MAJOR LESSONS
LINKS PLAYERS MAGAZINE 2019 ANNUAL EDITION
Angela Stanford stood not far from the eighteenth green, an ocean away from home and—it looked like—a shot away from a major championship. Again. Just weeks before, Stanford’s mother had been diagnosed with cancer, six years after her first battle with the disease had ended. There was every reason for Stanford to be the sentimental favorite to win at the 2018 Evian Championship. Every reason but one.
That other reason was the 26-year-old fellow American, Amy Olson, who stood over her ball in the rough, 135 yards from the hole. Olson had come to this 72nd hole with a one-shot lead, and no matter how much you might be rooting for one player over another, no one wants to see a player make double bogey to flip the result at the last.
But Olson’s shot was not easy. She was already in trouble, having driven her first shot into the deep rough on a hillside left of the par-4. She tried to pitch out to the fairway but couldn’t move the ball far enough. Now she was faced with another decision.
Her third shot required a carry over water. If she didn’t cover the hazard, she was finished. But if she pitched out again, she would still need to get up and down from 100 yards or so just to force a playoff.
“Then he said, ‘But you have to promise that if you’re going to do something, you’re going to work hard at it and you’re going to put your full effort in it.’”
Stanford’s dream rested on Olson’s nightmare.
And then Olson hit what she thought was “the best 8-iron of my life.”
Amy Olson didn’t grow up like a lot of kids around her. She and her older brother Nathan were homeschooled. Her parents weren’t wary of experiences for their children; they just wanted to be along for the ride.
But one place Olson was always free to wander was her backyard, an expanse that stretched at least to the par-3 that skirted their property in Oxbow, North Dakota.
At first, Olson says, she wasn’t captivated by golf. “I was more interested in picking dandelions and putting sticks and leaves in my dad’s golf bag.” But when Nathan started playing junior tournaments and bringing home trophies, Amy’s competitive nature met up with a tinge of jealousy and she told her dad she wanted in.
So Dad sat down with her and had “the talk.” OK, not that talk. She was eight years old and her mind was on something much more innocent. She just wanted to play.
“He told me he would pay for the entry fee and drive me back and forth,” she says, “and then he said, ‘But you have to promise that if you’re going to do something, you’re going to work hard at it and you’re going to put your full effort in it.’”
He also gave her an out in case she didn’t like it, but Olson’s little ears were shut by then. Over the next month, she hit 150 bags of balls—“I marked down how many.” She won that first tournament and never looked back. “From that point on, whenever the snow melted, I could not wait to get out on the golf course and practice. Sunup to sundown, there was no time that wasn’t good to go golfing for me.”
As the years progressed, the questions would come at the Andersons (her maiden name), both the parents and the children: How can they not play high school golf? Who’s going to notice them? How will they get into the top schools? But the family stuck to their decision and summer tournaments proved to be enough, especially since one of Amy’s victories was the 2009 US Girls’ Junior. After graduating from high school at 16, Amy wound up at nearby North Dakota State, just has Nathan had. She won an NCAA record 20 individual titles. Sometimes Mom and Dad really do know best.
Amy emerged from the LPGA Q School at the end of 2013 and began a career in the sport she had always loved. But professional golf’s challenges, including the strength of internationally loaded fields, put a player to the ultimate test.
Olson scuffled. When the winter comes in North Dakota, you can put the clubs away, crank up the heat in the house, let your fingers work a puzzle, and have some easy, meaningful talks with your mom. There is a sense of accomplishment in completing one of those puzzles, Olson says (it’s one of her favorite hobbies) and “sometimes you have the best conversations when you’re not staring eye-to-eye.” But the Tour is different. You’re playing for money, and some players will stare you right down in trying to get more than you.
By 2016, Olson was still without a win, an unfamiliar feeling for a player with so much success in her past. She decided to make changes to her swing that would eliminate what she called “a death move,” the kind of flaw that shows up at the worst times and with the meanest results. After asking around, she found Ron Stockton, son of two-time PGA Champion Dave Stockton. Ron’s own LPGA clientele through the years has included Brittany Lang and Morgan Pressel. Olson turned to the Californian for help.
