Aug. 2, 2006

by Lisa D. Mickey, Duramed FUTURES Tour

So far, so good.

That’s how Kristy McPherson describes her fourth season on the Duramed FUTURES Tour. And for good reason. McPherson won her first Tour event earlier this year in McAllen, Texas. And she has moved into the No. 9 spot on the Tour’s money list with five tournaments remaining.

“To finally get a win under my belt is great, but I’ve got to make a move in these last few weeks,” said McPherson, 25, of Conway, S.C. “It’s been a good year for me in general to jumpstart my career.”

And the former three-time, first-team All-American from the University of South Carolina especially has her heart set on taking care of unfinished business this week at the Laconia Savings Bank FUTURES Golf Classic in Concord, N.H., where she tied for second last year with co-runners-up Bo Mi Suh and Seon-Hwa Lee of South Korea. Lee has moved on to the LPGA Tour and McPherson hopes she will join her if she can grab another tournament win and move into the top five on the money list by season’s end.

But what is different this year than any other year? McPherson always seems to have her “A game” and possesses a swing and putting stroke that stacks up to any player on Tour. Behind her thick-as-honey Southern drawl and friendly demeanor is a player who is as competitive and tenacious as any.

“She’s stubborn as hell,” said her father David McPherson, a scratch-handicap player who put both a golf club and a fishing rod in his daughter’s hands at age 4. “She breathes competitive fire from the time she gets up in the morning to when she finally goes to sleep at night.”

The elder McPherson, who regularly shoots between 68 to 74 on the golf course (with an occasional 65), once tried to qualify for the PGA’s senior tour. He didn’t make it.

“I didn’t have the grit that it takes,” he said. “But Kristy’s got it. She’s got it all. And I told her that LPGA card will come when she’s ready.”

The father and daughter have shared respective health hurdles that made each a little tougher and more resolved than ever to compete and play well. At age 11, Kristy was stricken by an illness that put her in the bed for almost a year. She was in and out of hospitals and it took six months for doctors to finally diagnose rheumatoid arthritis. She was forced to be home-schooled for part of the 6th and 7th grade. Worst of all, the highly active kid who played Little League baseball, basketball, golf and wrestled with her brothers in the yard was on the inside looking out.

“We used to carry her out to the front porch and she’d watch the other kids play,” said her dad. “It just broke her heart that she couldn’t be out there with them. But even after she was starting to get better, she still wanted to compete. In Little League, she’d bat and they’d get another kid to run the bases for her.”

With nearly 12 months to only think about the sports she loved, Kristy would lie in her bed and wait for her father to come home from playing golf. Then, she would ask him about his round, demanding great detail about every shot on every hole — visualizing the round, feeling it herself, playing the game vicariously flat on her back.

At one point, doctors told the youngster she wouldn’t be able to play sports. At her worst, she had a horrific rash and had difficulty breathing. She was taking Prednisone, and at “five-foot-nothing,” she weighed 170 pounds — a far cry from the active little girl who could hold her own in any sport against a bunch of boys.

But a rheumatologist switched her medicine to the anti-inflammatory drug Mobic, which she takes daily, and told her she had the green light to “do anything you want.” Those words were golden to McPherson.

And while she still can’t run with ease, McPherson has learned to adapt her physical endeavors. She uses the medicine ball for exercise and regularly performs 100 pushups and 100 sit-ups. She avoids certain foods that cause flare-ups. And she accepts the daily pain as a reminder that she ultimately turned to a sport that she could play and play well.

“I wouldn’t know what it’s like to wake up every day and not feel pain,” said McPherson. “But I probably would never have played golf if I hadn’t had arthritis. I would have tried to play softball.

“And I believe my life would have been completely different if I wouldn’t have gotten sick,” she added. “I don’t think it’s ironic at all. I wouldn’t have been a Christian. I wouldn’t be on a professional golf tour. Nothing in my life would have been the same. There’s no doubt in my mind that when doctors said, ‘No sports,’ I knew I’d work as hard as I needed to work to get back.”

It was Kristy’s turn in November 2003, to encourage her father when he was diagnosed with cancer. He underwent kidney surgery and nine days later, had more surgery for bone cancer in his left leg (femur) and hip, which were replaced with artificial implants.

The McPherson family — with four children — are a close bunch, and Kristy spent every night possible camping in her father’s hospital room recliner and encouraging him, just as he had encouraged her. She learned to give him injections in his stomach. And now she was sharing her own golf adventures with her dad, reassuring him that even with an artificial leg, he would be back on the links.

