Between Two Weddings
By the time the second wedding went off, just over six months later, Ally McDonald finally got around to changing her name. No sooner had we gotten to know her as an LPGA Tour winner, but she disappeared from Tour leaderboards. Which doesn’t mean she wasn’t still making plenty of birdies. It’s just that now, thanks to the first wedding, we were going to have to remember she was Ally Ewing.
Entering 2020, Ally eyed the year ahead as most of us did, meaning business as usual. As a professional golfer, she’d practice hard, lay out her competitive schedule, set some goals, and play her heart out. Oh, and one more thing. Ally McDonald had said yes to Mississippi State assistant men’s golf coach Charlie Ewing. 2020 was the year they would get married. So there was more than a little extra on the bride-to-be’s plate.
Then came COVID.
Like most things, the LPGA Tour season was quickly suspended in mid-March. The sport’s leaders were going to need time to figure out how to navigate the demands of the 100-year health crisis: testing, travel, galleries, sponsorships. When would it make sense to play again?
The PGA Tour took the lead, one of the first sports to return to action. This gave LPGA commissioner Mike Whan and his team a chance to move forward with confidence. They planned a return to play on the last day of July. And Ally McDonald was doing double duty again. Her wedding, originally slated that same July 31, was now going to land right at the start of a very short season. What could be done?
Ally and Charlie and their families got to scrambling. They looked for an earlier date and found one on May 30, with the chance to invite up to 50 people under Mississippi’s outdoor restrictions. This was far fewer than they had originally planned, but the event was a winner.
“As it happened,” Ally said, “we couldn’t imagine it being any better. Of course we wanted everyone there that we had originally invited, but we look back on that day and we think it couldn’t have been any more perfect.”
For all the misery of 2020, this was how Ally’s magical year really got going. And we haven’t made mention yet of a girl’s first buck.
Ally McDonald grew up in small town Mississippi, in a place called Fulton, 90 minutes north of Starkville. Got your bearings? It was through Starkville, home of Mississippi State University, that Ally would trace her path to the LPGA Tour. First, Dad had a lesson or two for her.
“I remember as a junior golfer, my dad always taught me that you can’t win a golf tournament on the first day, but you can lose it,” Ally says. “So that’s always been something that resonated with me, particularly if I’ve played just an OK round on the first day. If you shot maybe a couple under and the lead’s at five or at seven, that doesn’t mean you’re out of position to contend for a golf tournament. I’ve always thought of that.”
Turns out, Dad’s lesson was just as big for life. Sometimes you have to wait out your dream, pushing past unexpected challenges and seasons of mediocrity.
Ally’s playing days went through Mississippi State, where she was a two-time first-team All-American. She was selected to play on the US Curtis Cup team in 2014, the pinnacle of competition for female amateurs. The future looked bright and lightened even more when she emerged from the 2016 Symetra Tour season having amassed the second highest earnings total in that tour’s history. She had earned her way to the LPGA Tour.
Then came the surprising diagnosis. Early in 2017, doctors informed Ally that she had Type 1 diabetes. The signs were there, but now they had a name, and not a casual one. Type 1 diabetes requires significant life changes, including dietary restrictions, proper exercise, and steady attention to the signals one’s body is sending. Play it wrong and a diabetic can suffer from life-threatening physical shock due to a lack of proper glucose in the bloodstream.
“When I found out, it really hit me,” she remembers. “I didn’t know a whole lot about diabetes. I knew some people who had it, but I wasn’t aware—when I got the news, I had just gotten my Tour card and now I’m going to have to learn how to deal with this disease. For a couple of days I was kind of just like how can I do both?”
The diagnosis—if this is possible—came at a good time. Ally had two months and more before the LPGA Tour season started, so she could learn what changes in routine would be needed to live and compete with diabetes. “I was able to lay the groundwork and get everything under control and understand that I had to do this at this time, that kind of stuff, just to kind of get my feet underneath me to start the year.”
The carbs were the hardest part. Usually a diabetic’s enemy, an athlete needs carbohydrates for the energy to keep going. The proper balance can be tough to find. “That part took me a little while, a couple months, especially once I got on the road,” Ally explains. “It’s definitely manageable, but you just have to stay very disciplined. I definitely go through weeks where I’m not at my best, but it’s very, very manageable with discipline.”
Ally McDonald met Charlie Ewing later that same year. Charlie was a Dallas kid, but as an aspiring college coach, he took an assistant’s job at Mississippi State. Ally was still putting in practice hours in Starkville, and her coach, Ginger Brown-Lemm, played matchmaker. The two met in August and went on their first date about a month later.
Ally had grown up in the church and Charlie was mentored through the ministry of College Golf Fellowship, so faith in Christ was common ground for the young pair. But also common was traveling and uncertain schedules. Assembling the practical aspects of marriage would take time, but by 2020, the couple was ready to put that wedding together.
Once the vows were said, the party lights were turned off, and the couple had honeymooned, it was time to get back to golf. In 2019, Ally got a taste of the big time, when she was selected to replace the injured Stacy Lewis on the US Solheim Cup team. Still, wins had eluded her. Her best finish in her three previous seasons on Tour had been two third-place showings. The 2020 season would be an abbreviated one, with fewer chances at victory, but maybe her time had come.
Ally’s first tournament after the restart, the LPGA Drive On Championship, was a disappointing missed cut. But a sequence of top-25s followed, then two top 15s in early October. The trend was good.
