Linn Grant contends at KPMG Women’s PGA after U.S. lifts vaccination travel restrictions

SPRINGFIELD, N.J. — Linn Grant’s debut at the KPMG Women’s PGA at Baltusrol surely felt like a long time coming for the up-and-coming Swedish star. This week marks Grant’s first major championship on American soil since the December 2020 U.S. Women’s Open, and she’s squarely in the mix heading into the weekend.

Vaccination travel restrictions kept Grant from playing in the United States after she earned her LPGA card in 2021. Remarkably, she managed to keep her card by competing in events only held outside the U.S., recording four top-eight finishes in the span of six events.

Back-to-back rounds of even par on a soggy Lower Course in Springfield, New Jersey, have Grant four strokes back of leader Xiyu Lin.

“I feel like my game is getting better for each day,” said Grant. “That’s usually how I work.”

Now a five-time winner on the Ladies European Tour, Grant said she wouldn’t have the same level of confidence in her game that she now possesses were it not for the experiences she had playing in Europe. She topped the season-long Race to Costa del Sol in 2022 and won the Jabra Ladies Open earlier this year in France.

“I try to see it as a positive,” said Grant, who made history when she beat the men at the Scandinavian Mixed last year. “That’s pretty much all I can do.”

Now No. 22 in the world, Grant missed the first major of the season in Texas as well as the chance to represent Sweden at the Hanwha International Crown due to travel restrictions.

With the national public health emergency expiring in May, the former Arizona State player was permitted to compete in the LET event in West Palm Beach, Florida. In her first LPGA start in the U.S., she advanced to the semifinals of the Bank of Hope Match-Play at Shadow Creek in Las Vegas.

While the vaccination topic is deeply controversial, Grant said she reads all the comments on her Instagram feed and said most of them have been positive.

“I think a lot of people think that they’re negative,” she said, “but at least on my Instagram they’re all positive.

“The few negative I get, I just brush them off. They don’t know me. They don’t know my reasons.”