CARLSBAD, Calif. – When Farah O’Keefe was 11 years old, she wrote down a list of goals, nearly 30 of them, ranging from doable to downright impossible, and stuck them on her bedroom wall as inspiration.
Win a U.S. Kids Golf event.
Buy a house and a big, pink truck.
Twenty major championship titles(?!).
OK, so she was only 11. But even then, she was a calculated dreamer.
“Focusing on achieving those big goals, especially those ones that seem impossible, they’ve kept me driven,” said O’Keefe, whose aspirations were mostly lofty enough that she’d only crossed off a few to date.
On Monday evening at La Costa, O’Keefe was looking forward to striking a pen through another of those goals: NCAA individual champion. The University of Texas junior, who entered the NCAA Championship having won three times this spring and not finished outside the top 10 all season, survived a tough final round to shoot 2-under 70 and win by two shots to become the third Longhorn to achieve the prestigious feat.
“That 11-year-old girl, she’d be ecstatic and jumping for joy right now,” said O’Keefe, who finished the 72-hole tournament at 12 under, the same score as each of the previous two individual national champs at the Gil Hanse redesign.
A decade ago, O’Keefe wasn’t completely sure where her talents would take her. She excelled in a variety of sports and other hobbies, including tennis (her dad, Michael, was a pro and now teaches), skateboarding, flag football, even playing standup bass in the orchestra. She played almost exclusively local golf tournaments into high school, and as a result, she only received one scholarship offer: from former Longhorns head coach Ryan Murphy.
O’Keefe would say that she wasn’t that good, but truthfully, she hadn’t come close to realizing her untapped potential.
“She was a diamond in the rough,” said current Texas head coach Laura Ianello.
After O’Keefe committed to Texas, she qualified for her first U.S. Girls’ Junior and made match play. The next summer, after enrolling in college a semester early to better acclimate, she not only reached the quarterfinals of the Girls’ Junior but qualified for the U.S. Women’s Open as well. She hasn’t slowed down since, rising to fourth in the world amateur rankings on the heels of her low-amateur performance at the Chevron Championship, where she was in the third-to-last pairing on Sunday. She’s now likely to win the Annika Award as the national player of the year, an honor that will be handed out Tuesday, as voted on by players, coaches and media, and come with a few more major and professional starts, including next week’s U.S. Women’s Open at Riviera.
“I remember how stressful it was trying to get recruited only playing local events,” O’Keefe said, “and now I get to play on the biggest stages in the world. It’s just so special.”
Texas’ motto this season has been, “We can do hard things.” That mantra stems from work the Longhorns have done with mental coach Brian Cain; O’Keefe has especially benefitted. Ianello and O’Keefe call O’Keefe’s bogeys and other mistakes, “Whoopsies.” Even last year, O’Keefe would be too easily rattled by them, sometimes unable to bounce back. But that hasn’t been the case in recent months, including Monday’s final round.
While she bogeyed two par-5s and shanked her approach from the long, wispy stuff left of the par-4 14th fairway and into the water right, O’Keefe remained what Ianello lauds as “stable.” O’Keefe went on to save bogey on that hole by draining a 15-footer, and after seeing her once three-shot advantage shrink back to one, she birdied Nos. 17 and 18 to post a number with six groups still left on each side of the golf course.
Texas’ fourth-place standing after 54 holes put the Longhorns in the more advantageous earlier wave than Stanford’s Megha Ganne, Duke’s Rianne Malixi and USC’s Catherine Park, all top-15 amateurs in the world who finished second, third and fourth, respectively.
“It played hard today,” O’Keefe said. “It was crazy, crazy golf. The greens were firmer, the wind was blowing, it was cold on the back nine. We kind of got a little bit of everything today. So going off an hour before was a big deal.”
O’Keefe spent much of the afternoon “almost meditating,” leaning on grounding techniques to remain where her feet were. She laughed off the hosel-rocket and later joked, “It’s a game of millimeters.” Her putter might’ve been the biggest key, as it’s been for much of the past year.
Having used a blade her whole life, O’Keefe finally transitioned to a mallet last spring. She finished second-second-20th last NCAA postseason, then caved in the face during the third round of last June’s U.S. Women’s Open. She bought a putter from the pro shop for that Sunday, then was fit into her current Scotty Cameron prototype at the Arnold Palmer Cup. With that flatstick, O’Keefe finished runner-up at the Women’s British Amateur and hasn’t finished worse than 15th in a non-professional, stroke-play tournament since. Not even at the Moon Golf Invitational in February, when she tallied a whopping eight three-putts to lose by eight shots, only to later find out that her putter shaft was bent. Two weeks later, she opened the Darius Rucker, arguably the biggest regular-season event, in 64 and eventually won by a shot.
“Darius and the Chevron both proved she’s comfortable with the cameras behind her,” said Ianello, who added of her superstar, “She’s fearless.”
O’Keefe inherits most of her courage from her mother, Marlene, who teaches middle-school robotics and programming but also is a black belt and was close to being an Olympian in taekwondo. Marlene doesn’t travel to many tournaments, so when she does, “It’s special,” Farah says. This week so happened to be one that mom made the trip, and she was rewarded by watching her daughter accomplish a lifelong dream – one of many, of course.
And she could witness another come Wednesday: NCAA team champion.