LILY HE
LPGA TOUR
AGE 21
LIVES THE ANGELS
308,000 FOLLOWING INSTAGRAM
When I opened my Instagram account, I was just a normal 15 year old girl who lived in San Diego, went to high school, had friends and played golf. At the time, I posted what all my friends were posting: selfies, what we were wearing. I enjoyed cultivating an image that wasn’t just about golf, even though my life really was. The assumptions people make on Instagram about how hard work is followed me through college golf at USC and into professional golf. While many of the things people tell me online are positive and supportive, there are ones that always seem to touch a nerve. It took me mentally to hit rock bottom in order not to let myself be consumed and not to be defined.
People don’t see on social media until before I could walk, I was in the child seat, next to my mother, behind dad’s stall at the shooting range in Chengdu, China, where I was born. My parents asked me, “What does daddy’s swing look like?” and I started swinging my arms as if I was swinging a club. I started playing when I was 5 years old. The youngest child in the golf courses. I’m not tall yet, only five feet six, but I was tiny in those days. But I remember thinking that I should win every competition. The coach told my parents that my competitiveness and my swing were signs of potential. So I started playing tournaments. When I was 5 and 6, we took two-hour flights to be able to play tournaments on weekends.
We moved to Vancouver when I was 6. My parents found a coach, Jake Kwon, who they liked because he was strict. In Canada, all girls played together, no age group. I improved fast, playing against older girls. After six years we moved to San Diego mainly for my golf. It was all that was going on in my life, but I didn’t have that clear vision of wanting to become a professional golfer until I was 15 and qualified for the US Women’s Open. The feeling of playing well under that pressure with all those people around, nothing can compare.
I made the cut and played with Paula Creamer. I love how, not only is she very trendy, feminine, pretty and sweet, but she is also a fierce competitor. Competition is seen as so masculine; people think you can’t be super feminine and still be taken seriously as a competitor. When my Instagram took off, I gained a real appreciation for how hard it is to do it.
Growing up, I was never a handsome boy. Golf was on my mind, appearance was not. But as you get older, it’s only natural for girls and boys to commit to how they look. My appearance began to mature. I understood my style, how I wanted to introduce myself. I was lucky to build a community and grab attention very quickly. I love interacting with people and sharing parts of my life. Through attention and sponsorship, it has also helped fund my golf career.
My Instagram doesn’t show my dedication to golf. I post golf photos, of course, but on Instagram I show the more feminine side of me. But some people ignore my golf achievements for this reason. People see my appearance and say, “Well, you won’t make it, because you don’t respond to the image of what a winner should look like.” They are assuming that if I commit myself to my appearance, I am not putting enough effort into golf. I get a lot of comments like that. People were waiting to see me fail, just to prove their theory.
I turned pro and played Symetra Tour in 2018. Between the swing changes, I didn’t have the best year, but I had a win and got full LPGA Tour status. When I got my card, I put so much pressure on myself to prove to the people who knew me and those who didn’t that I have spent my entire life working on golf. This is my dream. Here’s where it all went wrong. The first seven months of the LPGA tour were one miss cut after another. Add the negative social media feedback, people saying I didn’t belong and all I could think of was, Am I really cut out for it? Maybe they are right. Maybe I’m not good enough. I remember the nights when I woke up at 2am crying in bed because I wanted to be so strong.
In July, I stopped worrying. I was more miserable than I had ever been. I let go of the advice the coaches and people close to my family gave me about my game. I was told to prepare for tournaments by examining everything that could go wrong and managing those risks. I realized it stressed me out. I was told to practice a number of hours before the events; this made me think too much about things. I was told to meditate. It wasn’t an attack, so I stopped. If I didn’t feel like posting on Instagram, I didn’t post. If I was worried that people might not like something I wanted to post, I posted anyway.
I lost my card, so I had to go back to school Q. But unlike the year before, I slept well during those two weeks. The nervousness that a year earlier had made it impossible to eat went away. I trusted. And I won Q school. In golf and social media, I tried to be perfect. I thought that was what people wanted to see, so that’s how I thought I should be. But the last year taught me that perfection doesn’t exist anywhere. Mistakes will happen. And I can survive them.
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