Raising his family of seven boys and girls in Salt Lake City, Kelepi Finau gave new meaning to the saying that the word love is spelled T-I-M-E.
“My dad gave me just about every ounce of time outside of work to get me to where I am today,” said son Tony.
The story of how Tony defied the odds to become a six-time PGA Tour winner could be golf’s version of the Hollywood blockbuster “The Blind Side,” in which Michael Oher turned a love of football into a college scholarship and eventually NFL success. Of Tongan and American Samoan descent, Tony is the first player of such ancestry to play on the PGA Tour.
For being Tony’s unsung hero, Kelepi is Golfweek’s Father of the Year.
According to research compiled by the National Golf Foundation, Tony had a 1-in-250 chance of becoming a golfer. Not a professional golfer, but even playing the game at all. The deck is stacked against children without a parent who plays golf picking up the sport.
When Kelepi moved to the U.S. at age 11 in 1974, he didn’t speak English and rugby was his sport of choice. He transitioned to basketball and football, but golf was like a foreign language. He remembers sitting in his car with Tony’s mother, Ravena, at a municipal park in Long Beach, California, where they lived at the time. They were parked not far from a golf course and when Kelepi eyed the golfers in their funny outfits and bags slung over their shoulders, he said, “That’s got to be the dumbest sport ever. If you ever see me at a golf course with all those sissies and old rich guys, shoot me!”
Fast-forward to April 1997 as Tiger Woods won the Masters in record fashion. On the day of the final round, Ravena had made the boys sandwiches and called them in to eat and that’s when Tony’s younger brother, Gipper, 5, stared at the TV set in amazement at a young man of color that looked like him on TV. Enthralled by Tiger, who soon appeared victorious on the family box of Wheaties, Gipper convinced his mother to ask Kelepi to teach the boys the game.
“What did I tell you about golf?” Kelepi said. “Just shoot me. No way.”
But Ravena would not be denied. She viewed golf as a game that would keep her boys out of trouble and away from the gangs that were a cancer to their community. So Kelepi drove to the local course one Saturday and sat in his car for four hours and observed. He knew nothing about the game except that it looked intimidating, unwelcoming and expensive. “I didn’t feel like I belonged,” he recalled.
Lessons and buckets of balls were beyond the family’s means, so Kelepi, who worked a graveyard shift in cargo at Delta Air Lines, checked out instructional books and videotapes at the library from the likes of Billy Casper and Johnny Miller, whose advice was simple: teach the boys to hit it hard. “Golf My Way” by Jack Nicklaus became Kelepi’s bible, and he plastered frame-by-frame images of the Golden Bear’s swing to their garage walls. Sets were purchased at a local Salvation Army – a 6-iron for 75 cents, a putter for $1 and a little red bag for 50 cents.
The boys blasted balls off carpet – later replaced by discarded golf range mats worn to the nub – into a mattress. It wasn’t long before they ripped through a blanket that hung as a target and replaced it with a net, aiming at homemade circles spray-painted in red. Tony remembers hitting so many balls during the winter months that he developed blisters and bloody hands, but he kept beating balls. (Dents in the garage door from some of those balls remain to this day.)
The boys could chip and stroke putts at Jordan River Park, a nearby par-3 course, for free, which is why the brothers learned to play from the green back to the tee. Only when they could shoot par on the short course did they graduate to a regulation-length course, Rose Park, on the west side of Salt Lake City. On the way to practice, Kelepi picked them up after school and would swing by the football field first to teach his sons an important lesson.
“We’d stop there so they could see all their friends practicing,” Kelepi recalled. “There must have been 400-500 of them. I said, ‘Where is everybody?’ They’d say, ‘Right here.’ Then we’d drive up to the golf course. I’d say, ‘Who’s here?’ They’d say, ‘Nobody.’ I’d tell them, ‘Exactly. Your chance to make it in golf is way better, boys. There’s no competition here and more opportunity. You just have to commit 100 percent. So let’s practice.’ ”
Kelepi instilled three rules for his boys to obey:
- listen
- be serious
- never quit
He took them to Miami to compete in the Doral Publix International Junior Championship against the best junior golfers not just in the country, but the world. That’s where Tony first met and befriended Rory McIlroy as well as former Tour pro Scott Pickney. Tony won the Junior World Golf Championship at Torrey Pines at age 12 in 2002. McIlroy remembers Kelepi’s sunny disposition.
