Thursday, April 14, 2005 | 9:45 a.m.
Golfers and money do not grow in Nebraska.
Sarah Sasse took dreams of LPGA success creating a new life for her family on her thin shoulders, on endless hours of two-lane roads, even on reality TV before grudgingly joining the rest of the last-shot crowd in Las Vegas.
Her $80,000 project continues in a city fueled by risk and greased by cash, a place she barely knows, where she hopes to parlay high-class caddie spots at Bali Hai, Royal Links and the new Wynn course into the sponsorship to return to the Futures Tour.
Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Lincoln anymore.
"I basically am going about crazy right now," Sasse said recently, settling into a bookstore chair with a coffee drink on a rare day off.
Sasse did not leave the Futures Tour, which is the LPGA's minor league circuit, because of her game. Former NCAA All-Americans can play and Sasse finished 55th on the money list last year, earning a paltry $5,400 but staying above the cut line to keep her card.
She is not playing this year because she cannot afford the entry fees and travel expenses for a second season. People in Lincoln banded together to underwrite her for a year. The next year -- and the $40,000 she feels it takes to do it right -- is up to Sasse.
"As far as I can look is mid-July," Sasse said. "That's as far as I can look ahead right now. Because between now and then, if I want to go back out on tour, I have got to acquire enough sponsorship by mid-July for at least a full year, preferrably two. Once that happens, everything else will change."
That's all Sasse can hope. She rousts herself from bed each morning with an affirmation, a promise to herself that moving more than 1,100 miles away from her fiancee and four sisters in need will be worth it. Why else, Sasse reminds herself, would she have driven 83,000 miles in her Honda Civic in the past two years and spent nights sleeping in the back of the little car at highway rest stops.
She must assuage the part of her that swears she is being a selfish 24-year-old girl, that she should end this charade and just put her marketing degree to use at home to really help her middle-class family make ends meet. Professional golf is a dream Sasse has had since she was 9 years old, though, and she is driven to pursue it until she her skills, not her resources, stop her.
"I don't need to go and explain all the adversities I've had in my life because everybody has their problems," Sasse said. "For golf, my story's a little unique, but for the average American, it's not. It's not. To make it in this game and this profession, you've got to get a leg up somewhere."
High Roller
With a caddie job at Bali Hai and Royal Links lined up and a high school friend helping with finding an apartment, Sasse began looking for that advantage in Las Vegas in November. The caddie work can support her day-to-day, but the plan is to bump into enough of the right people to bank enough money for two years on the Futures Tour.
"I've made a couple of contacts and I guess opened up a couple of doors," Sasse said. "It's slow-moving."
After scraping by on a few thousand dollars last year, Sasse wants to have $80,000 in sponsorship lined up to support two years on the Futures Tour. That is enough time, she feels, to either make it to the LPGA or move on having given it her best shot.
She is not the only one trolling for sponsor dollars on a loop around town, though. Eddie Hernandez, an independent contractor who runs the caddie program for Walters Golf, said Sasse is one of many with a big game and an empty wallet working for him.
"I've got a bunch of very talented players that are looking for sponsors," Hernandez said. "I've got some serious sticks on my crew.
"Every once in a while, they'll get hooked up with the right guys, especially considering the clientele we cater to."
Sasse knows enough about Las Vegas to follow those whales. She will begin work at Wynn later this month, in a job where she hopes to work all around the golf facility in addition to taking some loops.
You never know where the sympathetic ear might be, she reasons.
"And that's what I'm trying to find," Sasse said. "I'm not sitting around waiting for it either. I'll do what I need to do to get there."
In the meantime, there is no glamour in purgatory. Her two-bedroom apartment features a mattress on the floor in her room and a couch that she grabbed from a neighbor as he took it to the dumpster. She was engaged to Chris near Valentine's Day and has seen him once since then, with little free time as she works most days.
And every call home, to the people Sasse cannot believe support her as they do, brings more heartache. Health troubles, job troubles, you name it -- these are the times when Lincoln needs to be closer.
"I just feel like I'm being kind of selfish because I'm still pursuing my own thing," Sasse said. "In my own pursuit, I hope to make it better for everybody else. Still, I'm not the one who's facing so much adversity and trying to be happy about somebody else's small little steps forward."
Humble beginnings
In a sport ruled by privilege, Sasse started without many advantages. The middle child of five girls, she happened into the game at the knee of her uncle, Rennie.
A golf teacher by trade, Rennie was videotaping his swing outside the house one day when Sarah was 9 years old. His niece picked up a club and started swinging it for fun.
"I caught a glimpse of it and I thought, 'My goodness.' I couldn't believe it," Rennie said. "I went in and got her dad and said, 'You had better take a look at this."'
They found a natural. Within two years of beating balls around the nine-hole public course she called home as a kid, Rennie said Sarah was one of the best short game players he had ever seen.
Golf stories involving money move quickly from there, right onto the swing coaches and academies and junior circuit events. It took a little more work for the daughter of a nurse and a railroad worker, already an outsider in the Midwest in a part-Asian family, to get into the golf community.
"There's been a lot of skepticism about my game," Sasse said. "Maybe it's because I didn't grow up in a country club and I'm also 5-foot-2. I didn't break 100 pounds until I was a junior in high school."
Her rapid development under the tutelage of Rennie earned no friends. Local women's groups started letting Sasse play as a 14-year-old, then somehow didn't invite her back once she started regularly beating them. She played high school golf, but needed a bigger stage to develop.
