Friberg: Workplace Anxiety on the LPGA Tour

Louise Friberg's first rookie blog was just posted on LPGA.com. I think it represents a more honest glimpse than we normally see into the mindset of many professional golfers - male or female - moving up from one level to another.

I wonder what the LPGA thought about this:

She immediately answers that question with, "It is easy," and goes on to describe the equal parts eagerness and anxiety with which she awaits the beginning of the LPGA season.

What Friberg is describing is the uncertainty almost all of us feel when we're starting a new job. Will the new people like me? Will I like them? Will I miss the old job and old friends? That's even the way she frames it in her blog:

Just because there is a lot of money at stake doesn't diminish the everyday emotions a newbie feels. Friberg is excited, and a little bit scared. She's leaving her home, family and friends in Sweden; she's leaving the Ladies European Tour, where she's been a solid player for years, where she has many friends, and where those friends often travel together and go out together after the day's golf is done. She's heading to a new country, joining a new company, meeting new coworkers.

I don't think Friberg, a k a "Lollo," has anything to worry about. She's a very nice person and she'll make friends quickly on the LPGA. I thought her blog post was refreshingly candid, and it makes me want even more for her to be successful this year.

But after reading Friberg's blog, think about this: If an English-speaking, Western European like Friberg has this much anxiety coming to the LPGA, imagine how the various and sundry Korean and Japanese golfers must feel ...

Addendum: See also Onnarin Sattayabanphot's first rookie blog. Onnarin is known as "Moo," which I'd always assumed referred to cows and/or milk, and was a nickname she'd probably picked up at Purdue (perhaps when her teammates took her cow-tipping). Nope, turns out her parents called her "Moo" from birth, and in Thai that means "little pig." Huh.

Moo has another nickname, too, one she didn't mention in her blog: Zippie or Zipper. Because once, prior to teeing off in a Futures Tour tournament, she made a mad dash into a port-a-let and, when attempting to zip up, broke her zipper. She frantically ran around to tournament officials looking for some way to keep her zipper shut, until finding one official who had some safety pins. And she played the round with pinned pants.