Remembering One Crazy Coincidental Family

I never realized how much a bunch of young golf pros with big dreams would come to mean to me back in 2003 when I started traveling with and writing about the LPGA’s pipeline tour. I was only supposed to go out and cover three tournaments for the Futures Tour that year while they looked for someone to replace their communications staffer. I ended up staying for nine years.

It was certainly different than my previous gigs with the Golf Digest Company, where I covered the LPGA Tour for Golf World for six years and for Golf For Women that final year in 2002. I spent a lot of time and many weeks each year following around and writing about Annika Sorenstam, Se Ri Pak and Karrie Webb. 

I was there in 1997 when Pak changed LPGA history with two major championship wins that opened the door for countless fellow South Koreans to follow. I was also there in 1999 when Juli Inkster achieved her career grand slam, and at Moon Valley Country Club in 2001 when Sorenstam carded her historic score of 59.

As a golf writer, I reported on Solheim Cups, U.S. Women’s Open dramas, LPGA Hall of Fame inductions and witnessed the end of LPGA eras (JoAnne Carner, Kathy Whitworth), rising new dynasties (Nancy Lopez, Betsy King, Patty Sheehan), and emerging next-generation stars (Lorena Ochoa, Laura Davies, Sorenstam, Pak and Webb).

So, I had already witnessed the best women golfers in the world when I arrived in Kansas to spend my first week on the Futures Tour with young pros just beginning their journey. No, they didn’t yet have the chops of those Hall of Famers on the LPGA Tour. Many of them were still wearing the ribbons of their former college teams on their ponytails. Some of them were traveling with parents. Others were homesick. Most were carpooling with fellow players to save money. Some were just a little bit lost.

But what I saw during those years were hundreds of very interesting human stories about how dreams begin for players from throughout the world. And what I learned was how the careers of those highly skilled LPGA players I had previously covered had actually started. Their base of experience began somewhere, and now, I was witnessing the genesis of that process.

I watched young pros who had never faced Texas or Oklahoma winds literally have to learn how to hit knockdown shots. I watched players from other parts of the world struggle with the different grasses in America -- learning to hit their putts hard enough on slow Bermuda greens or how to back off the pace on speedy bent grass. I watched players finally grasp the necessity of mastering their wedge play.

Traveling on tour was hard for all of us. It meant spending 20-some weeks of the year on the road, away from home and away from any sense of a “normal” life that involved friends and families. I traveled in a company van packed with weeks of clothes, laundry detergent, staple food items and whatever was needed to live out of a suitcase from March to September.

During that time, I saw players fixing flat tires on the side of the road and doing what was needed to go from one tournament town to the next. I saw them eating a lot of fast food to stretch their funds and I joked with some that Panera should be the tour's sponsor because that’s where most of us ate every day. I remember once seeing several players sitting on the curb of a Dairy Queen eating ice cream as if it were the greatest thing that had happened to them all week.

Another time, on a lonely Texas highway somewhere between Brownsville and El Paso, I saw the mother of one player fly by me in her large SUV doing about 110 mph while her player-child snoozed in the front seat. And then there was the time a car drove up beside me on a highway somewhere between Michigan and Chicago and when I looked over, I saw a player driving her car with her bare feet while she took a video of me behind the wheel with her cell phone.

With players from 37 nations and from throughout the United States, there were always interesting things going on. I remember coming upon several young Korean players giggling and stuffing something into a Coke bottle. On closer inspection, I realized they were picking up baby copperhead snakes and poking them into the bottle, which prompted me to shout, “No, no! Dangerous!” 

Another time in Kansas, I had to rescue two players from the People’s Republic of China who had accidentally locked their keys in their rental car. I used my personal AAA card to help them out. They never understood how that worked and tried to pay me. I waved them off and couldn’t explain to them the beauty of AAA for road warriors like us.

I had one player (in her 20s) who would sneak into our mobile office once a week to talk about how she wanted a boyfriend, but her parents wouldn’t allow her to date. I had another player who came to me with tears streaming down her face who asked if I could get her away from her overbearing father. On more than one occasion, I would find an excuse to tell her father she was needed at the tour's mobile office so she could go behind closed doors and cry.

One player, from an affluent American family, received a shipment of new irons every few months from her father. I remember seeing her in the parking lot in West Virginia with irons spilling out of the back of her car. I reminded her there was “no magic in a box” and that the magic was only to be found in the practice areas. I said it in a kidding way, but that, of course, was probably not what she wanted to hear.

We experienced flooded courses in Ohio and Illinois. I remember several players purchasing rafts and floating down a fairway. Another time, in Lima, Ohio, we had a tornado pass through. One player from Italy told me she was holding on to the door handle of her car when the wind blew her feet off the ground, suspending her body parallel to the car door. Another player from California, not knowing what to do when her car started lifting off the road, parked and ran into a local business and crawled under a table with the employees there.

We also experienced death on the tour. One of our most beloved young international pros was killed in a head-on collision as she drove from one tournament to the next. We held a memorial service in the clubhouse a few days later and players sat packed in that room, shoulder to shoulder, not really understanding how to grasp losing a peer. It was beyond sad and extremely difficult as a staff member to “stay strong” for the young pros. 

It was also heart breaking when a man knocked on the mobile office door following the accident and sat down beside me, describing how he had turned off the ignition of our player’s car on the highway and waited beside her for first responders to arrive on that horrible day.

In working with the most talented young professionals, I also had to help many of them learn how to work with news media, understand how to answer questions and to realize how this was now a part of their job as professionals if they were fortunate enough to win. I told them this was practice for what they would experience on the LPGA Tour.

There were also days when I literally taught basic English to top international players and helped them write simple thank-you speeches for awards ceremonies. One Korean player -- who has now won several times on the LPGA tour -- gave her first thank-you speech in New York, and then ran off the stage and buried her head in my chest. To this day, when I see that player at LPGA events, she always comes over with a big hug. Her English is perfect.

So, while my assignment was to write about the tournaments, profile the players and help them learn how to work with sports writers at each tournament site, those nine years became much, much more. I truly saw these players’ growth at every stage. And when you travel and work together, and weave in stress, endless highway miles, bad weather, human tragedy and triumph, you get to know people in ways you never think possible.

I tried to write about these young pros just like I wrote about Sorenstam, Webb, Inkster and Pak. I tried to treat them the same way – only with this group, it often felt like I was writing about little sisters stepping up in a big way. I watched them grow up. I couldn't prevent them from barging into my heart.

That became very clear when I watched 17-year-old Inbee Park arrive on the Futures Tour in 2006. She missed the 36-hole tournament cut in her professional debut in Louisiana, but went home, worked on her game and returned to finish in the top 10 11 times that season to earn automatic 2007 LPGA membership.

Two years later, when Park made the 2008 U.S. Women’s Open Championship her first win on the LPGA Tour, she looked at me with the trophy in her arms and said, “Lisa, can you believe this?” Of course I could believe it. She had committed to her goal. She never gave up.

And while none of the many young pros I met during those years on the Futures Tour would go on to the LPGA’s Hall of Fame as Park did, when I think of them now, I realize they were all equally special.  

I watched some of them throw away opportunity and others find their wings. Some moved on to the LPGA Tour. Some moved on to other careers and other lives. Many of them are moms now. All emerged from this same shared experience.

They were just kids, but they taught me a lot about hope and even more about courage. And during the years I was with them, they scared me to death, made me laugh, frustrated me beyond measure, but made me love them like family. 

Come to think about it, all of us were one big, crazy, sometimes dysfunctional family stuck on a highway somewhere between dreams and a paycheck.

- Lisa D. Mickey, March 1, 2020