A Pro Golfer Who
Lived a Life

I picked up a golf club for the first time when I was eleven years old. My father handed it to me on a damp Wellington morning, the fairway still wet from the night before, and said simply: "Hold it like you mean it." I didn't know then that those five words would shape the next four decades of my life.

Growing up in New Zealand in the 1970s, girls didn't play golf. Not seriously, anyway. It was a game for businessmen on Saturdays and retired gentlemen on Tuesdays. But nobody told my father that — and, thankfully, nobody told me.

By the time I was fifteen I was beating every boy at my school. By seventeen I had my first amateur title. By twenty I was on a plane to compete in Australia, a suitcase full of borrowed clothes and a borrowed confidence I had to learn to make my own.

This memoir is not really about golf. It's about the people who believed in me before I believed in myself. It's about the tournaments I won when I had no business winning them, the ones I lost when I was certain I'd prepared enough. It's about the friendships forged on practice ranges in foreign countries, the quiet loneliness of hotel rooms, and the extraordinary kindness of strangers who became family.

If you've ever stood over a putt knowing everything depended on it — a career, a dream, a version of yourself you weren't sure existed — then some part of this story is yours too.

This is where it began. On a wet Wellington morning, holding a club like I meant it.