LPGA star Stacy Lewis goes home to lend a hand
LPGA’s Lewis donates prize, gets set to roll up sleeves for hurricane relief
Some give up, others dig in. Stacy Lewis has always grabbed the shovel.
Starting next week, when the LPGA tour star returns to her home north of Houston, she will begin in earnest to help the fourth-largest city in the USA recover from the devastation left by Hurricane Harvey. She’ll do so with her labor, heading into areas left in ruin and helping out in any way she can. And she will do so with dollars.
Lewis, a former world No. 1 and a two-time major champion who hadn’t won in three years, pledged all of her winnings to relief efforts before the start of last week’s Cambia Portland Classic. After going 83 starts without a win, a frustrating stretch in which she finished runner-up 12 times, Lewis won for Houston, holding off In Gee Chun by one shot Sunday. Lewis’ $195,000 firstplace check was matched by a sponsor, KPMG. Another of her sponsors, Marathon Petroleum Corp., added $1 million, making it a total of $1.39 million.
Besides the money, many of her fellow players donated shoes. Friends across the country saw what Lewis was doing and started collecting clothes, toiletries and other goods and sent packages to her home.
“When we get home, there is going to be a lot to distribute,” Lewis said Monday in a phone interview with USA TODAY Sports from Indianapolis, where she’ll play this week before taking five weeks off. “I just wanted to do something that would make a difference and hopefully make others donate because they saw what I was doing. I put a lot more pressure on myself, but I never really felt it. I knew a win was possible. I knew what it meant.
“Now it’s time to figure out
where this money is going to go. And we have a whole lot more money to work with because of my sponsors. I can actually go home and go out there and find people I can help. I just don’t want to hand over a check. I want to go out there. If I can help break apart a house or rebuild a house, I will.
“It’s not something that can be fixed right away. This isn’t something that is going away anytime soon. And I’ll help any way I can.”
Lewis was playing in Canada when Harvey barreled in on Houston. Her husband, Gerrod Chadwell, the head coach of the women’s golf team at the University of Houston, was at the couple’s home at the Golf Club of Houston. Their home is fine, but Lewis started seeing on television the damage Harvey was inflicting and hearing reports from her husband and parents, who live nearby. She knew doing nothing was not an option. Giving up wasn’t going to happen. Hope always remains.
For Lewis, she’s known no other way. She’s relied on an inner strength to conquer misery, pain and any sense of despair since she was diagnosed with scoliosis at 11. For seven years she wore a back brace 18 hours a day, often alone in her thoughts on the front porch as her friends went off to play.
Every three months for seven years, Lewis, now 32, would go to the doctor hoping to hear good news, that her back was fine and she could do away with the brace. She never heard the good news. Instead, a steel rod and five screws were fused to her backbone shortly after she received her high school diploma, a six-hour procedure during which doctors deflated her left lung and moved her heart’s aorta to make room to operate on her damaged spine.
There was a risk she could be paralyzed.
But reared in the Lone Star State, she is Texas tough, and she fought. Little steps turned into giant strides. Setbacks became motivation. And she recovered. After redshirting her freshman year at the University of Arkansas, she became a four-time All-American and won 12 times and was the No. 1 amateur in the world.
“What I went through with my back, it made me who I am,” she said. “When things get hard, when things get bad, I’m just never going to give up. Going to the doctor every three months, and being disappointed every time, you develop a certain toughness. You can’t teach that.”
So when her professional ca- reer started slowly, she didn’t lose hope. With steady progression, she became No. 1 in the world and won two major championships. Then she got stuck on win No. 11 and went three years between victories. Now, that was tough.
“It was really hard,” she said. “There were tears, there was anger, there was every emotion there. It is hard to get that motivation to work hard every day, to work hard every day and then get disappointed again. That was the hardest part. Picking yourself up and going through it all over again. That was the toughest part by far.”
But she kept getting back up. And now she’ll help Houston get back up.