Alison Lee stayed off the black runs on a recent ski trip to Japan in an effort to avoid anything catastrophic. She couldn’t have imagined that her boyfriend’s rescue dog, a black Pomeranian aptly named Bear, would be what sent her to the hospital.
Bear, a rescue dog who only has a handful of teeth, managed to clamp down on Lee’s left hand in late January, resulting in a number of open wounds. Twenty-four hours after the incident, Lee woke up to find that her entire arm had turned red. She went to the emergency room and was diagnosed with lymphangitis. Doctors had to cut open her hand in two places to get rid of the infection.
She stayed in the hospital for two nights and withdrew from next week’s Aramco Saudi Ladies International as well as the Honda LPGA Thailand. Lee, who won on Saudi’s Riyadh Golf Club last fall, will make her first LPGA start Feb. 29-March 3 at the HSBC Women’s World Championship in Singapore.
“He’s a very sweet dog,” Lee insisted. “He just gets very territorial.”
The Los Angeles native was the hottest player in the world at the end of 2023, winning on the LET in Saudi Arabia and finishing runner-up in her last three LPGA starts. Though admittedly burnt out at the end of the year, Lee only wished she’d had a couple more chances to try and capitalize on the momentum.
When it comes to star power, few on tour can match Lee’s potential.
“There’s an elegance about everything she does,” said Chris Mayson, the swing coach who brought Lee out of a years-long slump with the driver yips.
“It’s a little bit like watching Rory (McIlroy) play the game. There’s a rhythm to it that just makes it easy on the eye.”
One of the most approachable players on tour, Lee’s openness with the media makes it easy for fans to take an interest. The problem, of course, is that Lee hasn’t yet built a professional resume strong enough to take advantage of that star potential.
More to the point: She hasn’t won on the LPGA.
“She has that ability to capture the audience,” said UCLA head coach Alicia Um Holmes of a Bruin who won the Annika Award, given to the nation’s top player, as a freshman.
A six-time first-team All-American on the AJGA, Lee was a powerhouse amateur who won LPGA Q-School in 2014. As a rookie, she played her way onto the Solheim Cup team – like Paula Creamer and Rose Zhang – but watched the early success plummet in short order.
Lee had experienced the driver yips in the past, to the point she worried that UCLA might pull her scholarship. But she’d always found a way to claw herself back in a few short months.
By 2018, Lee had dipped to 155th on the LPGA money list. By the time she arrived on Mayson’s practice tee, she was desperate.
Mayson immediately provided a sense of calm.
“All these things start with a technical issue,” he said. “For the most part, continuous bad driving is a technical issue that turns into a mental issue.”
There were moments along the way when Lee thought it might be time to quit. Close friend Michelle Wie West saw it and could’ve seen things going either way.
“Yes, because it got so bad,” said Wie West of whether or not Lee would walk away, “but no because I always felt like she felt it was unfinished business.”
The first time Lee met Wie West was at the 2009 U.S. Women’s Open when she was 14 years old. Lee’s father had convinced her to join the Wie family in player dining that week. It was Wie West’s time at Stanford that inspired Lee to continue with her studies and social life at UCLA even after she joined the tour.
Both players felt it was the best decision they could’ve made, getting out of the alternate reality that tour life often brings.
“So many weeks I’m moping around, depressed, lonely,” said Lee. “It’s nice to talk to friends who experience day-to-day life so completely differently than me. It kind of grounds me a little bit.”
The frustration of a missed three-footer, for example, melts away when a friend who teaches special ed talks about a student who suffered a seizure in class.
Such perspective is priceless in the midst of nightmarish yips.
Wie West experienced the putting yips three times over the course of her career. Stan Utley was the one who helped her escape.
“You just black out, you lose all sensation,” she said. “Having the yips is like the wildest thing in sports. Something that is so simple, and you just all of a get clammy hands, start shaking, heart palpitations.”
When Wie West won the 2014 U.S. Women’s Open at Pinehurst No. 2, she hit a 3-wood stinger off the tee because she didn’t feel comfortable with driver. Another year, the former phenom played a huge cut all season because she couldn’t hit a draw.
“You don’t really want to talk about it,” said Wie West of being uncomfortable over the ball. “You just act like this is the new norm; pretend it doesn’t exist.”
It took Lee several years to get her driver sorted, and early last year, she struggled mightily with her putter, saying she had the yips there, too. At the LPGA Drive On event in Arizona last spring, she hit 16 greens and had 38 putts.
“I hit every shot to 10 feet and walked off the green three-putting,” she recalled.
Mayson had urged Lee to see a putting coach for a long time, but she was stubborn about it until this summer when she finally hired Chris Cho.
Lee played her last three events of 2023 on the LPGA in 56 under par, and that doesn’t include the 61-61-65 she shot in Saudi Arabia on the LET to win by eight.
“Golf is really 95 percent confidence,” said Wie West.
To that end, Lee points to several people who have boosted her mentally. Mayson, she said, radiates confidence. His calming presence balances out her worried nature.
At the CME Group Tour Championship last year, Lee told the media that she played in a pro-am with Fred Couples last September and that he’d become her No. 1 fan.
“He just was hammering into me like, ‘You need to believe; you’re a good player,’ ” said Lee. “You need to go out there and believe you’re the shit and you can do it.”
Lee’s inner-circle also includes boyfriend Trey Kidd, the kind-hearted owner of Bear the rescue dog. Lee and Kidd were introduced by a mutual friend near the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Kidd, a former college player at Colorado State who now works in finance, plays off a plus-three handicap. If Lee plays from the back tees, she doesn’t have to give him any strokes.
Lee said when the 6-foot-6 Kidd hit a growth spurt in junior golf, he too struggled with the driver yips. When it comes to finding a partner who understands Lee’s world, the Vegas resident seems to have hit the proverbial jackpot.
In addition to Cho, there’s a less obvious change in Lee’s daily routine that helped shift her focus in 2023. For the first time since high school, she took up recreational reading – in a big way.
Lee read over 40 books in 2023. She’d get lost in fictional worlds created by Sarah J. Mass. The one-hour bus ride to the course in South Korea flew by as Lee immersed herself in the “Throne of Glass” series. When play slowed down during practice rounds, she’d sometimes got out her Kindle and read a few pages.
“I think it was honestly the best thing for me,” said Lee, “putting myself in this alternative universe, and like kind of living there so I don’t have to almost face what’s going on now. And not that I wasn’t facing it, it just kind of muted the whole thing.”
Alison Lee finishes number one in Riyadh 🥇🏆#RaiseOurGame | #SeeTheImpact pic.twitter.com/9IMA7bQS27
— Ladies European Tour (@LETgolf) October 29, 2023
The 2024 season presents massive opportunities for Lee, who has risen to No. 18 in the Rolex Rankings. She was crushed to not make the Solheim Cup team last year. She’s high on captain Stacy Lewis’ 2024 list though, and in position to potentially represent the U.S. at the Paris Olympics, too.
Lee turns 29 later this month and aims to treat this like an all-or-nothing year.
Whatever happens, she’ll be open about it, because as Lee looks around and sees players on tour who are lost like she once was, she wants them to know they’re not alone.
“I didn’t want to be the one to talk to other girls and ask them what their experiences were like,” said Lee. “I didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I was embarrassed. I felt so ashamed that I wasn’t playing well.”
But she didn’t quit.
