Mickey a la Cart

Lisa D. Mickey will offer an inside view of the Duramed FUTURES Tour and its players throughout the 2007 season. Visit "Mickey a la Cart" for an "extra" view of the Tour from her own "mobile office".

Reeling in the Years: Short Stint, Long Stint, Time Well-Spent

By Lisa D. Mickey

LPGA Tour veteran and former Duramed FUTURES Tour player Becky Iverson once assured me that, “When you travel on Tour, you age in dog years.”

Hmmm. Does that mean the last five years I’ve spent traveling on the road with the Duramed FUTURES Tour equals 35 years? Some days it certainly feels like it.

And some days, it feels like yesterday when: Stacy Prammanasudh and Reilley Rankin were winning their first tournaments as pros (in 2003); Korean Birdie (Ju) Kim was giving her first champion’s speech in English before moving on to capture the 2005 U.S. Women’s Open Championship; Jimin Kang was perfecting her thousand-watt smile and emerging as the Tour’s 2004 Player of the Year; Seon-Hwa Lee was prepping in 2005 as Player of the Year to become the LPGA’s 2006 Rookie of the Year; Nicole Castrale was proving to herself that her surgically repaired shoulder could win tournaments as a professional; Julieta Granada was morphing from a hot-shot teen talent into a bona fide LPGA star who could win the 2006 ADT Championship’s million-dollar jackpot in four rounds; and New Yorker Meaghan Francella was laying the foundation in 2006 for the 2007 LPGA Tour, where she beat Annika Sorenstam in a playoff and top-ranked Lorena Ochoa in match-play earlier this season.

And there have been others who made a big impression in the early stages of their professional careers. In 2006, the Tour was the playground for an ultra-competitive teen named Angela Park, who turned her disappointment over not automatically earning one of the five exempt 2007 LPGA cards into such a fired-up performance this year that she emerged as the LPGA’s top rookie in 2007. For many of us, it was no surprise.

And a year from now, I’m sure I will look back at the Duramed FUTURES Tour’s top players in 2007 and see how they fall into place among the Tour’s “great ones” who moved on to bigger things and higher-profile lives. I wonder how Mexican Violeta Retamoza will add more exposure to golf in her homeland alongside Ochoa, an old friend and compatriot? I wonder how former collegiate All-Americans and Big Ten Conference foes Mollie Fankhauser and Allison Fouch will move their youthful fire to the LPGA for the first time as fully exempt players?

I wonder if Scotland’s Vikki Laing and Swede Sofie Andersson, both winners on the 2007 Duramed FUTURES Tour, will join the much-needed cast of young stars for the 2009 European Solheim Cup team, or if Texan Taylor Leon will play elbow-to-elbow with best pal and high school classmate Paula Creamer, or how self-driven and long-hitting “Moo” Sattayabanphot will someday become the first Thai player to win a major championship?

One thing I have learned is that there are great players every year and often, you have to look beyond the top five. Julieta Granada and Angela Park are proof of that.

While these players are all business on the golf course, there certainly are memories of them when they were just beginning their journeys as aspiring touring pros. I remember “Stacy P” riding around a campground cookout one evening in a tournament city on a child’s “Big Wheel” and South Korean Hye Jung Choi with a huge smile on her face in a hotel breakfast area as she attacked a plate of biscuits and gravy in a Southeastern state. I once went to a home-cooked Thai meal in an Extended Stay America hotel at the invitation of Virada Nirapathpongporn. She cooked, and all I had to do was bring my own plate, fork and chair.

Then there was the time that I got on a high-powered motorboat in Queenstown, Md., with Reilley Rankin and some other players and staff to speed across a body of water for Maryland blue crabs. And there was the birthday cake food fight among a group of young Korean players with a number of them smeared in white icing, followed by a go-cart competition on an amusement park track with lanky Song-Hee Kim, the 2006 Player of the Year, folded up in a tiny cart with an intense look of concentration on her face as she navigated the track’s turns.

I remember at a tournament in Kansas trying to explain to Korean players Aram Cho and Young Jo to leave the poisonous baby copperhead snakes alone as they attempted to shove them into an empty Coke bottle. And I remember trying to explain to a couple of players from the People’s Republic of China that they did not have to pay me for the AAA service man who arrived and opened their vehicle when they accidentally locked their keys inside their rental car.

How do you keep a straight face when natural-born comediennes like Sarah Lynn (Johnston) Sargent leaves her putter in the clubhouse bathroom after a pit stop at the nine-hole turn? And what do you say to Meredith Duncan, who can reel off rap tunes and do her funky “chicken-leg” dance when the tension is so thick you could slice it with a 2-iron? Or how do you keep from laughing while Colombian Cristina Baena who, when frustrated, can spend a solid five minutes telling you how “estupid” she is before the anger is suddenly gone and she’s laughing again? NOBODY has a thicker Southern accent than South Carolina’s Kristy McPherson, who can provide entertaining detail about her golf round in a dialect so sweet and slow that you want to climb into a hammock and take a nap – or at least order a sweet tea to wake back up. And how about riding to Starbucks in the back seat of a huge rental car driven by Italian Costanza Trussoni, who, while backing up, informed her passengers that she couldn’t “see so well in these things, so I rely on sound?”

