BEDMINSTER, New Jersey—Danielle Kang’s first Ladies Professional Golf Association victory was long overdue, coming in her 144th start, at the Women’s PGA Championship early this month. In the two weeks since, she has been racing to keep her life running on time.
On Wednesday at Trump National Golf Club, she sprinted with her arms spread like wings to the 10th tee and flung herself into the embrace of Michelle Wie, who had stood patiently waiting for more than five minutes. Still out of breath, the 24-year-old Kang proceeded to tee up her ball and hit an errant drive. “Oh my gosh,” she said. “That’s terrible.”
Wie, one of Kang’s best friends, chided her in mock exasperation.
“You can’t just run up to the tee and hit,” Wie said.
After hitting a second drive that found the fairway, Kang hit two approach shots. The second, from deep rough, grazed Wie’s mother, who had barely noticed that she had been hit by the time she was swallowed in a hug from Kang, who had rushed over to apologize.
Kang’s smile seems to magnetically attract the cameras, but on the eve of the US Women’s Open here, her usual effervescence fell a little flat as she finished tuning up for what she hopes will be her second major championship in two starts.
“I’m so overwhelmed,” Kang said.
Old-fashioned
SINCE she birdied the final hole for a one-stroke victory over the defending champion Brooke Henderson at Olympia Fields to win the second major of the year, Kang said she has been receiving about 700 messages a day on her phone and via social media. At first, she tried to reply to every message, but quickly fell into keystroke quicksand.
In desperation, she handed her phone to her mother at the beginning of this week so she would have several hundred fewer distractions. Annika Sorenstam, a retired 10-time major winner, reached out to Kang the old-fashioned way—by tracking her down in the clubhouse—to offer her congratulations. She threw in some advice on how to handle the attention that can engulf a first-time major winner.
Kang said Sorenstam had told her to carve out time for news media obligations but also to make time for herself. Kang, a California native of South Korean descent, tried to do exactly that last week; she canceled a media tour in New York so she could fly with her caddie, Cole Pensanti, to Los Angeles to visit the grave of her father, K.S. Kang, who died of brain and lung cancer in 2013.
“I had to see him,” Kang said of her father, who had caddied for her when she won back-to-back US Women’s Amateur championships, in 2010 and 2011. Her weekly routine once included texting or talking to him before and after every competitive round.
Bib
AFTER he was told he had cancer, Kang said, she felt as if she was playing more for him than for herself. “It gave him joy to see me play,” she said.
After his death, she felt as if she had lost her greatest champion. She took her grief out on the game they both loved.
“I felt like golf took away the time I could have spent with him,” Kang said.
But her attitude and practice habits both started to improve after a night when she dreamed that her father had spoken to her.
“You’re not practicing hard,” she said that he told her.
Kang carries Dunhill cigarettes, her father’s favorite brand, in her golf bag. She lights one before every tournament because the smell reminds her of her father and calms her. When she visits his grave site, she lights a few, and on her most recent visit she did so again. She also had Pensanti’s caddie bib from Olympia Fields with her—her way of telling her father that she had practiced hard and it had paid off.
Unfriended
BUT then, Kang believes her father already knew that. She said that she had felt his presence on the 72nd green at Olympia Fields before she sank the birdie putt. Since then, Kang has felt like a passenger looking at her life from the window of a speeding plane.
“I’ve been on cloud nine and I’ve been trying to come down from it just so I can focus on this week,” she said.
The 27-year-old Wie, the 2014 Open champion, can relate.
“I know what she’s going through,” Wie said. “The week after you win your first major is a blur, and then it all catches up with you, and you get tired and cranky.”
As easy as the back nine felt to Kang on the Sunday she won the PGA, that’s how hard the back nine at Trump National felt to her the day before the scheduled start of the Open. Wie threw Kang a laugh line that pulled her through one hole when she said, “I unfriended you when you wouldn’t watch Beauty and the Beast with me.”
A short while later, Kang’s mother, who had been walking several yards behind her, caught up to her and said, “You look way too stressed.” She calmed Kang down, and so did Wie, who told Kang: “Just breathe. You’re doing everything good.”
Image credits: New York Times News Service