“That doctor who told him he’d never play golf again didn’t know how stubborn McPhersons are,” laughed Kristy, whose family lives 10 miles from the golf courses of Myrtle Beach, S.C.

“I was with my dad when the doctor told him that, and my dad said, ‘No way, that’s not even an option.'”

As sick as he was, her father shot a 67 in his last round before surgery. In his third round back, he carded a 71. And two months after being able to play again, he fired another 67. As they say, the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree.

“You’ll never hear Kristy complain about her bad days,” said good friend and fellow Tour member Janell Howland of Boise, Idaho. “She’s not the type who looks for sympathy. She wants to be like anybody else.”

But that’s just it. McPherson isn’t like everybody else and she’s far from being a selfish, winning-is-everything kind of touring pro, as is often the stereotype. She still puts in the hours of practice, is as competitive and skilled as anyone in the top-20, but has taken her unique perspective and applied it to every-day random acts of gentility.

That quality was best exemplified this season by a situation that occurred during an early round of the Tour’s tournament in Tucson, Ariz. McPherson was playing with Allison Fouch and Fouch was having a tough day off the tee with a new driver. After the round, McPherson asked Fouch if she could tell her something she noticed about her opponent’s swing during the round.

“Kristy said my swing looked really closed and that I was swinging too far right and needed to just turn the club over,” said Fouch of Grand Rapids, Mich., who is now ranked fifth on the Tour’s money list. “It was a neat gesture on her part and I was taken back a little bit because it’s not very often that you get that. I felt like she was saying, ‘Hey, we’re not just competitors out here.'”

Fouch considered McPherson’s suggestion, thanked her, and went to the range and worked out her swing issues. That week in Tucson, Fouch tied for eighth and McPherson tied for 10th.

“I think she’s one of the least selfish people that I know,” added Howland.

“Obviously, she wants to win, but she’s the type of person that if she says, ‘Great birdie,’ she means it. She’ll always bring her ‘A’ game, but if you beat her, she also can tell you, ‘Good job.'”

Of course, the next big job for McPherson is to win again to move up the money list. It’s a tough assignment against a competitive field. And every player feels the clock ticking. Especially McPherson, who won seven times in college, including two SEC Championships, and who was the 2002 NCAA Honda Inspirational Athlete of the Year.

Making the transition from college to the Duramed FUTURES Tour and on to the LPGA Tour has been a tough assignment, but not as difficult as the other challenges McPherson has faced in life.

“Nineteen tournaments [during the Tour’s competitive season] is really not a lot of time and every dollar counts out here,” she said. “I’ve made it to the final stage of LPGA Q-School three times, but I don’t just want the week of my life to get my card. When I get out there [on the LPGA Tour], I want to be there to stay. It’s a timing thing because there are some people out there now who haven’t beaten me one single week. But Q-School is just a crazy, crazy week of golf.”

Top-ranked players on the Duramed FUTURES Tour scratched their heads during June when McPherson left the Tour for two weeks of filming in Los Angeles during the middle of the season. She was picked for The Golf Channel’s Big Break VI Trump National show, scheduled to air in September. When she left, McPherson was ranked No. 5 on the money list. When she returned two weeks later, she had slipped to 10th. But when asked why she risked losing ground on the Tour’s money list, McPherson said it was a decision she made with great consideration.

“I believe I have game and needed something to put my game out there because I haven’t made a quick transition from college golf to the LPGA,” she said. “It was an awesome experience and it definitely helped me realize how important every single shot is. Every shot out here could mean a couple thousand dollars and a couple thousand dollars sometimes means the difference between getting or not getting your LPGA Tour card.”

But for the next five weeks, McPherson’s focus is on the Duramed FUTURES Tour, where she says, “That little white ball doesn’t know what tour it’s playing on.” McPherson does, but she is motivated to move on to play against such former collegiate opponents as Virada Nirapathpongporn and Reilley Rankin, who “graduated” from the Duramed FUTURES to the LPGA.

“I can play with those girls and I know it,” she said. “I’m happy for them and I look forward to playing with them on the next level. Sure, there are times when I’ve been pretty frustrated, but I’ve been a lot more patient than I ever thought I’d be. And I’m one that’s learned that everything happens for a reason.”

And in its own time.