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FROM SCRATCH
By Heather Daly-Donofrio
Believe me if you want, but the second day I ever swung a golf club, I played a competitive match, shot 65, and won. Now, I dare Annika Sorenstam to say that!
But I guess it's only fair that I tell the whole story before I get too carried away with it all.
I started playing golf when I was 15 years old. It wasn't so much that I wanted to play golf. It was more that I wanted to go to college. You know how it is, filling up your application with
whatever activities you can. Since no girls were choosing to play golf then, I thought, "Hey! Instant varsity letter!"
In truth, I was a swimmer. From the time I was a little girl, I spent most of my year in the swimming pool. In fact, when the Catholic church I attended moved catechism from Sunday to Tuesday, it
conflicted with swimming. My parents thought it was more important to go to swim classes than to get religious training, so swimming it was.
By the time I got to high school, though, I was looking for a way to fill in that one month in the spring when I did not swim. During that month I was an athlete without a sport, which could be
defined in one word: boring. I looked around for a team that was easy to make and a sport that was--in my mind--easy to play. That sport was golf.
After I signed up for the team, circumstances moved swiftly. I went to the driving range one day, and on the second day I was in a 9-hole match. I did win that match, but it wasn't because my
day on the range had been all that magical. I shot 65 for the nine holes (if I remember right), and that was only because we played a game similar to miniature golf—once you were four over par on a
hole, you had to pick up. Then, when they went over the card, they added two more to each x. What's more, they handicapped the matches. So to this day I can brag about that second-day win, but
I can't really brag very loudly.
Nor can I brag about the swift development of my game after that. After all, I was only playing one month a year. Nobody in my family played golf, so I didn't really have anybody to play with.
But golf served its purpose. Coupled with swimming and my academics, golf got me into Yale (OK, maybe not the golf).
In one way, Yale was just like high school: few women were too interested in going out for the golf team. I was again able to swim and play golf. But my golf was only slightly improved. I don't
know what my handicap was then, but I hardly ever broke 90. I think my best score going into college was 86 or 87, and I had shot that only a couple of times.
But by my junior year at Yale, the summers began to open up a bit, and I found time to play more golf. I'd play fairly well in local and regional amateur events, but when school started in the
fall, I was too busy with other things, and my mind would stray from golf. So even when I graduated from college, I could shoot 75 if everything went perfectly, but I could just as easily shoot 90 the
very next day.
Now this wasn't that long ago, just 1991. There were plenty of excellent amateur players coming out of college. So what made me think that I could get to the LPGA Tour? I still can't tell
you, but it was an idea that began for me when I was working in the bag room at a local club during those college summers. I was the only girl among a bunch of boys, and for whatever reason I fell in
love with golf then. I'd see flashes of good things in my game, and a few people told me I had potential. That was enough to grab my attention.
It didn't hurt either that when I graduated from Yale, I was pretty burned out from going to school. So I decided to take a year off and play golf and see how much I improved.
One year turned into two and then into three. I figured it would be easy to just go get a job, because I had done fairly well in college. But to get to the LPGA Tour—now that would be the
supreme challenge! It was the greatest challenge I felt I could give myself at that time. So I headed for Florida, picked up another job in a bag room and just practiced and played and worked in the bag
room for a couple of years.
I suppose anyone can say that they had a dream buried within them to play professional sports, and that they worked and worked and worked to get there. But for me that would really be true. I'm
sure the people I played college golf with didn't think I had any business trying to play professionally. Yet for some reason, I always knew in the deep recesses of my mind that I would get there. I
really didn't have any reinforcement from my scores telling me that I could do that. It was just something inside me that made me believe I could do it.
Another person believed in me too. His name was Raymond Howell, and I first met him when I was working at the course in college. He began teaching me to play the game, and he has been teaching me
ever since. I can honestly say that I would never have made the Tour if I hadn't met him, because I would never have found a teacher who would have spent that much time with me and been that patient
with me, someone who would have been so open and free with his knowledge and generous with his time. I know it sounds like I'm gushing, but you're allowed to do that about your husband! Raymond
and I have been married for two-and-a-half years now.
In the spring of 1993, it was time to make the move that suggested how serious I was about this challenge: I turned professional. My first pro tournament was Qualifying School that year, but I did
not make it.
I bounced around the mini-tours for awhile, including three years on the Futures Tour in the mid-90s. I'd play for about six months, then I'd run out of money and have to pick up a teaching
job or another bag room job. Sometimes I'd even take a job that had nothing to do with golf—anything to get some money to get back out on tour again.
When I reached the Futures Tour, I was able to focus almost exclusively on playing golf. I won four tournaments out there, but I certainly wasn't getting rich, and my challenge was still out in
front of me. At least I still hoped so. But when the fall of 1997 approached, I began to think that maybe the LPGA Tour wasnÕt going to happen for me. I'd tried qualifying school four times without
success. So I hedged my bets, as they say, and applied for the women's golf coach job at Yale. Of course, they also say that God works in mysterious ways, and right after I got the job at Yale, I
finally qualified for the Tour. Suddenly I was in business—two of them!