Each new season on the Tour brings so many new players from all over the world. This year’s 2007 Class had 99 rookies. Our annual qualifying tournament this November has a full field of 312 players from 29 countries with a waiting list. That’s a lot more young pros hoping to make it big in women’s golf. Or, quite simply, just to make it somewhere.

Growing numbers of young women give it a try every year. Only the most talented, most determined and most physically healthy will move on to the LPGA Tour. And on the way, there’s not a lot of room for error. Even surviving the LPGA’s sectional qualifying tournaments is no guarantee of future success. Exempt LPGA status is a well-earned medal, but keeping it is yet one more step for which young pros must be prepared.

In other words, to play professional golf is a series of related steps in which the player must repeatedly keep her standards high and have the ability and determination to perform well and respond to the new demands of each level. It takes a special kind of person to survive in this environment. And there’s no such thing as hiding out on the bench wondering if you’ll be able to perform when you are asked. In golf, you only get paid if you perform. And you only last if your performance is consistently solid.

In the five years that I’ve worked with this Tour, it seems that these early steps in each professional’s career is critical. Qualifying for the Duramed FUTURES Tour with full status has become more competitive and earning one of the five LPGA Tour cards awarded to the top five season money winners is a battle that even the best players might repeat two to three times before successfully walking away with a coveted card.

Every player goes about that quest in her own way. Some players practice frenetically. Some work out like Olympians and practice sparingly. Some are self-driven, while others are driven by parents and coaches. Some have the finest equipment that money can buy. Some play with the same clubs they’ve used for years. Some call their sports psychologist after every round. Some call Dad. Some meditate near the first tee waiting for their tee time. Some cry frequently. Some laugh often. Some go through the motions. Some give up and go home. And a few make it.

Interestingly, in almost a cyclical nature, the ones who make it are the catalyst for others. When Angela Park played on the Duramed FUTURES Tour in 2006, she made no secret of wanting to play Michelle Wie head to head as soon as possible. I remember overhearing a conversation between two of our young pros that year, with one saying of Wie, “I want a piece of her.” And that snippet of dialogue echoed in my ears as I sat on the couch at home recently, watching Park take an 11-shot lead over Wie in the first round of the LPGA’s Samsung World Championship. Wie was her target, just as Annika Sorenstam was the player to beat by Ochoa and every other player ranked lower than Number 1 in the world. The player at the top stirs the pot for everybody else and makes them fight a little harder for the things they want.

And that’s also what I told top-ranked player Song-Hee Kim in 2006 when she sensed a building competitive rivalry between herself and several players on Tour that she wanted to call friends. The shy teen couldn’t say everything she wanted to say in her limited English, but I knew what was bugging her as she shadowed me one day. As simply as possible, I told her: “Song-Hee, when you are No. 1, everyone will always want what you have. If you plan to be a top player, you have to get used to that now.”

Sorenstam, and now Ochoa, are the benchmarks for so many others. I’m sure that our 2007 grad, Violeta Retamoza, remembers winning some junior and amateur tournaments against Ochoa years ago. She probably looks at Ochoa’s current success and believes that she too, can win on the LPGA Tour. Certainly, Se Ri Pak, bound for induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame this fall, spurred that same belief in the 44 Koreans now on the LPGA Tour and the 30-some others now chasing that dream on the Duramed FUTURES Tour.

Truly, some of the world’s top future women players are now building their foundations here. It is a process. Sometimes it seems to take forever. Sometimes, it’s only a short year and the next thing you know, you are in the LPGA’s pressure pot fighting for survival. But even if it feels like “dog years” to the players – and to a few others of us at times – they are important years of growth and learning. They are necessary.

As much as every player would like to think she is totally prepared to make an immediate transition from amateur or collegiate golf to the LPGA Tour, I beg to differ -- based on considerable time observing good players who got better. I’ve watched some terrific talent come through this tour and move on, but not a single one of them left the Duramed FUTURES Tour without gaining something that would help them later. Whether it was learning how to pack a suitcase, or to eat healthy on the road, or to play for six consecutive weeks, or to regain confidence after an injury, or to win a playoff, or to laugh at themselves a little more often, each left with tools she can use on the LPGA Tour.

For some, it has taken longer to move on. For others, it was just a brief stop here on the Duramed FUTURES Tour. But regardless of the number of years, there’s a lot to know and much to experience, and any amount of time spent, seems to be time well invested.