Alexandra Försterling stepped into the limelight of professional golf in 2023 – winning twice on the Ladies European Tour, finishing 6th in the Race to Costa del Sol and earning her LPGA Tour card through Q-School. Her journey has led her all around the world, but her native Berlin still remains home. We met Alexandra on a rainy winter evening at the Alexanderplatz, or ‘Alex’, as the locals call it.
It’s raining in Berlin. The city, which has always been more of an exciting, sometimes unsettling process than a finished town, shows its drearier side on this far too warm December morning. Through the rain, Brazilian visitors scurry past the Christmas-decorated shop windows of international fashion retailers to retreat to the nearest branch of a coffee house chain. Soon to begin work with a pumpkin-spiced latte behind their laptop. Umbrellas block the view of carelessly parked electric scooters, huddled together in small groups on the sidewalks, like sad electric livestock without a purpose. Winter atmosphere in Berlin-Mitte.
While the night before, I had stressed the visual benefits of wet, shiny road surfaces, I now wish I hadn’t. A glance at the pouring rain makes me think the day might turn into a drenched catastrophe. Streams flow in the gutters, no one bothers to avoid puddles anymore.
When we met for the first time, Alexandra Försterling’s world was quite different. Even though only a few weeks have passed since then, a lot has happened. Back then, our short online encounter was entirely under the impression of her first Tour victory. The 23-year-old rookie had just won the VP-Bank Swiss Open with three dominant rounds of 69. With nerves of steel and with hardly any mistakes, she had shown the golf world who she is.
During that interview, Alex seemed almost a little surprised by her success. As if she couldn’t look back on a successful amateur career with countless victories and top placings. Both as an individual player and as part of a team, her career had been remarkable. A member of the German national squad since 2014, her name could often be found at the top of international amateur tournament leaderboards. With teams of her home club Berlin- Wannsee, she won several championship titles. In 2018,she decided to accept a full scholarship to Arizona State University and played for the “Sun Devils” until she turned professional in 2022. Anyone who followed Alexandra Försterling’s golfing development should really not have been surprised by her first professional victory. Her stats are impressive, her length of tee is remarkable.
There was nothing fake about her modesty. At the time, she spoke about her hopes, wishes, and career goals. She talked about techno, Harry Potter, her passion for down- to-earth food, for painting and her great love for Berlin.
When we meet in person on this rainy day in Mitte, she seems a little more delicate and younger than the top athlete persona from the TV screen. Her smile is open and honest. Her answers are to the point – and the world of Alexandra Försterling has become a completely different one.
She’s won again. On the Island of Mallorca, she roared away from the field with rounds of 69, 67 and 67. Her score of 203 (-13) was five strokes better than the 208 carded by runner-up Trichat Cheenglab. Alex’ second nine of her final round were an incredible demonstration of astonishing maturity as a player.
Her game that day had a simplicity and effortlessness that is rarely seen. The kind that invites comparisons with the greats of our sport. With a precession that could hardly be outdone, Försterling seemingly effortlessly played her way to the winner’s podium – smiling all the way.
She believes she was just fortunate and that the stars simply aligned in her favor. “It takes a bit of luck for everything to come together.” She laughingly brushes aside my comment that one could see how she made the stars compliant. I want to object, but don’t. There is a calm determination in the gesture that should not be underestimated.
It didn’t stop at the second victory. By the end of 2023, she achieved another career goal we spoke about in the first interview. At the beginning of December, she earned her tour card for the LPGA in one of those marathon-like qualifying school events in Florida. The big tour beckons. Alexandra Försterling’s travelling schedule isn’t necessarily going to get any smaller in the near future.
In her first season as a professional, she played an astonishing 24 LET tournaments. Not counting events in the USA. She has been to almost every continent, travelled thousands of kilometers using all kinds of transportation and visited some places whose names many of her peers probably can’t even spell (and which I, in some cases, also had to look up). Kilifi County in Kenya, Rabat in Morocco, King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, Johannesburg in South Africa, Singapore plus various places in Europe (not only on the mainland), Hong Kong and the USA.
