Playing From The Rough

By Tiffany Mack Fitzgerald

"Is this your first time playing a round?"

Author Tiffany Fitzgerald cringed as she heard these words while walking the golf course for the first time with her male colleagues. Indeed it was her first time and while the score was less than perfect, even slightly humiliating that day, she pressed on to dispel the stereotype that

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Dec 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9798885042574

Book preview

Playing from the Rough

Tiffany Mack Fitzgerald

new degree press

copyright © 2022 Tiffany Mack Fitzgerald

All rights reserved.

Playing from the Rough

Photo Credit: Nick Nelson, The BRANDPRENUER Agency

ISBN

979-8-88504-146-1 Paperback

979-8-88504-778-4 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-257-4 Digital Ebook

This book is dedicated to you. I pray you believe you are beautiful and can do hard things.

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Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction

The Meeting After The Meeting

The Black Girl in Marketing

Caution: Black Girl Golfing

Royal Tee

A Rare Sighting

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

Jigga Boo

Get In Where You Fit In

When Opportunity Calls

Do It Anyway

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix1

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Author’s Note

Like golf, life can be difficult and challenging, with lots of twists, turns, hazards, and penalties I call the consequences of a bad shot. However, with the right community and support, you can achieve anything your heart desires, including writing a book. It reminds me of a piece by one of my favorite poets, Langston Hughes. In his poem, Mother to Son, a mother describes to her son a story of perseverance and hope. Those two things became the cornerstones of my life.

As a woman who grew up with several hurdles to clear to reach any level of success, life was hard. I never had dreams for myself. I also never took the time to really reflect on how my childhood traumas influenced who I became as a woman, a mother of three, an entrepreneur, and a wife. Life threw me a few curveballs that forced me to spend some time reflecting on how I became the founder of Black Girls Golf, my fourth child. None of it was an accident; by a twist of fate, I was prepared for the challenges I would face breaking into an industry that wasn’t prepared to hear my voice.

Playing from the Rough is my letter to you about how I turned my struggles into a lesson of encouragement and inspiration. This is also a story of community and the blessings we receive through relationships. I’ve learned through relationships that you can succeed in unlikely environments. Golf doesn’t care about your challenges or your triumphs. It’s just you and the course. When you play with others, it’s you, the course, and the relationship you build with your golf partners, and it’s the power of those relationships that can help you build community and a network you can tap into when you need it.

We need each other and we need community, like the one I built in Black Girls Golf. Through this network of powerful Black women, I’ve met amazing people like my business bestie, Morgan Wider, who challenges me through her work in style and self-discovery, or Natalie Holland, a former collegiate athlete who volunteers her time to help with our beginner clinics in Atlanta. I can’t forget Rosalyn Lark, an attorney who has been leading the Black Girls Golf community in Dallas by planning clinics and fun golf outings. These women, and so many more, have stepped in and played their part in the story of building and creating Black Girls Golf, some of them through hands-on work and others through their investment in me, attending events and golf clinics.

If given the opportunity to be the change you want to see, what would you do? This wasn’t a question I could have answered as a younger woman. I was too busy revisiting the traumas from my childhood. Like many of you, I was going through the motions and showing up with a script—go to college, get a job, start a family, and hope it all turns out okay. I started Black Girls Golf as my answer to this question. However, my story didn’t start with me being a single mother who single-handily wanted to change an entire industry.

Letting you know where I came from is important because golf wasn’t where I was supposed to end up. The world I grew up in wasn’t a window through which I saw opportunities. It was more like a cage where people who looked like me were trapped by poverty and access to opportunities was limited.

Although golf came into my life later, it was the gift that gave me a different perspective of the world and helped me see the value in human connection. It was a gateway for me from one world where there are very few positive outcomes into a world where possibilities rest in your ability to connect with others. I want Black women and the girls who would become women to experience that level of connection and more importantly, have the access to opportunity golf can bring.

In a country where the value of a space is measured by the absence of Black people, I wanted Black women to have their own space to show up as their whole selves, but we weren’t being invited. In fact, no one goes to a party uninvited. Black Girls Golf is your invitation, and this book is me sharing the playlist with you. Sharing my story of perseverance and connection is proof we should all give more than we take, stand when we want to fall, and explore the possibilities when it’s easier to remain where it’s comfortable.

Do the thing. Yes, it will be hard. Yes, there will be times when you have no clue what you’re doing, and yes, people will tell you you’re crazy. Yes, things will come up because shit happens. Do it anyway. The world is full of two kinds of people—the ones who do shit even when it’s hard, and the ones who watch us do it.

This book is my journey through the possibilities that exist once you realize you are strong enough, you are smart enough, and you are powerful enough to play from the rough. In this abbreviated journey through my life, I hope you’ll learn a little, laugh a lot, and be inspired to learn, practice, and play golf.

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Introduction

She grabbed my hands and said, Tiffany, thank you so much for this. I didn’t know how much I needed this space. It has been so healing. Conversations like this one happened daily for the four days we spent at the inaugural Black Girls Golf Executive Retreat in November 2021. I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of sisterhood and gratitude.

The over one hundred women who traveled from across the US to attend the Black Girls Golf Executive Retreat came together to celebrate each other and connect around their love of golf. It was amazing to see my dream happening in real life. It was actually more than a dream come true, and it all started with an idea.

When I started playing golf in 2000, I didn’t know where to go for information, resources, and community. I thought golf was always a White, male-dominated industry and that I would always be an outsider. I just expected to show up and be the only one, but I was open to my perception being totally wrong, and what you believe about golf and where you fit in this industry might be wrong too.

I’m telling you my story about my first time playing to let you know it was intimidating, but I got through it. My determination to build better relationships with colleagues was stronger to learn this game outweighed my fear of being the only one. I was determined to infiltrate this secret society for my own professional benefit, and it worked. Golf helped me connect with the world around me so I learned the game and wanted other Black women to enjoy it too, and in Playing from the Rough, I tell you how it all began—the challenges and the failures.

As it grew, so, too, did some of issues in my personal life, and when I didn’t have anything else, I still had Black Girls Golf and the relationships I built through the BGG community. My goal was to introduce more Black women to golf and do the work to prepare the industry for our presence, but what happened instead was magical. We became a community and a sisterhood, and in this book, I’ll share stories with you to show you how our lived experiences are very similar and how golf gave me a place to share those experiences with other women who could relate. Our race and gender are what connected us, but golf is the glue that keeps us bonded.

Playing from the Rough tells the story of me trying to navigate corporate America and then me succeeding in an unlikely space despite my background and the trauma I experienced in my life. I hope you are able to see yourself in some of these stories and feel like you can overcome