RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. – No matter where Angela Stanford traveled around the world, she always sent her mom a text on the plane. The first trip without her was rough. At the Palm Springs airport baggage claim, Stanford fought the urge to run back to Texas.
Golf had always been a tool – to go to college, to escape, to help others, to bring joy to her mom as she bravely battled cancer.
“It’s never felt like I played golf for me,” she said.
Now what?
When Stanford, 44, turned into Mission Hills Country Club for the first time this week, she noticed that the flower beds were covered in luscious pink and purple petunias, the same colors that Nan wanted on her casket.
She lost it.
When the desert sky spit rain during that first practice round at the Chevron Championship, Stanford thought it might have been the first sprinkling she’d ever felt in 20 years of coming here. Then she saw a rainbow, arched in the sky like a bridge to heaven. A reminder of God’s promises.
Hi mom.
The night before the first round, Stanford went to the Sunglass Hut to find something that would hide her tears. On the first tee Thursday, she sobbed as she prepared her yardage book and pin sheet in the shade of the grandstand.
She thought she’d cried it out by the time Jenny Shin hit. But when the first tee announcer said, “from Saginaw, Texas,” Stanford’s head tilted back in a shock of pain.
“She basically built that city,” said Stanford.
Laura Nan met the love of her life, Steve, in the fifth grade in Saginaw, a suburb of Fort Worth, and the two married in 1974 shortly after high school graduation. Nan’s mind for numbers had her overseeing the city finances for decades, without a college degree. She somehow managed to build a police station, rec center, and city hall without raising taxes. She was city manager for 17 years.
When Nan was approached by a councilman about naming rights one day, she thought they were going to put Angela’s name on the water tower. Instead, it’s Nan’s name that’s on city hall.
Nan Stanford died on March 9 at home in Saginaw at age 66. She’d battled cancer – first in the breast and then in her bones and liver – for more than a decade. During the funeral procession out to Aurora, the police officer stopped in front of city hall for 15 seconds to honor her life’s work.
“There aren’t many buildings named after women,” said Stanford.
Looking back, Stanford said she should’ve backed off of that first tee shot at Mission Hills until she was ready to hit. Instead, she hurried through and pulled it left out of bounds. The opening triple-bogey proved difficult to recover from in a first-round 77.
But there were shots, like the 48-foot birdie putt she drained on the third hole and the tiny window she laced it through in the trees on No. 11, that she credits mom for the assist.
She plans to play in Hawaii next because mom loved it there. Nan even touched base with her sister about an upcoming trip mere days before she died.
Stanford, a seven-time winner on the LPGA, gets her strength from Nan, that stick-to-itiveness that saw her win her first major at age 40. She started a foundation that awards college scholarships to those whose lives have been impacted by cancer because she knows that if Nan’s cancer had come when Angela was in high school, there’s no way she would’ve gone to college. And Angela was the first from her family to go to college.
It’s the reason she wears blue on Sundays – in honor of her blue-collar roots.
“We’ll give scholarships until we run out of money,” she said.
Nan loved people. In Rancho Mirage, she’d get out to the first, ninth, 10th, and 18th to watch golf but would otherwise stay in the clubhouse and talk to those she knew on tour about their families.
“That’s the thing I’m having the hardest part with,” said Stanford. “I want to be the best of who she was … I don’t know if I can do that.”
It’s difficult to say what comes next for Stanford, beyond this week and Hawaii, because she’s still battling an emptiness inside.
The good news is that there will never be another first round without mom.
And there will be more rainbows.