Actually, I was more than a little interested in what God had to do with all of this at that time. Two years before, at a Futures Tour Bible study, I had given my life to Christ and things had taken
a very sudden turn then, so I had a sense that I was dealing with no ordinary God.
As I mentioned earlier, religion did not play a big part in my upbringing—it fell somewhere below swimming anyway. I always believed in God, but I wasn't practicing any particular faith.
When I got to the Futures Tour, though, I met some of the players who participated in the fellowship group and I liked them. They were upbeat and sort of had this light around them. I really liked how
they treated people. When I mentioned this to one or two of them, they tried to get me to start coming to the fellowship meetings. But I put them off.
Eventually, though, I had to be polite, so I went to a meeting. I'm not sure what I was looking for out of the meeting, but I was aware of one particular weakness I possessed at the time: anger.
From the time I was a child, I was an easily angered person. On tour, I was constantly churning inside, never at peace. I felt like I was a pretty decent human being, but it seemed like I was on edge 24
hours a day.
Some of the players at the fellowship meeting knew this about me, but they knew it wasn't their job to change me. They just guided me through parts of the Bible that I could start reading. They
knew that it was Jesus Christ who would do the changing.
In Lima, Ohio, in 1995, I attended the fellowship meeting and Cindy Mackey was there speaking on the topic, "Living Your Life for Christ." When she finished, she asked if anyone there
would like to pray a prayer to accept Christ. Quietly, I prayed that prayer.
Then I won the tournament.
Winning itself was a change. I had never done that before. Having money was a bit strange too, because I had had to borrow money from Raymond to pay my way into this stretch of tournaments. But the
biggest change came on the 13th hole in the last round of the tournament.
On the 13th tee, I was tied for the lead. It was a par five and I hit my driver—out of bounds. Normally, I would have gone ballistic. I probably would have banged a club, might have sworn, who
knows what! But this time, I had an incredible feeling of peace. I just teed up another ball and hit it down the fairway. And then, when I was walking off the tee box, I literally felt Jesus walking next
to me. It gave me such an incredibly joyous and peaceful feeling.
I bogeyed that hole, birdied the next, and ended up winning. It was an exciting victory, of course, but it was also the most important lesson I could ever have learned so early in my commitment to
Jesus. I learned that faith in Christ is an everyday thing. It was an unbelievable affirmation that I had done the right thing.
So when the time finally came that I met the challenge and qualified for the LPGA Tour in 1997, I knew that God would be there with me. It took some juggling those three years when I was both
coaching and playing tournaments, but living with Christ has been the framework that has changed my life.
It is easy to get down on yourself when you're playing the Tour. When I'm going through bad stretches, missing cuts and not making money, it's easy to get wrapped up in what you think
you should be accomplishing. You think about the money you should have won and the tournaments you could have won. It's really easy to lose perspective. You sort of have to grab yourself and say,
"Wait a minute. Golf is not number one in my life. Christ is number one."
The Tour is a competitive place. Sometimes it is very tough dealing with that atmosphere and dealing with people at the same time. I like to be an encourager. I think it is one of my gifts. And yet,
on Tour, you don't get much of that back, because there is so much competition out there. That can be a real frustration when you're struggling, and that is a time when I really have to look to
Christ.
I guess that is one of the greatest things about knowing Christ. So often when you look at athletes, you see people like me. It looks like I started from scratch because I didn't even start
playing the game until high school, and even then I wasn't any good. And it's true that there are a lot of players on the Tour who have worked even harder than I have to get here and to win.
But when you know Christ, you realize that none of it is from scratch really. He has given me athletic ability, which not a lot of people have at 5'1" tall! He has given me the
determination to work for my goals. He has given me a family, including Raymond and my sisters and brother, who really support me. And He has given me real peace.
I'd love to win a tournament on Tour. I know I'm capable of it. But I can't keep clinging to golf all the time, thinking it is the be-all and end-all. It's not healthy. You don't
play good golf that way. And that's not how Christ wants us to live our lives. So I'm just trying to take things in stride right now. It's a lot more peaceful way to live, not being driven
constantly to be perfect on the course all the time. Perfection belongs to one person: Jesus Christ. That's why we have to give every part of every day to Him—off the golf course and on it.
I have tried very hard to reconcile in my mind how it is OK to be strongly competitive and be faithful to Christ at the same time. It's a very hard thing to do, and I haven't figured it out
yet.
But that's not new. I'm not sure what first gave me the impression that I could be a professional golfer. I'm not sure how I won that first tournament when I would normally have let my
anger take over. I'm not sure why I finally made the Tour at the moment I was ready to take on something different. But I am sure of this: God knows. He has brought me to where I am now, and He will
take me to where I am going.
This article originally appeared in the Links Letter, August 2001.
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