JEENO STRIKES WHILE HER IRONS ARE HOT
Jeeno Thitikul is not wasting time. Having completed the ’24 season by winning the Race to CME and bagging comfortably over $5 million, she promptly came out top in her first outing of ’25 – the PIF Saudi Ladies International. This week she is playing in the Honda LPGA Thailand — and then it is Asia’s major, the HSBC Women’s World Championship.
That the previous PIF Saudi Ladies International was won by a sister Thai in Paphangkoin Tavatanikit in is hardly surprising. Thailand is turning out one top golfer after another and, though their names do not exactly trip off Western tongues, they are happy to share their nicknames with the golfing world.
Following on from Jeeno, Tavatanikit answers to Patty and, to give another example, Parajee Anannarukarn is called Meow. Why? Because that was the nickname chosen for her by her three-year-old sister on the day she was born.
For an answer to why Thais have become so successful in so a short space of time, some say that it is because of their healthy diets, starting with the Jasmine rice of which the average Thai will eat some 100 kg per year. In Jeeno’s case, though, it seems probable that her success story has more to do with the fresh air recommended by the family doctor. He had told the parents that their six-year-old daughter was catching too many colds and that the best way for her to build up strength was to pursue an outdoor sport.
Jeeno was shown clip of golf and tennis and chose golf on the grounds that tennis involved too much in the way of running around. She has made a series of what seem like wise decisions over the years, with none more so than when she chose to spend an extra year on the amateur scene. The idea was that she would polish her game to the point where she would have no trouble hanging on to her LPGA players’ card once she had it in her pocket.
Two hundred and nineteen was the extra year in question and, after pinning down a total of 16 amateur titles, she turned professional in January 2020 just ahead of her 17th birthday,
What is more, far from having to worry about losing her card when she started playing in America, she won the LPGA’s Rookie of the Year award.
It was Chris McCalmont, a Thai-based caddie who works for another Thai in Ponanong Phatium, who approached with his answer on what lies behind Thailand’s golfing story. In his eyes, the Thai children’s grounding in the game is probably as good as it gets. Where, in the US, there is a more individual approach, with parents shepherding their offspring to a tournament and staying with them until the tournament is done, Thai officials do the taking and the fetching besides paying the bills.
“They look after them like they would their own children,” said McCalmont. “In Thailand,” he continued, “it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor. If you’re any good, you’ll make it.”
For another telling point, the teenagers copy those officials in helping players who are younger than themselves. Jeeno, for instance, has said that she learned a lot from Ariya Jutanugarn, a double major winner who advised, “You can learn more from your mistakes than anything else”, and Moriya Jutanugarn, the older of the sisters who passed on her knowledge of course managementt.
Jeeno, who now has 18 professional titles to her name and is currently No 4 on the World Rankings. is still talking of how she plays golf because she wants to feed her family. “Ranking,” she said, “is not that important to me.”
By the time she was 21, she had amassed over $10 million in prizemoney and you would imagine that the Thitikul family and relatives are thriving.
As one of the directors of team development at the Thai Golf Association said not so very long ago, Jeeno is a genius.