“That was taking kind of a big risk to make swing changes that I knew weren’t going to pay off short-term but were going to pay off long-term,” Olson says. “I believed that, but in golf there are no guarantees.”
What Olson was looking for most of all was consistency: lower scores, more often. In other words, every golfer’s dream. But in the case of a tour professional, finding consistency can be the difference between losing your tour card and winning tournaments. It’s a big deal.
But Olson’s near trajectory was just what she anticipated. The changes she was working on meant more missed cuts and eventually she had to go back to Q School at the end of 2016. She won her card back, then began to see better results in 2017, making more cuts than ever before. But she was still looking for lower scores.
In January 2018, Olson came out firing in some pro-am competitions, posting 64s and 65s. Maybe this was it. “I was giving myself a ton of birdie opportunities and seeing them drop,” she says.
In the early Tour season, she notched a tie for 11th in Phoenix, finished with a good Sunday a week later at the Kia Classic, then headed to the season’s first major, the ANA Inspiration at Mission Hills. With three rounds in the 60s, Olson landed in the final group on Sunday. This was not something she was used to, especially in a major. She faltered, and the victory went to an even bigger surprise, Pernilla Lindberg, a 31-year-old first-time winner who prevailed over world number one Inbee Park in a six-hole playoff that extended into Monday morning. “That wasn’t my moment,” Olson reflected. “I knew now that I could play at the top level, but you’ve got to put four rounds together to win a major championship.” Her 72 dropped her to ninth place. Still, it was her best finish yet in a major.
Olson did not qualify for the US Women’s Open in 2018, but she was top 20 at the LPGA Championship and top 30 at the Women’s British Open. Her confidence in the toughest events was building for the season’s fifth major, the Evian Championship, alongside Lake Geneva in alpine France. There was just one problem. She didn’t like the course.
Golf is not all there is to life, of course, not even for a professional. Olson wasn’t looking for love as an undergrad at North Dakota State, but she also wasn’t opposed to keeping her eyes open. From a distance, then Amy Anderson admired Grant Olson. She wasn’t alone. Grant played linebacker for the Bison football team. “If there are going to be two or three star players on every team, he was one of them,” Amy says. “So I had that little bit of a crush from afar, kind of based on his reputation.”
That reputation included his faith, something Amy herself had learned from her parents but secured as her own. “I was about six years old and I remember reading in Revelation about liars going to hell, and I was like, ‘Well, that’s me. How am I going to avoid this?’ So that was the point where I realized that I wasn’t good enough and it didn’t matter what my parents believed, I had to place my faith in Jesus.”
She experienced times of questions and doubt, both in high school and college. But her parents supported her as she took the time to compare her faith to other world religions. Then she had a North Dakota teammate with similar questions about how Christianity fits into one’s life. “We dug into the Word (the Bible) and we tried to practically live out what we read. Obviously, like we all do, we failed miserably many times—I still do—but through that we leaned on God’s grace, and God used that to mold us and prepare us for where we are now.”
When Amy left college and began her tour career, she continued her walk with Christ. Meanwhile, so did Grant, but far away. He moved to Wyoming, following his North Dakota coach and beginning his own coaching career. He and Amy were Facebook friends, though, and when Grant posted some thoughts about a difficult event he had gone through, Amy reached out. “I sent him a note and said, ‘Hey, thanks for sharing. It’s encouraging to me knowing that other people are fighting the fight and going through tough stuff but continuing to trust God.’”
That note opened a six-month online exchange between the two, and by the time they went out for the first time, “we knew a lot of fundamental things about each other,” Amy says. “So when we had our first date it was just a matter of OK, is there a chemistry? Do we like being around each other? That was pretty instantaneous.” They were married in 2017.
The Olsons live in Terre Haute, Indiana, now. When Grant started coaching linebackers at Indiana State, he went looking for practice opportunities for Amy by asking the school’s golf coach. She was soon connected to the women’s golf team, and when she is home, the two will host dinners with the linebackers or the golfers or friends from church. “We really enjoy hosting,” Amy says. [Update: The Olsons moved to Amy’s hometown in North Dakota in January 2019, when Grant received a coaching job at North Dakota State.]
