The Long Road

Eunice Choi teed off in the early afternoon that day, so when she hit a six-iron on her second hole, the sun’s angle made it difficult to follow the ball.

She could tell from the way it felt, however, that it was a pretty good shot and she quickly looked toward the flag.

“Usually if the ball hits the flagstick, the flagstick will move,” Choi said. “But it didn’t, it just stayed. Everything was calm.”

When she arrived at the green to find her ball in the hole, nothing remained calm.

It was the first hole in one in a competitive round for Choi, a Dove Canyon resident and graduate of Laguna Hills High and UCLA, and she erupted in celebration, complete with a scream and a smile. That’s about as emotional as Choi plans to get on a golf course this year.

Choi, 24, plays on the Futures Tour, the official developmental tour of the LPGA. It’s a 20-tournament grind that tests a player’s mental toughness and physical stamina as much as her golf skill. Over the next five months the tour will visit Texas, Georgia, Michigan, Florida and various points in between.

The purses are small, with winners earning an average of $7,500, but the rewards can be big. The top three finishers on the money list receive automatic exemptions to the LPGA for the following year.

With more than 300 players competing for those three spots, the pressure can be intense, something Choi knows all too well.

Last August, Choi held the top spot on the tour’s money list, a position she took over after winning a tournament in April. But in the tour’s final three tournaments, she missed two cuts and made only $232 in the other to finish fifth on the final list, $1,905 away from her LPGA exemption.

“Last year, I got pretty burned out,” Choi said. “I think I was out of my comfort zone, basically. I felt pressure to hold on to that No. 1 spot. I kept on thinking about the end result.”

She has learned from that experience. This year, she will pay closer attention to how she is playing rather than where she finishes. She will count fairways and greens hit in regulation rather than money earned.

“My goal pretty much is to be steady,” Choi said. “To have a steady golf game, keep a low scoring average. . . . I’m not really asking myself to win every tournament or finish in the top three. I just don’t want to think in terms of that because I think it just adds to the pressure.”

Choi’s mother, Innae Choi, remembers how the pressure got to her only daughter. On the Futures tour, players can’t afford to miss any tournaments, and during one stretch, the tour went five consecutive weeks in Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio and North Carolina.

In addition to playing, Eunice mixed in occasional lessons with respected swing coach David Ledbetter in Florida. But that only added to the strain. The hassles of booking flights, reserving rental cars and finding hotels were enormous, and without a sponsor, the expenses started piling up.

“She called one night and she was crying,” Innae Choi said. “It was a lot of things. She felt like she had no swing and she felt bad because it was costing us a lot of money. She was under a lot of pressure.”

Choi has removed some of those hassles for this season. She plans to drive across the country to relieve airline travel stress and has stopped seeing Ledbetter, opting for local instructor John Hartman at Northwood Golf Center in Irvine.

She remains wary, however, of a span of eight consecutive weeks in May and June that will take her from Georgia to New England and into the Midwest.

“When I first turned pro I didn’t know what to expect,” Choi said. “I really didn’t know much. I wasn’t used to traveling week in and week out.”

The first three tournaments this year, including this week’s in Paso Robles, have taken place in California. So far, Choi seems to be playing pressure-free.

She finished second at the season-opening Pacific Bell Futures Classic at Quail Ranch Golf Club in Moreno Valley and sixth at the San Diego Futures Classic, where her hole in one sparked a five-under-par 67--the third-best score on tour this year.

Tuesday, she shot 72 (40-32) in the first round at Paso Robles and is four shots behind the leader.

Her swing is everything a golfer strives for: compact, fluid and balanced. The results are indisputable. She is second on the tour with a 72.167 scoring average, second with a .929 fairways-hit percentage and second in greens in regulation at .815.

“There are times when I feel like I should be out there [on the LPGA Tour],” Choi said. “I believe I hit the ball as good as LPGA pros. I know I can putt. I know I can do all those things. I think what frustrates me right now is my mental game. I need to strengthen that.”

Her putting statistics are not among the tour’s top 10, which is noteworthy because Choi led the NCAA in putting average for two years at UCLA. Again, she points to her head as the reason.

“When I was younger, I never really thought about my putting,” she said. “I never practiced it because to me putting was just so easy. But then once I turned professional, it was like, ‘OK, every putt counts’ and once you start thinking like that, it gets harder.”

Choi recognizes that her second-half breakdown last year was not because of any physical problem or swing flaw. She acknowledged a lack of confidence that snowballed as the pressure intensified. And while she has long dreamed of playing on the LPGA Tour, in some ways she is glad she didn’t make it.

“I’m kind of living by the sayings ‘Whatever happens, happens’ and ‘Whatever is meant to be, is meant to be,’ ” Choi said. “I guess last year it wasn’t meant to be, and I want to say I probably wasn’t ready anyway.”