There is something almost manic about the travelling behaviour of modern golf professionals, these descendants of the stressed Phileas Fogg, who was chased around the world in 80 days. “You have to love travelling.” If you can’t stand the constant change of location, the tour – the truth is in the name – will quickly become an ordeal: torture.
Right-hand driving, left-hand gear boxes, shuttle buses, traffic chaos, foreign food, tropical humidity, desert winds, barbed wire fences, unbelievable wealth and horrible poverty. Contrasts one can hardly imagine. Every week something new, every week somewhere new. Compared to all that, the city of Berlin with its constant beggars, traffic gridlock and con artists disguised as rose sellers, seems like a medium-sized provincial idyll.
Nevertheless, the constant flood of impressions is huge. It goes without saying, but it is often forgotten by outsiders, that in addition to all the tournament, travel and accommodation logistics, players also have to take care of their golf game. Tour pros don’t travel for fun, but for work. There’s hardly any time to get to know the country. Some readers may recall the uproar surrounding the young, somewhat naïve Bubba Watson, who enraged the French public in 2011 when he couldn’t name the Parisian sights he had seen driving by.
Alex laughs. Even the second Tour victory of the year hasn’t gone to her head. She has eyes for what’s happening around her. She talks about giraffes in Kenya, the food in Hong Kong, the architecture in Singapore, speaks of begging children and pro-am events with extremely rich amateurs, who, after a duffed tee-shot, pick up the ball to make loud phone calls about the next hot deal – while the rest of the team tries to earn a living.
For many, the culture shock of just one of these places would not be easy to process. Pro golfers, on the other hand, fall from one culture-clash to the next. Of course, their perception is heavily filtered, as if wearing blinkers. They often see the world through tinted windows of courtesy cars, from hotel balconies, from taxis, from Airbnbs, from climatized coaches and from behind the walls of exclusive private clubs.
Even though, thanks to new sponsors and the tireless work of Alexandra Armas and the LET people, prize money on the LET has increased significantly, life on tour is still difficult. For many athletes even precarious.
Permanent caddies are not necessarily the rule. Often, friends or family members help on the bag. During Alexandra’s first Tour win, it was her mother. Staying in luxury hotels is an absolute exception and flights on private jets – as male PGA pros are often seen taking – are virtually unknown. In most cases, the European women’s tour travels economy class, always with a short-term rebooking option, and often with short warning. “It’s not uncommon to find out you’re going to be playing or not only a few days before the event.” Carpooling, flat-sharing and bus travel are the order of the day.
Even before you make it to the professional tour, considerable sacrifices on many sides need to be made.
The fact that Alexandra still calls the simple Berlin meatball ‘Bulette’ one of her favourite dishes is probably due to the fact that it was so common in her youth. The life of a young top amateur is not so dissimilar to the life of a professional golfer. Busy days leave little room for elaborate extravagances. Food has a purely practical character, must be easy to prepare and quick to consume. “We often ate in the car between school and training sessions,” she recalls.
But, of course, the ‘Bulette’ is more. After weeks of travelling, coming home also has a culinary side to it. Is there anything that could be more Berlin than a ‘Bulette’ from mum’s kitchen? Techno maybe and the Alexanderplatz. The town square lovingly referred to by the people of Berlin as “Alex”…
Follow-up: In March 2024, Alexandra Försterling secured her third tour victory on the LET with a breathtaking third round of 67 strokes. She won the Aramco Team Series event in Tampa by a three-stroke margin. I can’t help but think back to our conversation in Berlin, where she told me that “the experience of winning helps you win.” Something that’s obviously true. And that “the Solheim Cup is still a distant dream”.
With the victory in Florida, she has come a lot closer to this dream. And this author is a little nervous that his article might be outdated by the time it is published. He would like nothing more.