{"id":829067,"date":"2026-08-28T21:20:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T21:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/829067\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T21:20:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T21:20:14","slug":"retiring-nordqvist-marches-to-her-own-beat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/829067\/","title":{"rendered":"Retiring Nordqvist marches to her own beat"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\"\"Anna Nordqvist, 39, has announced she will retire from playing competitive golf. Stuart Franklin, Getty Images<\/p>\n

It was an odd business. On the 26th of July, the last day of the Women\u2019s Scottish Open at Dundonald Links, Anna Nordqvist, who is Europe\u2019s captain for the upcoming Solheim Cup at Bernardus Golf in the Netherlands, talked of how she had ruled herself out of juggling the captaincy with playing against the Americans. \u201cI took on the captaincy because I was content that I was going to play in another [Solheim Cup],\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Now 39, she could certainly have played in another \u2013 and another. Yet on Wednesday, the three-time major winner announced she would retire from competitive golf after playing in this week\u2019s FM Championship near Boston.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not sure what the future has in store for me, but it\u2019s with a grateful heart I have decided to retire from playing professional golf to focus on my health and my family,\u201d she wrote in a letter that she read on Instagram.<\/p>\n

Of course she was entitled to change her mind, but it did set her fans wondering why she would have sent out the news ahead of the Solheim Cup rather than after it, especially when she has never been one for courting attention from the media. (In teenage years, she had thought she would like to be a journalist, only one week in a newspaper office told her that there was nothing she would like to do less.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Vis-\u00e0-vis the Solheim Cup, Nordqvist has always wanted to do things her way and, at least as yet, her way has been very different to that of the U.S. captain, Angela Stanford. Whereas Stanford had given up on competitive golf in November 2024 to devote herself to her captaincy role, Nordqvist found herself playing some of the best golf of her career. Though it helped her to stay in touch with plenty of her \u201cteam possibles,\u201d it can only have been a tortuous experience, especially when she closed with a 68 to finish among the leading Europeans at the recent AIG Women\u2019s Open at Royal Lytham & St Annes.<\/p>\n

Her many admirers saw it as a travesty that Nordqvist, a nine-time Solheim Cup competitor, wouldn\u2019t be playing in this year\u2019s match, especially when she ended up with a team which includes as many as four newcomers. Though Lottie Woad is ranked sixth in the Rolex Women\u2019s World Golf Rankings, the other three have been showing plenty of promise whilst lacking experience. Any one of them \u2013 Mimi Rhodes, Julia L\u00f3pez Ramirez or Nastasia Nadaud \u2013 could do as did 17-year-old Charley Hull in 2013 by winning a couple of points at the first time of asking, but is this a bit of a risk?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe team needs Anna as a player,\u201d maintained one of the European players\u2019 close relations. \u201cThe Americans would be far more scared of her than they would of this collection of newcomers. There\u2019s a lovely side to Anna but she\u2019s shy and scary at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Europeans have just the one major winner in Maja Stark, who won the 2025 U.S. Women\u2019s Open. That might sound a tad disappointing but the truth is that they have mind-blowing players in their midst.<\/p>\n

Another experienced soul to have missed out on a Nordqvist selection is England\u2019s Georgia Hall, who won the 2018 Women\u2019s British Open and the \u201920 Cambia Portland Classic. Yes she had a baby at the start of the year but, once she got back to work, she knew she was improving by the day. Most recently, she had a top-10 finish in the PIF London Championship at the Centurion Club. You wouldn\u2019t want to play her all and every day at Bernardus, but surely she would have been a good bet for partnering one of the new players in foursomes and four-balls.<\/p>\n

Now for how Stanford must have reacted when she learned of the four first-timers in Nordqvist\u2019s team. She had a couple of weeks to think about it and, when the day came to announce her captain\u2019s picks last Tuesday, she had just the one novice in Lindy Duncan, though there was a second in Auston Kim who had in fact made enough points to qualify. Duncan, though 35, was an obvious choice in that she had notched as many as 14 top-10 finishes in the last couple of years.<\/p>\n

\u201cStatistically, she\u2019s one of our best putters,\u201d Stanford said.<\/p>\n

Her team includes three major champions in Nelly Korda, who won the 2021 KPMG Women\u2019s PGA Championship, the \u201924 and \u201926 Chevron Championships and the \u201926 US Women\u2019s Open; Jennifer Kupcho, a Chevron winner in \u201922, and Allisen Corpuz, who won the U.S. Women\u2019s Open of \u201923.<\/p>\n

\"\"The European Solheim Cup captain has won three major championships in her career. Stuart Franklin, Getty Images<\/p>\n

The Europeans, in turn, have just the one major winner in Maja Stark, who won the 2025 U.S. Women\u2019s Open. That might sound a tad disappointing but the truth is that they have mind-blowing players in their midst. Woad, 22, won the Augusta National Women\u2019s Amateur in \u201924 and went on from there to win the \u201925 Women\u2019s Irish Open as an amateur and then, a few weeks later, the Women\u2019s Scottish Open in her first outing as a professional. Thirty-year-old Hull is of the same calibre, what with 13 top-ten finishes in majors, four tied for seconds and one second on her own in the \u201923 AIG Women\u2019s Open.<\/p>\n

Linn Grant, meantime, was the first female winner of the Volvo Car Scandinavian Mixed in 2022 and won it again two years later. The joint DP World Tour and Ladies European Tour event consisted of 78 men and 78 women and, in \u201922, the Swede won by a staggering nine strokes. Surely enough to frighten a few Ryder Cup men.<\/p>\n

Not a shot has been hit at the time of writing but, what with two captains and their very different ways, you can only wonder which way is going to work.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 2026 Global Golf Post LLC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anna Nordqvist, 39, has announced she will retire from playing competitive golf. Stuart Franklin, Getty Images It was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":829068,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[112156,427,100140,99],"class_list":["post-829067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-anna-nordqvist","tag-golf","tag-solheim-cup","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=829067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/829068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=829067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=829067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=829067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}