Her family found enough money for Sasse and her father to drive to some American Junior Golf Association events. That's when Sasse began to understand the notion of pressure. She had to perform because opportunities like these would be few.
Some days, Sasse played well. Other times, she didn't, and those were the trouble spots. In those bad times, Sasse's father would sometimes read off the expense report for the trip to her as they drove back home, reminding her of the scarce money they spent on her golf dreams.
"As far as golf, her dad just put a lot of pressure on her," Rennie said.
Sasse and her father go up and down in their relationship now, but at least she feels he believes in her ability. Some locals even talked down her game to college coaches as Sasse tried to become not only the first college athlete in her family, but the first college graduate as well.
She hooked on in her hometown at the University of Nebraska and immediately proved herself. Sasse was named to the All-Big 12 first team three times, winning both the conference championship and player of the year award as a senior in 2003.
Money talks
Money is still Sasse's pressure, even if it is now her own in question. She put her marketing knowledge to work in Lincoln, hitting up as many people as she could for small donations to take a crack at the Futures Tour.
Her former manager at Ruby Tuesday's came up with $500. So did the folks at the sports bar where she waitressed. She made some of her own money as well, working the odd jobs that she has since high school.
She's delivered newspapers. She sold tacos and folded baby clothing. She telemarketed for Bowling Digest, Hockey Digest and the National Rifle Association. The checks cashed all the same.
Growing up with just enough, Sasse still feels the value of every dollar.
"Golf, unfortunately, is one of those sports where you need bank," Sasse said. "You need resources to get to the top level."
With enough money for plenty of Subway dinners and the occasional motel, Sasse set out with the weight of making it to the big leagues in one year on her mind. She traveled plenty at Nebraska, but this was Sasse's first time out on her own.
Steady but not spectacular, Sasse took what she could, like $374 on a T36 finish in Albuquerque and $336 for a T38 in Vermont.
She made eight of nine cuts between March and July 2004, but an income of about $2,500 in that time is a deeper cut. Inevitably, the money trouble crept into her head on the golf course.
Understand that Sasse is always hard on herself when playing golf, to the point that Rennie feels it holds her back. Then add in thoughts of desperately needing to make a check and it becomes obvious how Sasse missed her next three cuts and subsequently ran out of money.
"There's not a lot of even keel," Sasse said. "That's a lot of the reason I am the way I am on the golf course. I mean, that type of lifestyle (and) with my background and the way that I've had to get out on tour, there's just not a lot of stability. Every little thing kind of upsets the balance."
Her sponsors at home told her not to worry about expenses through the end of the year. They would come up with the extra money. Sasse was touched and managed a tie for ninth in her final start of the year, but she still felt obligated to play well enough to pay that money back, even if she didn't have to.
"Why am I doing this?" Sasse thought. "All these money people have helped out and I'm blowing this opportunity. I should be home with a real job."
She needed a break and she got one.
Reality bites
The flyer in the players' locker room advertised auditions for a reality TV show called "Big Break III: Ladies Only" on The Golf Channel. Ten women would be chosen and the winner of the competition earned an LPGA exemption for 2005.
Even if it meant driving overnight from Detroit to Decatur, Ill., after a 36-hole U.S. Women's Open qualifier, Sasse was in.
The tryout quickly weeded out pretenders. Applicants were given 10 balls and asked to hit a draw, a slice and a straight shot with a driver, 5-iron and a wedge. The final test was a flop shot.
They had already filled out long applications about why they wanted to be on the show and an on-camera interview followed. Out of money, worried for her family and just plain tired, Sasse broke down in tears, saying, "I really need a big break."
Sasse was selected and went in October to Virginia to film the show over two weeks. She discovered that reality TV, with constant in-your-face cameras and producers searching for a catfight, is a chore.
She made it through the first three episodes, but was eliminated in the fourth show. Sasse sank a shot into a lake and never recovered in the competition, wearing her mounting frustration on her face as she realized this door to the LPGA would be closed.
"She doesn't have fun when she plays," Rennie said. "She's too intense out there."
Rennie knows that pressure Sarah faces. He toiled on the mini-tours as a younger man and enjoyed his best year when he had a sponsor. Rennie never went far beyond Nebraska, though.
"I never left here when I was growing up and playing," Rennie said. "I respect her for doing that.
"More than anything, she just needed to get away from the family and spread her wings a little bit. Our family has always been homebodies. She needed to get away, just to escape the pressure. I know Sarah and she thinks about it a lot."
Her Big Break competitors saw it too, criticizing Sasse on the show for getting too upset about golf. She breaks herself down too easily, they said, and it's tough for Sasse to disagree.
"A lot of that is based on the fact that there's just a lot of pressure," Sasse said. "And it's not necessarily all me putting it there. I just need to find a way to get rid of it before I go back out on the golf course."
If only they knew why she gets so upset, Sasse still thinks. Maybe then, they wouldn't be so quick to assume why a fat shot into the water meant so much.
"There's always going to be pressure coming down the line neck-and-neck with another player. That, I can do," Sasse said. "But when you keep on piling it and piling it to where I just can't focus on the shot itself and back there between shots, I'm thinking about things that have nothing to do with the game, that's just not necessarily healthy and it's not going to promote me playing very good golf either."
With a little Vegas money in her pocket and a real shot at making it, Sasse feels all that pressure will melt, at least long enough to play some good golf. And then, Sasse shares footing with anyone.
"It is a great equalizer," Sasse said. "When you hit that golf ball, nothing else matters. It doesn't matter how much money you have or where you're from."
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