning,” Harm says. “I’m just really enjoying golf to this extent maybe for the first time in my life. And I’m really happy with the life I’ve created for myself and the things I get to do and what my job is.
“I can now actually fully grasp how cool that is.”