CARLSBAD Lizette Salas can see it in her father’s walk. On the golf course, outside the ropes, as he follows his youngest daughter on the LPGA Tour, Ramon Salas strides as if he owns the place.
In his working life, Ramon is a mechanic at the Azusa Greens Golf Course in the San Gabriel Valley, a man who once traded handy work so that Lizette could take golf lessons. Now his girl is among the best players in the world, and he strolls the course with his backpack, shoulders held high and chest out.
“He leaves my mom behind,” Lizette Salas said with a laugh on Tuesday at Aviara Golf Club. “He’s striding to see where my ball went. When we’re on the driving range, he’s not watching the other players or saying ‘hi’ to people. He’s only focused on me.”
Ramon Salas wasn’t at Aviara on Tuesday for Lizette’s practice round because he was at home at the golf course working, but he will be here beginning Thursday when the 72-hole Kia Classic tees off.
For reasons both endearing and harrowing, fathers can sometimes have a high profile on the LPGA Tour. They can be extremely involved in their daughter’s trade long after they might consider letting go. In the Salas family’s case, the presence of one on the tour is almost unimaginable without the other.
If not for emigrating from a small town outside of Guadalajara; if not for meeting his future wife, Martha, in a U.S. factory; if not for taking the golf course job with his brother; if not for so badly wanting his children to play golf at a time when most Hispanics shunned the game as boring or elitist; if not for doing the extra work so that Lizette could play; if not for all that Ramon Salas did, his daughter would not have been a four-time All-American at USC, or survived LPGA Q School by making four straight birdies on the last day, or risen to her current spot of No. 46 in the Rolex Rankings.
Salas, 23, finished third in Rookie of the Year voting in 2012, earned $242,000 and had a season-best finish of ninth at the tour stop in Malaysia. This year she already has notched three top-13 finishes in four starts, including a tie for fourth last week in Phoenix by shooting four rounds in the 60s.
Finally, Salas can relax a little bit. She can eat in nice restaurants and stay in decent hotels less than two years after she and her father traveled the country in a truck so she could play on the minor-league LPGA Symetra Tour. Unable to afford motels, they often stayed at rest stops overnight, with Lizette sleeping in the cab while her father bedded down with her golf clubs in the back.
“Obviously, it was a little rough,” Lizette said. “But it was something we had to do. I look back on it and it makes me appreciate all of the hard work I have done, all of the sacrifices my dad has made. It’s a story I can tell my grandkids.”