The hidden value of playing golf with a pro can endure for decades

Baseball has fantasy camps but golf has something far better: the pro-am. Pro-ams give the duffing class an inside-the-ropes illusion that we play the same game the pros play. Which we do, in a limited way. Pros like to moan about the hardship of playing with us. Male pros in their golfing prime, I should say — PGA Tour stars and the like. LPGA pros have always had a better attitude about their pro-am obligations. The women seem to understand, maybe on instinct alone, that ams pay bills, and the pro-am itself connects amateur fans to their assigned pros forever.

In the early 1980s, I caddied in an LPGA pro-am on Long Island with Lori Garbacz as the headliner. She was personality-plus. I followed her in the agate type of various newspapers and magazines for the rest of her long career, and laughed out loud when I read that she had instructed her caddie to order a Domino’s pizza for on-course delivery during a crawling U.S. Open round at Colonial Country Club. So on brand, based on my half-day with Lori G. As a marketing tool, you can’t beat the pro-am. It comes right out of the long, rich history of human intercourse. People needing people, etc.

In 2024, in consecutive weeks in New Jersey, I played in two LPGA pro-ams. At the Cognizant Founders Cup at Upper Montclair Country Club, our group — a foursome of press-tent escapees — was assigned Yealimi Noh for the front nine and Lucy Li for the back nine. Noh’s game looked spectacular. Her parents walked the entire nine holes with us, which took almost three hours, and Grant Boone, the broadcaster, came by in a cart, curious to see what Noh was wearing on this toasty afternoon, as she enjoyed (I learned that day) a reputation on tour for stylish dressing. Poor Lucy Li, with dusk and a first round approaching, was lost in swing confusion. She was grinding-grinding-grinding, and all that little-girl promise she had displayed as a junior golfer seemed gone. (She played in a U.S. Open as an 11-year-old.) The day was beyond sluggish, the heat was stifling, our pros were engaged with their own lives and travails — and still the day has had a long afterlife.

The next week, at the pro-am at the Mizuho Americas Cup, an LPGA event at Liberty National Golf Club, I was paired on the front nine with Bailey Tardy. Bailey is a trip, open and funny. She talked about winning an event on a remote Chinese island while dealing with a particularly indelicate case of food poisoning and she described the primitive on-course “bathroom” opps with memorable real-life language. On the back nine I was paired with Wei-Ling Hsu, a diminutive pro from Taiwan who grew up in a Buddhist home. She had (and has) a beautifully round and rhythmic swing and a quiet, pensive manner. She told me that Tiger Woods blended an Eastern and Western approach to his golf, and that she could relate.

I’ve been keeping an eye on how all four of these players have been doing for the past two years. Not in any sort of compulsive way but I’ll look them up now and again or look for their names in tournament results.

You can imagine my surprise when I turned on the TV early Sunday afternoon to watch the conclusion of the fourth round of the AIG Women’s Open at Royal Lytham last Sunday and right there on our color television set were three of those four LPGA players I briefly shared fairways with two years ago. Bailey Tardy was not in the field. The other three were in different degrees of contention, with Ms. Noh in the lead. She was wearing navy blue slacks, gathered at the ankle like a bicycle pant, and a stylish shirt, matching in color but with white trim. I guess you could say it was statement dressing but I found myself paying attention to it only because of Grant Boone’s comment two years earlier. She finished one stroke out of the playoff and afterward talked about her rekindled love for the game.

Lucy Li’s four rounds, on the par-71 Lytham course, were 72, 68, 69 — and 76, leaving her in a tie for 16th. She was in the final day’s penultimate group. It’s so hard to finish in this game.

My rooting interest was with Wei-Ling Hsu. She was in Game 26 of 34 on Sunday. In other words, not in contention, one over for 54 holes. But she went out in one under, turned and made birdies on 10, 11 and 13. She was three under for the tournament, and if she could get to the house at four under — well, you never know. She could win from the car park or at least find herself in a playoff.

Two years earlier, at Liberty National, she was wearing various items, including a belt buckle, bearing Jack Nicklaus’s tidy signature and familiar emblem, the Golden Bear. I asked Wei-Ling if she had ever met Nicklaus. She said she had not, and would not want to, unless she had “earned” the chance to meet him by way of good play. What she was doing constituted good play. She made pars on 14, 15, 16 and 17, so she was still three under par standing on the 18th tee. A birdie and a four-under finish would get the attention of all the contenders playing in behind her. She’d be in the house. Lytham’s clubhouse is a showpiece of red-brick old-timey charm.

Wei-Ling had talked to me, two years ago, about Tiger’s play. Shots he played that looked audacious to us did not look that way to her. “You don’t take too much, but you don’t take too little,” she said, describing a Buddhist approach to shot selection. His best shots, like her best shots, were neither greedy nor modest. They were appropriate to the circumstance. I’m not sure I understand what she was saying but it was fascinating.

Wei-Ling hit driver on the final hole at Lytham. The hole was playing 400 yards and was baked out, but Wei-Ling is a short hitter and driving a ball, down the fairway and in play, was certainly her best chance to finish with a birdie 3. Her final tee shot was poised and beautiful, but links golf is links golf, and the ball finished almost against the wall of a fairway bunker. Bad luck. “I might look like this sweet girl,” she had told me two years ago. “But I could come off the course and want to punch something.” Hmmm. When she walked up and saw that ball in the trap, maybe “lost the head,” as players used to say. Maybe the 71 holes of links golf and the decade-plus of her long road game came gushing out of her. I don’t know, but it did take her two shots to get out of that trap. She doubled the last and finished in a tie for 6th at one under for the week. She earned $267,000.

I was watching from 3,000 miles and several time zones away. I was happy for her — that payday is the best of her career. (Her one LPGA win paid $195,000.) Of course, I felt for her, too. How could you not? But finishing is so, so hard. More than anything, I felt connected to her and her career in this difficult game.

In New Jersey, in 2024, Wei-Ling had missed the cut at Upper Montclair and made the drive to Liberty National. She was 10,000 miles from home and driving alone in a rental car across the Garden State. Those north-south byways can be a lot. Describing the drive to me, she said, in her quiet and modest way, that she felt a kind of happiness. I could relate to all of it, and to her. Nine holes together, and she had made a fan for life.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com