Kang did not pick up the game of golf until she was 13, tagging along with her older brother Alex to golf lessons. But she quickly took to the sport, qualifying for the 2007 U.S. Women’s Open at age 14, just one year after she first picked up a club. She captured her first major amateur title at the 2010 U.S. Women’s Amateur and successfully defended the win in 2011, becoming just the 12th player since 1895 to win back-to-back titles.

After spending one season at Pepperdine University, Kang turned professional in 2011 and earned her LPGA Tour card at that year’s Qualifying School. But her amateur achievements did not immediately translate to professional success. She spent six years on Tour without a win, a span of more than 140 starts made all the more difficult by the death of her father, K.S. Kang, in 2013 after a battle with brain cancer.

Kang’s dad often served as her caddie during her amateur and young professional career, and his loss took a hard toll on his young daughter. Following his death, she even had his signature, written in Korean, tattooed on her right hand.

“I have a really great life, and I'm blessed for what I have, but what I was going through mentally, losing my dad, and then not winning, trying to play through it, all of the images in my mind, I couldn't calm it down,” Kang told Golf Digest in 2018. “To find some peace, I needed to talk to somebody. Therapy helped a lot. She told me it was OK, that everything was going to be fine. She helped me with different mechanisms on how to deal with anger.”

Taking that time to focus on her mental health truly transformed Kang’s life and her game. She finally earned her breakthrough win at the 2017 KPMG Women’s PGA Championship at Olympia Fields Country Club, birdieing the 72nd hole and immediately bursting into happy tears, enveloped in the arms of her mother, Dr. Grace Lee. Kang honored and celebrated her dad’s memory by placing her winning caddie bib at his gravestone.

Road to Tokyo - Danielle Kang

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