Azucena Maldonado C O M M U N I T Y
DIDN’T HAVE A RELATIONSHIP WITH GOLF, neither did my family. We didn’t grow up around golf, it wasn’t in my field of reference, I didn’t really know golfers and so it was absolutely foreign to me. I’d heard of Nancy Lopez and probably Lee Trevino, but they were all just vague names to me. I knew them as Latino leaders, but I didn’t see beyond that. One day I needed a plumber and I asked a neighbor for a recommendation. They gave me a number, and because it was a holiday the man who owned the plumbing company came himself, it wasn’t one of his people. That’s how we met. He called me the week after! And so we went out. He was a crazy avid golfer—is a crazy avid golfer, one of those single-digit handicap golfers. He lives to golf, and this is a Latino golfer, right? And so on our second date he took me to a golf course and he bought me a putter and were just putting on the practice green. He was setting up drills for me and, you know, it was fun, and right away, immediately, I thought, ‘Wow, this is something that I can do!’ I was making some putts and it just seemed doable to me. I like it, and so he keeps taking me to the golf course, pitch-and-putt par 3s, introduces me a little bit more and a little bit more, and when I started hitting the ball I fell in love with it immediately, I connected immediately. It felt like something I could do. I’d never played sports in my life, although I felt athletic. Anything I played was never formal, baseball or football with the neighbors. I was always competitive with my brother, I could catch a ball better than him, that kind of thing, but I never participated in formal sports in school. He would take me three times a week minimum to teach me. I think his game suffered because he was dedicating so much time to me and so he wasn’t playing the big courses, he was there with me on the little par-3s working on his short game.
winter 2014
On my own I would go to the driving range and practice. I’m not going to say I got pretty good, but I got comfortable with the game right away. I wanted to get better because I wanted to be able to play the bigger courses, and he wasn’t going to take me to the bigger courses before I was ready. That’s all we would do: golf, watch the Golf Channel, everything in our relationship was golf. Through the years I always practiced on my own. I wanted to get better, and I liked the challenge. I wasn’t doing it for him—never was I doing it for him, it was always because I loved it. And yes, of course I got to play with him and he was like my caddie—he was fabulous, he spoiled me. Three years into playing golf, I was a little confident with my game, somebody invited me to participate in a golf tournament. I didn’t really understand the bigger picture of golf, I didn’t know what it was. When I walked in to register I thought, ‘Wow, this is like Disneyland for a golfer.’ That’s
39
Susanne Kindt
I