Professional golfers make the game look easy. It’s not — even for them. The best players in the world sweat and grind and stress over shots and scores just like you do. Only difference is, you get despondent when you can’t make bogey, they get despondent when they can’t make birdie.
Ask Danielle Kang.
Actually, Kang is a good player to ask about virtually any topic, because you’re likely to get a refreshingly honest answer. The world No. 11 and five-time LPGA winner tells it like it is, or at least her version of how she thinks it is.
The latest reminder of Kang’s candor came Wednesday at the LPGA’s season-capping CME Group Tour Championship, in Naples, Fla., when Kang was asked about how much she loves golf.
“I really love golf,” she said. And then here came the candor: “I used to not, but I have learned to love the game in the last few years and I am obsessed with it. I’m trying to figure out a way to fail better at this point because I fail every day. I’m trying to figure it out, and I can’t figure out this game. … For me, I think my new goal to fail better every time I fail.”
Good advice for all, whether you’re a golfer, a gardener or a grocer.
Kang was then asked whether she likes to get out on her off-weeks and just play for fun.
“To be quite frank, I don’t enjoy playing recreationally,” she said. “I don’t really like to play for fun. I love competition. I like being able to score what I did, didn’t do well, and be better and try and work towards a goal. Golf is stressful enough that I really don’t want to play for fun. It is really not fun when I make bogeys. So, me trying to stress and try and birdie when I’m playing at a random golf course doesn’t — it stresses me out.”
Kang’s certainly not the first player to admit she doesn’t like to play golf for giggles. Jack Nicklaus was once asked if he liked to play for fun. He replied — we’re paraphrasing here — that yes, he does, but his idea of fun is walking up the 72nd hole of a major with the lead. More recently, Brooks Koepka has referred to golf as “boring,” telling Golf Digest in 2015 that if he could do it all over again, he would have played baseball. In other words, you won’t likely catch Koepka jetting off to Bandon for a long weekend with his boys. Same goes for Kang. Golf — ultra-competitive golf, that is — is her profession and one to which she has committed her life. There’s not room for much else.
“I think I’m sometimes so obsessed with eating right, sleeping right, working out, living and breathing just to play good golf that even if I do everything correct, my results are not where I want it to be,” Kang said.
