Kai Trump’s surprising LPGA invitation to achieve her goal

On a Sunday in May 2017, a little girl stood on the final hole of the Senior PGA Championship in Virginia, watching Bernhard Langer win the event by one stroke over Vijay Singh. The daughter, Kai Trump, was next to her father, Donald Trump Jr., at a course owned by her paternal grandfather. Donald Trumpthen in the first year of his first term as president of the United States. Kai Trump, wide-eyed and 10 years old, seemed happy to be there. She was already into golf.

Eight years later, her grandfather is in the first year of his second term as president, and Kai is the captain of the girls’ golf team at Benjamin School in South Florida. Her mother (Vanessa Trump) is dating Tiger Woods, whose 16-year-old son, Charlie, also attends the Benjamin school. on tuesday, Kai announced that she has accepted an invitation to play in a mid-November LPGA event in Florida sponsored by Annika Sorenstam.

“What’s up guys?” Kai said at the start of her 37-second poolside video announcement, posted on TikTokwhere he has 3.4 million followers. “I am excited to announce that I will be making my LPGA debut in November at Annika.”

On Tuesday evening, Kai did a 15-minute interview on Sirius XM radio with Sorenstam and her husband, Mike McGee, the son of Jerry McGee, a prominent PGA Tour player in the 1970s. McGee said that, by his math, Kai had more than 8 million followers, combining her various social media channels.

“I couldn’t do it without my team,” Kai noted.

“I could use some help with my content,” Sorenstam said.

Kai Trump is a top junior golfer with LPGA aspirations who has committed to play golf at the University of Miami starting next year. There are hundreds of other teenage girls with similar profiles. Kai was invited to play at Sorenstam’s event because her paternal grandfather is the president of the United States and because her social media following is massive. No one disputes this.

“I would imagine, since Tuesday’s announcement, that this is one of the most talked about women’s golf tournaments that has probably ever existed,” Justin Sheehan, chief operating officer of the tournament’s host club, Pelican Golf Club, said in a telephone interview Thursday. “It’s on news channels and sports channels. The social media impression numbers, I think they call it, are staggering. Love it or hate it, it’s getting people talking about the event.

“We’re on a mission to grow this game. Seeing the impact Caitlin had last year was pretty exciting.”

Caitlin Clarkstar point guard for the WNBA’s Indiana Fever put her promising golf game on public display at last year’s tournament, playing in the pro-am with Sorenstam. Clark will play again in this year’s pro-am. Sheehan, a former teaching pro who has worked with LPGA players, described Clark as a single-digit golfer with unlimited upside.

Sheehan, along with his professional wife, Nathalia Sheehan, played nine holes with Kai Trump at the Pelican this year. Asked for a scouting report, Sheehan said Kai had an impressive swing and LPGA length and, like all young players, was learning about shot selection. (Her caddy for the tournament will be her friend Allan Kournikova, the 21-year-old brother of retired tennis player Anna Kournikova.) Sheehan declined to make any predictions about what Kai might shoot at the four-day tournament, which begins Nov. 13.

Last year, the 36-hole cut was two over par, 142. Given Kai’s record in junior events, where her scores are often in the mid-70s or higher, making the cut would be an amazing feat. Sheehan noted that sponsors’ invitations to many professional tournaments go to players of a wide range of abilities, including local pros and celebrity athletes.

Sheehan said that in the first year of the event, in 2020, his future wife, competing as Nathalie Filler, played in the tournament without a sponsor. The main qualification of Filler’s game was that she was the North Florida PGA Player of the Year. By any ordinary measure, she is an excellent golfer. Competing against the best players in the world, Filler lost by 12.

As Tiger Woods has often said, improvement in golf comes as a series of “baby steps.” His goal, coming up in the game as an amateur, was to dominate at every level he played at. But he played the 1992 Los Angeles Open, minus a sponsor, as a 16-year-old amateur — and the reigning U.S. junior amateur champion. Steph Curry has played in professional events as a sponsor exception, as a scratch golfer and one of the greatest basketball players in history. Annika Sorenstam played in one PGA Tour event, the 2003 Colonial, except for one sponsor and as the most dominant female golfer in the game. Sheehan noted that following Bryson DeChambeau on social media — his videotaped efforts to break 50 on a short course in the company of people including Steph Curry and President Trump — has introduced golf to untold numbers of new golfers. He expects Kai Trump’s participation in an LPGA event to do the same. The key numbers here aren’t her score totals, but her social media reach.

The November event’s birth certificate name is ANNIKA run by Gainbridge at Pelican, but players and fans call it Annika, for the tournament’s host, the 55-year-old Swedish golf legend who lives in Orlando. Gainbridge, a financial services company, is the tournament sponsor, responsible for the event’s $3.25 million purse, 15 percent of which ($487,000) goes to the winner, if the winner is a professional. You can say, almost certainly, that the winner will be a professional – a Nelly Korda, a Charlie Hull. (Kai Trump will compete as an amateur.) The tournament will be played on the “reimagined” Donald Ross course at Pelican Golf Club, near Clearwater, Fla. Justin Sheehan, a former teaching professional, is the club’s chief operating officer, and the invitation to Kai Trump comes at the behest of the Pelican.

Ryan Dever, the tournament director, said in an interview that he extended the invitation to Kai through her agent and that “the communication has been through Kai’s team.”

The event is the final full-field event of the LPGA season, four rounds of 36-hole cuts and 108 players, three of whom are in the special invitational field.

One spot is reserved each year for a member of the winning team of a Sorenstam-sponsored collegiate event, the Annika Intercollegiate. The winning team was Wake Forest, and the team decided that Anne-Sterre den Dunnen of the Netherlands, a senior, would represent the team in Sorenstam’s LPGA event.

A second place award from Gainbridge went to Lauryn Nguyen, a promising Northwestern University golfer. Like Kai Trump, Lauryn Nguyen is making her LPGA pro debut. But unlike Kai, she didn’t announce her participation in the event with a TikTok post that traveled the world reaching hundreds of thousands of people.

It really is an incredible 37 second clip. In it, Kai is standing next to a golf net next to a backyard pool with a small patch of green and grass to the side. The pool has a basketball rim for dunks in the pool and the fence behind the pool is trimmed to perfection. She’s wearing a TaylorMade hat (her grandfather’s favorite brand) and a Benjamin School golf shirt in sky blue to match the sky above her. The final punctuation mark of the video is an iron shot, but net, with a smooth, controlled backswing and finishing with good balance. She is wearing little white socks. She has an interesting style of speaking, with which she throws her right hand to emphasize certain syllables. Millions have seen it. Soon here, millions will see her swing at an LPGA event.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.