‘I just want to go home’: For LPGA pros, globetrotting is physical, mental grind

There is, of course, a glamorous side to life in the upper echelon of professional golf. Adoring fans. Endorsement deals with luxury car and watch brands. Smoothing Pro V1s on immaculate, sun-splashed driving ranges — swing coach, masseuse and analytics whiz in tow.

But there’s another side, too.

Canceled flights. Jet lag. Living out of a suitcase. Long stretches away from family and friends.

First-world hardships for sure, but hardships nonetheless, especially on the increasingly global LPGA and Ladies European tours, and most especially this time of year when fatigued players would be forgiven for forgetting what city, if not time zone, they’re in. The LPGA Tour is in the midst of a month-long swing that takes the pros from China to Korea to Malaysia to Japan. Meanwhile, over that same period, the LET schedule has hopped from China to Taiwan to India to Saudi Arabia, where the tour is this week for an Aramco Team Series event at Riyadh Golf Club.

The travel is a grind, not just physically but also mentally and emotionally. Ask the players at the Riyadh stop, who earlier this week spoke openly about the challenges of their nomad lifestyles.

“I don’t think there’s one girl out there who says they love going to the airport every single day and going to tournaments every single week, because it’s hard, it’s really hard,” said Alison Lee, who is ranked 34th in the world; after playing three of the LPGA’s Asian swing events, Lee is now playing making her fourth start in four weeks across four countries and two continents. “It’s hard on our bodies. Especially when we travel internationally and spend hours and hours on the road, packing, unpacking, and a lot of the time, a lot of us travel alone as well. So, if we’re going to the airport, we have two, three, four suitcases. Dragging it through the airport, slowly making our way to the next event, renting a car, getting to the hotel room. It can get pretty lonely at times.”

The rigors of travel are, of course, not unique to the women’s game. But in terms of passports stamped and frequent-flier points accumulated, the top female players are, well, miles ahead of most of their male counterparts. Also, whereas there’s some geographical flow or logic to the PGA Tour schedule (the season kicks off with a couple of Hawaii events followed by a few stops in the American West before settling in Florida for a month, etc.), the LPGA is literally all over the map.

A couple of season-opening Florida events are followed by stops in Singapore, Thailand and China. Then it’s back to the U.S. for a dizzying itinerary that takes players from Arizona to Hawaii to New Jersey. This year, over a three-week stretch in July, the tour Ping-Ponged from France to Ohio to Calgary. Last year, my colleague, Claire Rogers, captured the volume of travel in an eye-opening video that has drawn 1.6 million views on X.

It’s no wonder that by the time the players reach the fall, they’re spent.

Charley Hull, who lives in England, played in Malaysia last week followed by Saudi Arabia this week. When she’s on the road, she said in her wonderfully direct style, “I just want to go home.”

Hull, who is ranked 15th in the world, can be more selective than many LPGA pros about which events she plays, which affords her the luxury of following what she calls her “golden rule”: never playing more than two weeks consecutively.

“Unless it’s in the UK,” she said. “Like, I can go from Evian to British to Scottish.” She added, “I turned pro when I was 16 years old. Now I’m 28. I have to have a bit of a life in between.”

Yes, golfers — just like dentists and lawyers and teachers — wants lives, too. When you see them strolling the fairways, rapping putts on the practice green or stretching their limbs in the fitness trailer, it’s easy to forget that all those activities are their jobs. Shirking or underperforming in any of those duties can lead to missed cuts, and stressing about income and playing status, and difficult conversations with spouses and caddies, and…more stress. Things can spiral in a hurry.

Fifth-year LPGA pro Patty Tavatanakit grew up and played competitively in Thailand before starring on the women’s golf team at UCLA. Now 25, she has two LPGA wins, including a major title (2021 Chevron). When Tavatanakit was asked this week what keeps her motivated to keep spanning the globe in pursuit of golfing greatness, her candor was startling.  

“I’m already contemplating if I actually love golf, but I do it as a job,” she said. “What drives me to do what I do is probably being successful. I really want to be successful, just setting goals and trying to achieve them, whatever it is. I feel like I lost that for a little bit the past two years, I was just really lost and like, why am I playing? And so, I set a good goal at the beginning of this year, and it kind of sparked some good feelings inside.”

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That positive mojo almost immediately translated into wins. Tavatanakit won Aramco’s other LET Saudi event, in February, blowing away the field by seven, before a week later winning the LPGA’s Thailand event. “I’m not sure how long I’m going to keep that going — definitely not, like, the next 20 years,” Tavatanakit said. “I have a time due date on what I want to do, what I want to achieve, and I just want to get out.”

Tavatanakit’s early retirement plans aren’t an anomaly in the women’s game. Lydia Ko, who is 27 and enjoying one of the best seasons of her career, has said she wants to hang up her spikes before she turns 30. Earlier this year, Lexi Thompson, 29, stunned the golf world when she announced that she was calling it quits.

Tavatanaki, who has settled in Orlando, says even when she’s playing in her native Thailand, she still doesn’t feel like she’s home, largely because she can’t get into a routine. Earlier this year, when Tavatanaki saw Taylor Swift perform in Singapore, she said she couldn’t help but think what she shares in common with the pop star.

“There must be some nights where she just does not feel like it, she just wants to call it quits, but she can’t disappoint all those people,” Tavatanakit said of Swift. “It’s just the same with us, like if we just want to call it quits and we just want to go home, but we can disappoint all fans, our responsibility to the Tour, our sponsors. It’s just a part of the job. Sometimes tell yourself you just have to suck it up and do it and do the best you can. If you watch her on the stage, she did not even show that, because she’s great. I idolize that and I try to put it in this year’s mindset as much as possible.”

Carlotta Ciganda, a 34-year-old Solheim Cup stalwart from Spain, turned pro in 2011. She has won seven times on the LET, twice more on the LPGA and seen more airports than Rick Steves. Ciganda was all-in on Tavatanaki’s T. Swift analogy as well as the other players’ musings on their travel schedules.

“I would agree with everything they said,” Ciganda said in her joint press conference in Riyadh with Tavatanakit, Hull and Lee. “I’ve been on tour for 13 years, and it is getting tougher to travel when we go to Asia and all the time changes.

“There are moments when you just want to be home with your family, you just want to sleep, don’t have an alarm. Just want to relax. I think a lot of people just see the prize money that we get on the Sunday. There is a lot of work behind it and a lot of flights, hotels and jet lag, at 3 a.m. looking at the city because we can’t sleep.”

Still, Ciganda stressed, all that time in cramped seats at 40,000 feet aside, she knows she and her peers still have it pretty good.

“I love playing, I love competing — otherwise I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “I always compare it to when I go home, and I see my friends working in an office or doing other jobs. I feel very lucky to do what I do. I think all of us feel the same.”