Alison Lee didn’t think she was meeting a friend on the day she arrived at the Berenberg Invitational’s Pro-Am in September.
She thought she was meeting Freddie Couples.
As she tells it, the story of this most unusual friendship begins on a beautiful fall afternoon in Bedford Hills, New York, where Lee (a rising LPGA talent) was paired with Couples (the golf hall of famer) for 18 holes of hit-and-giggle. Couples was in good spirits on that day, and he was particularly impressed with Lee, 28, whose game appeared to rounding into form just in time for the closing stretch of the LPGA season. They got to talking about golf and life, as pro-am partners do, and before long they were talking like old friends. As their round ended, they exchanged phone numbers — a pleasantry that Lee didn’t think much of at the time.
Soon after their round was over, Couples reached out for the first time. And, as Lee says now with a chuckle, he hasn’t stopped reaching out since.
“He’s like ‘you’re SO good at golf, YOU need to believe it,'” Lee says with a chuckle. “I’m like ‘Freddie, it’s fine. I’m okay.'”
Lee says she’s not sure what Couples saw in her that made him reach out with that first message – or with the messages that have followed nearly every day since. While it was certainly nice to hear words of encouragement from a hall of famer, she didn’t think she needed the push.
“Starting with like Arkansas, China, he was just hammering into me, ‘you need to believe you’re a good player, you need to go out there and believe you’re the sh*t and you can do it,'” Lee said. “I mean, it was a lot of messages every day from Freddie, I’m not gonna lie. It was like ‘oh, another message from Freddie.'”
But Couples’ words weren’t empty. He’d seen something in Lee during the day they played together, and he’d noticed something was missing. The great players have more than just talent. They have a sense of radical, sometimes unhinged self-belief — and Couples wanted Lee to see that for herself.
So he started texting her. Every day. Often using his chosen nickname for her, “Mrs. Monster” to send along words of encouragement for the day or week to follow. And then a funny thing happened: after the texts started flowing in, Lee’s game took off. She logged runner-up finishes in three consecutive LPGA events, including the season-ending CME Group Tour Championship — netting close to $1 million in earnings in one month, more than she’d made on the LPGA all season. At the end of October, her hot streak culminated in a victory at the Aramco Team Series event in Riyadh, just the second win of Lee’s pro career.
Her game was blossoming. That wasn’t an accident, and the source of the change wasn’t, either.
“Honestly, him hammering that into me, it really resonated with me, and finally I slowly started to believe it,” Lee said. “I read those messages and — I’m gonna get emotional, he’s just been so supportive and to see someone like that — a legend who watched me play golf and wants to tell me how good I am.”
Lee paused.
“It’s surreal to think, he’s telling me how good I am and for the longest time, I didn’t believe it myself.”
With the closing stretch of her season, Lee reached closer to LPGA stardom than ever before, cracking the top 20 of the Rolex ranking for the first time in her career. It’d been a dramatic run, and it’d come in no small part thanks to the kindness of a golf legend.
“He’s honestly been the biggest supporter and my number one fan over the last couple of months,” Lee said. “It’s been really cool. I just look at my phone and it says ‘Freddie Couples’ and I’m like, ‘that’s weird.'”
Not bad for a pro-am partner.