It’s that love for people that made the September afternoon in Évian-les-Bains so tough on those who know the LPGA. There was Stanford, the 40-year-old veteran of six US Solheim Cup teams whose résumé included top 5s at every major, including a playoff loss in the 2003 US Open. And now her mom’s cancer had returned. The urges of sentiment—and the prayers of her own mother—held hope for Stanford, though the clubhouse leader was still a shot behind.
Then there on the eighteenth, with her purely struck 8-iron sailing toward the flagstick, was the cheery, friendly Olson. All that ball from the rough had to do was release to the back of the green and she would have her chance to win outright. But the ball stopped in a matter of feet. She and Nathan, who was caddying for her that Sunday, could not believe it.
Still, she looked over a putt to win. But this one was more than 40 feet. Misjudging the speed of the putt that was pulled along by the descent in the direction of Lake Geneva, Olson sent it eight feet past. Her putt coming back was too slow.
Double bogey.
Stanford had won.
“Honestly, I played well for 71 holes,” Olson said in reflection after the season closed. “I doubled the last hole to lose by one, and that was really difficult. It was harder than I ever imagined I would take a golf tournament, but I got over it a lot quicker than I thought I would. I took so many positives away from that tournament, and I think it was probably the highlight of my year.”
But Olson also found herself among the fans of Angela Stanford. “I absolutely believe she was supposed to win that event. I’m not saying that God chooses this person wins it and this person loses it, the ball goes in the hole for her and it doesn’t go in for me, but I believe that it is going to be a really good thing in Angela’s life, and I am extremely happy that if I couldn’t win it, it was her.”
Double bogeys can happen at any time, of course. Stanford had one herself at the sixteenth of that winning final round. But when they come on the last hole of major, it can leave a player shaking her head, wondering if she has what it takes to get the job done when so much is on the line. Fortunately for Olson, she received some expert input in the days that followed. She talked extensively to Dave Stockton and also to LPGA legend Nancy Lopez.
“Nancy goes, ‘You know how many tournaments I won?’ I didn’t,” Olson admits. “She says, ‘48. You know how many I finished second in? 49.’ To me, when I look at Nancy Lopez, I look at one of the most accomplished women in the history of golf, and when she tells me that she has more second place finishes than first place, that means you have to put yourself in that position an awful lot of times. Sometimes it’s going to happen, sometimes it’s not.
“Right now, I have more second place finishes that than first place, so I’m basically Nancy Lopez.”
Olson can laugh about it now, and she hopes it is all a catalyst for a strong 2019 season. But at the time, she also needed some sentimental support of her own. It came from Grant, back home in Indiana, on the phone to that ritzy village in France.
“I love how when we talk after a tournament, he’s always saying, ‘You know what, this is what happened at work today.’ It helps me realize that golf isn’t everything. He did that that day. But then he goes, ‘Hey, Sweetheart, I just want you to know that I love you even more today than I did yesterday.’ He’s a born coach, but he wasn’t trying to be a coach at that point. He was just being a husband.”
SIDEBAR: LONELINESS ON TOUR
Amy Olson has spoken publicly about the loneliness that can settle over tour players. We asked her to
explain what she means.
“In an individual sport—and maybe any sport—the higher up you get, the lonelier it gets. • People have aspirations. They want to be great, they want to win tournaments, championships, whatever it is. But I’ve just realized how empty that is and how empty people can feel. It’s not even like, ‘Oh, it didn’t fulfill me 20 years ago or 30 years ago, but I figured it out.’ Instead it’s, ‘It doesn’t fulfill me now and I don’t know where to turn.’ • I feel so fortunate, because I’ve been through some difficulties, but I’ve always known where to turn. If something doesn’t go well, I can go back to the Bible, I can go back to my relationship with God, and he is always there and he is always faithful, and he has never once let me down. I’ve talked to players where golf is the only thing that’s been there for them, and golf is going to let you down. I really cannot imagine a more desperate, lonely place to be than when golf is your rock.”