“He has a really good energy about him and he’s always smiling and making everyone around him happier,” he said. “Tony did it a different way and took a different route to get here and it’s made all the difference in the world to have a supportive father by his side.”
Mark Whetzel, director of golf at Thanksgiving Point Golf Club in Lehi, Utah, recognized the raw talent of the Finau boys and gave them a place to play.
“What impressed me was how well they were hitting the ball at such a young age without any formal instruction,” Whetzel said. “Gip was the ‘superstar’ at the time. He was the one turning heads and being called the next Tiger. Tony was stocky and built like a middle linebacker. He had so much desire to learn.”
Tony didn’t beat his brother in competition until 2004, the year he earned a Junior Ryder Cup team spot. Tony went on to become a two-time Utah State High School championship medalist and a 2006 state championship team member, with his father as coach at West High School. That team title may have had a different result if not for Kelepi teaching a female student on the boys’ team well enough that she became a counting score for the team. Tony was set to accept a scholarship from BYU when Dieter Esch, a golf enthusiast and owner of Wilhelmina Models, offered to pay the $50,000 entry fee for each brother into The Ultimate Game, a high stakes cutthroat competition. The family accepted.
Tony advanced to the 36-hole final and netted $100,000. He made a cut on Tour that same year, when as a 17-year-old he led the U.S. Bank Championship field in driving distance with a 331.6-yard average. Tony turned pro at 17 and his unconventional path to the PGA Tour included some lean years as he struggled to climb the rungs of the pro golf world. Despite working with the likes of David Leadbetter, Tony failed to advance through second stage of PGA Tour Q-School five times, and doubt crept in.
“Some of the years I was on the mini tours, yeah, I asked myself, Am I good enough or not?” he said.
Tony didn’t make it to the big leagues until he sought help again from Kelepi. (He’s been working with Boyd Summerhays, whom he met as a youth competing against him and his brother Daniel in Utah Junior Golf Association tournaments, ever since he earned his PGA Tour card.)
“I evaluated my game and realized it was going to take a while if I listened to all these guys tell me how to play when they didn’t grow up watching me and how I hit a golf ball,” Tony said. “It’s hard to be a father and a coach but I went back to my dad, who taught me by feel to see shots and hit it. He got every ounce out of me through practice and pushing me to be my best. He told me you won’t be anybody if you’re not outworking the competition. I still believe that to this day.”
Gipper had the talent, but he lacked the work ethic of Tony and never advanced through PGA Tour Q-School.
“Gipper’s purpose was he made Tony better,” Kelepi said. “Gipper put Tony on his toes to go practice every day. They were both so good at such a young age. One had the love for the game, one had the talent for the game and the guy that loves the game went and practiced while the guy that had the talent, you know, just played around with it, but he was there to make the other guy really work hard.”
Kelepi is convinced that Tony would’ve made it to the PGA Tour even sooner had his mother not died in a car accident on November 27, 2011. Tony was listed as one of the speakers at her funeral, but he was too choked up to speak. Tony still wears the color green on Sunday as a way to honor his mother, and when the wind blows he says he feels her spirit with him.
“I feel like I have to show the world, not only what a great player I am, but the person I was raised to be,” Tony said.
They say the heart of a man is measured in times of strife. Losing his mother deepened Tony’s resolve. He resumed working with his father, found his old groove and regained his assurance.
He made the PGA Tour in 2015, won the 2016 Puerto Rico Open and has become a fixture on the U.S. squad in international competitions, winning five times since August 2021.
Kelepi remarried in 2014 and that relationship has produced three more children, including Jonathan, 8, who is obsessed with golf and has Kelepi going full circle back to his earliest days of training the boys to become golfers.
“He loves the game,” Kelepi said. “So, I’m working with him and he’s going to be unbelievable.”
Perhaps a second Finau will make it to the PGA Tour someday.