The Drive On tournament name resurfaced in a new fill-in event at Reynolds Lake Oconee in Georgia. The location was popular, with several lakeside holes allowing local fans to watch and cheer from the safe distance of their various watercrafts. The Jack Nicklaus-designed Lake Oconee course had been restored in 2019 and shone like a repolished gem. Players raved about the place all week. But one player loved it all the more. The birthday girl, Ally McDonald.
An opening 66 left Ally a shot back of the thriving Danielle Kang, the American who had won the first two events after the restart. But Ally’s 68 on Friday pushed her ahead of Kang, then a 69 on Saturday gave her a one-shot cushion over Bianca Pagdanganan and two over Kang.
Then came birthday Sunday, October 25, the day Ally turned 28. It would be a different day, for sure. She’d have to pull down her mask to blow out the candles on her cake after the round. But the real difference came down the stretch that afternoon, when Kang pressed the issue with back-to-back-to-back birdies just as Ally was making bogey. A comfortable margin forged by Ally’s own three birdies to start the inward nine disintegrated to one shot. “I’m not going to lie, it shook me up pretty bad,” she would tell reporters after the round.
But Ally went back to her process, the one that had brought her to this week and then to this Sunday. Ally had actually expected a charge from Kang, and now she had to respond. She made key pars when Kang backed off with a bogey at fifteen, then Ally added a birdie at seventeen to allow her the margin she needed, even with a Kang birdie at the last. For the first time, Ally McDonald lifted an LPGA trophy. Who ever said 2020 was a no-good year?
Every professional golf hopeful has a head full of dreams. For many, those dreams are never matched by reality. But that fall day at Reynolds, Ally found her dream had come true. Charlie, off coaching, wasn’t there, but her parents were, and they shared her joy. When the three of them got home about midnight, Ally’s grandparents were all there, waiting up to add to the celebration. “I was super happy and excited for them to be able to experience this win with me,” she says. “I’m so blessed to have all four of them. That was really special.”
These are the same people that gave Ally the foundations she held to right through her wedding and her win. The family attended a small Baptist church together when she was growing up. “I got saved when I was eight. I remember the day and how everything happened. At a young age, you understand the concept of salvation, but obviously you progress in your faith to really grasp how Christ died for us and all that kind of stuff. At eight I had this small understanding but continued to try to grow in my faith.”
College, as it does for so many who grow up in church, presented challenges. Would she find others of faith to support her? Would the demands of collegiate golf steal her focus on Christ? She found the support she needed and sought it all the more when her college career ended and she could land in a church of her choice. Ally and Charlie attend church together in Starkville, where their roots were sunk even deeper just weeks after Ally’s win when Charlie was named Brown-Lemm’s successor as the head women’s coach at MSU.
Ally also draws support from the well-established fellowship on Tour. “There are so many people at home, through church, the life on tour—I’ve had so many people who have just been so great and supportive and people who pour into your life. We all just try to guide each other and help each other be more plugged into the word, into Christ, and to fully just be seeking him.”
‘I just had some songs in my head that were speaking to me in a way of calming me and understanding that golf is not who I am, it’s what I do.’The three weeks after McDonald’s win were open on the Tour’s schedule due to the cancellation of the Asian swing. So Charlie took Ally to the woods. They had been there several times over since meeting. Charlie’s family had taught him the intricacies and pleasures of bow hunting, and he had been passing these along to Ally.
This time, though, Ally would experience another first, when she used a crossbow to bag her first buck. “Something that he has always enjoyed has turned into something that I really enjoy doing,” she says. “I thought I’d hate hunting, getting in a deer stand or blind and just sitting there for hours, but it’s actually quite peaceful and pretty relaxing.”
The two have also gotten hooked on pickleball, sometimes competing with fellow LPGA Tour player Amy Olson and her husband Grant. Ally laughs about the way she and Charlie go at it on the court: “We’re both super competitive, so it can sometimes not be great for our marriage, but we really enjoy it.”
Many times over, Ally and Charlie found their way in 2020. When the season picked up again the week before Thanksgiving, Ally stayed hot, grabbing a runner-up finish to world No. 2 Sei Young Kim. Now she was zipping up the Race to the CME Globe standings. If she wanted it, she would have a spot in the season-ending event. But that weekend—which would follow the rescheduled US Women’s Open, where she finished in the top 20—was already spoken for. The second wedding. Her brother Andrew this time. Still more for the family to celebrate, even with the cautious navigations of COVID.
Ally will enter the 2021 as one of the top-ranked American players in the game. The Solheim Cup will come around again, and this time she is well-positioned to earn an outright spot under new captain Pat Hurst. Her confidence—the most critical of golf’s intangibles—as a Tour winner is accelerated. And she will do all of this under her new name. Ally Ewing. It was stitched into the staff bags she gave her in-laws as a surprise gift when the Tour arrived in Dallas at Thanksgiving.
Throughout her win at Reynolds, Ally let songs of faith play on the stereo of her mind. “I just had some songs in my head that were speaking to me in a way of calming me and understanding that golf is not who I am, it’s what I do.”
The bigger picture of what life is all about played before the eyes of all of us in 2020, but for Ally McDonald Ewing, it was more of the same—a chance to use the gifts and platform God has given her to “show other people that God is good,” she says. “I’m super thankful for that avenue.”