NORTH BERWICK, SCOTLAND | Kendall Dye was worried. It had nothing to do with missing fairways but the fact that something she had posted on Twitter had gone a bit off-piste on its route into the pages of a local paper.
It was all to do with the wonderful day she had in St Andrews the Friday ahead of this week’s Aberdeen Standard Investments Ladies Scottish Open at the Renaissance Club in Gullane. To revisit the story, this 32-year-old, four-time winner on the Symetra Tour had joined a queue at 3:20 in the morning in a bid to see if she could be among those lucky enough to get a starting time over the Old Course at some point that day.
Whilst in the queue, a cheerful Aussie had drawn her attention to the fact that she would need to produce a handicap certificate to prove that she could play a bit. A little later, she tweeted the tale as follows: “St. Andrews needed a letter of proof from my home club for my handicap to allow me to play. … I had to think quick & pulled this out of my wallet for the first time ever.”
“This” just happened to be her LPGA card. The interested media person, in picking up on that tweet, took it a gimme of a putt further and said that officials had “demanded proof” of her ability to play. In Kendall’s eyes, it made her experience sound as if it had been an ill-tempered affair. “No one was demanding anything,” she said. “The truth was that my exchange with the official, a man called Rob, could not have been a more lighthearted and friendly affair.”
“We use our golfing gifts to raise money for people in Zambia through assorted pro-ams – and it’s something I’ve been doing since 2015.” – Kendall Dye
It seems likely that other hopefuls in what was a decidedly happy queue had advised Rob of the fact that they had an LPGA player in their midst. Whatever, Rob knew who she was and, after greeting her with the warmest of handshakes, he had shown no interest in seeing any paperwork at all.
“I was thrilled when he told me that I had got the last spot on offer for the Friday – it was for 4:30 in the afternoon – and we were just having a chat and a laugh. Rob made a joke about wanting to see a handicap certificate and I pulled out my LPGA card by way of a jokey response. There was nothing negative in what happened and I would hate anyone to think that there was. Absolutely everyone was super kind.”
When 4:30 finally came around, she found herself playing against three guys from Dallas. All four of them did a lot of talking but she was round in 71 in spite of the fact that she had not gotten to her bed in the Ardgowan Hotel until midnight ahead of her 3 a.m. alarm call. (She had spent the previous evening driving north after playing Hillside and Royal Birkdale.)
The funny thing is that she already had a round booked over the Old Course for the Saturday. That was to play with her caddie, a man of St Andrews by name of Rob Quin whom she had met some years earlier at the Old Collier Golf Club in Florida where he works in the winter. “The reason for the Friday round,” she expanded, “was that I wanted the experience of doing what so many everyday golfers want to do. And it was as magic for me as it was for all of them.”
Kendall had talked of everyone she met in St Andrews being “super kind” when she herself would seem to be “super kind.” Apart from being worried sick about offending the man in charge of the queue, she talked of her involvement in Betsy King’s Golf Fore Africa charity.
“We use our golfing gifts to raise money for people in Zambia through assorted pro-ams – and it’s something I’ve been doing since 2015,” she said.
She has been out to Zambia a couple of times and tells of a 2015 trip ahead of which she had raised $15,000 among friends and family for a water well for one of the villages.
On a day dedicated to visiting the various wells funded by donors to Golf Fore Africa, Kendall was assuming that her well had yet to be excavated when the bus stopped one more time. It was in a village in the middle of nowhere and when she was least expecting it, someone announced, “Kendall, this is your well…” (She has enabled more since but that was the one she will never forget.)
Older ladies in the village sang and danced in her honour and, all of a sudden, the first spurt of the clean water the locals had ever known shot from the ground.
Kendall was still on a high after her visit to St Andrews while, when pressed, she mentioned that she was longing for a first win among the LPGA professionals. Yet she was quick to suggest that it was not an all-consuming ambition.
“Whatever happens, what I’m doing to help to get fresh water to the millions who are still without it will be the greatest thing I’ll ever do.”