PLAYER RECORD
Best LPGA Tour finish: 6th, 2014 ISPS Handa Women’s Australian Open
A WORLD OF SUPPORT
LINKS PLAYERS MAGAZINE, 2017 ANNUAL EDITION
By Amelia Lewis with Jeff Hopper
No one on Tour does it by herself.
Over the last six years I have circled the globe, playing golf on the LPGA Tour and the Ladies European Tour. It has been the most amazing, wonderful experience I could ever have wanted. In fact, when I was a young girl growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, I would have told you that the life I am living now was my dream. But there’s no chance I could survive this life alone.
Success in a sport as hard as golf comes from the confidence you build with hard work and practice. In your mind, you have to see yourself hit the right shots at the right moments over and over again. Those things you do on your own.
But you also have to surround yourself with people who build your confidence and support you as well. They are people you can lean on when you struggle and need help. Every player on Tour has these people around them.
For me, though, there is one more element of my support system that gives me strength. This is having God on my side. I don’t mean this to sound like he is for me and not for other players. What I mean is that I would not be able to keep this crazy, exciting professional golfer’s life together if it wasn’t for his presence, and I’d love to tell you why.
When I was a little girl in Jacksonville, my parents didn’t play golf. But like many parents they were committed to keeping me busy when school was out for the summer, so they put me in several sports camps: swimming, tennis, and golf. I loved swimming and I was competitive with it until I was 16, but when I was introduced to golf at 10 years old, I got hooked on it.
In golf, integrity and values are a big part of the game, but it’s also a really hard sport that you have to work at. It’s not something where if you’re a good athlete you’re automatically going to be good at it. Then, while you’re working hard at the physical part of it, you have the whole mental side, too. That really intrigued me.
By the time I was 12, I had decided that I wanted to become a professional golfer. This meant hard work and more dedication to the game to help fulfill my dream.
I was also extremely dedicated to my studies in school. At that age, my parents gave me an allowance if I earned good grades. If I got straight A’s, I was especially rewarded. This is how I bought my first set of clubs. I made all A’s, then used that money to split the cost of the clubs with my mom and dad. That is how committed I was to becoming a professional golfer.
Of course, this didn’t always make my swim coaches happy. They started to get on my case and said, “Amelia, you’re not coming to practice, you’re playing golf. You need to decide: Are you going to be a swimmer or a golfer?” So maybe it’s because of them I chose golf! It was actually an easy decision, because I loved golf and I knew I could make a living at it.
After school, I would practice until dark at the golf course. I was the only girl golfer at my club, so I would always play matches with the boys. That was hard because they don’t go easy on you. You really have to step it up. But the boys also teach you to learn the rules and hit the shots under pressure.
On the other end of the spectrum, I remember an encounter with an older lady at the club. She thought it was her duty to help me be realistic. “You know,” she told me, “statistics show that only one girl in a couple thousand can make it professionally. So don’t get your hopes up.” I just looked at her with an expression that said, I know I’m going to be a pro one day. I was very stubborn. I wasn’t going to let her tell me what I couldn’t do, and that fueled me even more. I just knew that if I worked hard, I was going to be a great professional golfer.
Those memories are probably what encourage me to support junior girls golf like I do now. The executive director of the Hurricane Junior Tour, who has been a friend for some time, contacted me earlier this year and told me that he wanted to have a national championship for girls and I was the only LPGA Tour player that he wanted to partner with. I was all for it, but I also told him, “If we’re going to do this championship, we’re going to do it big and we’re going to put it on properly.”
The first Amelia Lewis Girls National Championship was held in the fall of 2016, and it was a huge success. We modeled it after a Tour event, so we had roped off areas, sponsors, and products for the girls. We had a welcome party with all the vendors and the girls received a ton of gifts. And the winners of the two age divisions are going to caddie for me in a practice round of an LPGA event this season, so I’m really looking forward to that!
I know the girls are competitive, but my hope for them is that they also have a lot of fun at the event. That’s the most important thing I try to do as a professional—keep the game in perspective and have fun. I want that to be a key lesson I pass on to young players.
When I emerged from the junior ranks, I headed to the University of Florida to play college golf. But the coach I played for was not the coach who recruited me, and I was never very comfortable. More than that, I wanted to be a pro. So I left Florida after a semester, used my No. 3 ranking as an amateur, and went to the Symetra Tour (it was the Duramed Futures Tour at the time, in 2009). This is the tour that qualifies players for the LPGA Qualifying Tournament. So when I finished top 20 on the Symetra Tour, I went straight to the final stage of Q-School, where I played well enough to get my LPGA Tour card for the 2010 season.
Most golf fans know that players from around the world come to the US tours, both on the men’s and the women’s side of the game. But I like to travel and take my game all over the world. By playing the LPGA Tour and the Ladies European Tour, I have traveled just about everywhere golf can be played: the US, Canada, the British Isles, continental Europe, Australia, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
Of all these places, I would rank Australia and the UK at the top of my list. The people there are so supportive of golf, so we always get great crowds, and the people are really nice.
But I do love coming home. I am a fifth generation native of Jacksonville and my whole family lives there. Because my life on the road is always going, going, going, I love to relax when I’m home. I still live with my family, so my younger brothers and sisters are always around, and I can take it easy with them and my friends. When I’m on tour, I am always going to a function or playing a pro-am or traveling through an airport, so relaxing when I’m home is fine with me!
What I also like about home is that some of the key pieces of that all-important support system are there. I grew up going to church and I attended a Christian elementary and middle school, so faith and fellowship have always been a part of my life. But honestly, sometimes I put God second and my faith second to everything else that’s going on in my life. I think that’s something a lot of people can relate to, because we always have things going on in our lives that distract us from what’s most important. In the middle of all this, you have to stay dedicated, read the Bible, pray, and remember that first comes God and then everything else in your life.
I would say that my No. 1 priority is reminding myself that God is actually first in my life, but I still lose track of this sometimes.
It is so easy to get caught up in our daily goals and drama in our lives. I want to win on Tour. That may seem obvious, but I have been out here for six years and I have won twice. I have had some really great years with multiple second place finishes and top 10s, but I practice hard to keep winning.
But maybe that’s where the trouble comes in. When you’re playing at the highest level and competing for trophies on the world’s best tours, it’s easy to place expectations on yourself. With expectations comes pressure, and you can end up being very hard on yourself about every missed shot. That’s actually a very backwards way of getting the results you want.
This is why Jesus is so important to me and why I can’t play golf without him. When you get your strength in Christ, it takes some of the pressure off, because you know that someone always has your back and everything is going to be OK, even if you don’t make the putt. You don’t have this huge amount of pressure on you, like life or death, because you know someone has already died for you.
Sometimes when an athlete says that God is on their side, they get criticized because it sounds like God is taking sides—like he’s for me and against you. That’s not it at all. For me, having Christ on my side gives me confidence, because I feel complete in him, and I feel like I can go out and conquer the world. This doesn’t happen every time. In a golf sense, you could say that I am still waiting to “conquer the world.” As easy as it sounds, it is still hard to keep sight of God’s presence in your life, and you always have to remind yourself about that.
My support system helps me do this, beginning with my parents at home. But it is good to have friends on Tour who understand me as well. We have a weekly fellowship on tour and this group keeps me grounded and reminds me that I have a bigger purpose in life than just hitting the ball around. I need to treat people the way God wants me to treat them and always be his light on the course. It’s not easy when you miss a putt to remember that, but it reminds me that there is more to life than golf.