Thomson reflects on losses on, off golf course

Forgive Christin Thomson for not having the best of seasons this year on the Duramed Futures Tour.
The 24-year-old Fort Frances golfer made just two cuts—finishing no better than 57th for the season—in her second year on the LPGA’s developmental tour.
If it fell short of the proverbial breakout year, there were mitigating circumstances. She switched coaches and spent a lot of the season tinkering with her swing.
“I was kind of trying to get back to basics and fundamentals, and the game that I used to play,” Thomson said.
But for all the things that went wrong on the course, the indelible imprint of the season was made July 30 when—smack-dab in the middle of the season—her father, Robert, passed away after a short battle with lung cancer.
Her family learned the diagnosis in February just before Thomson’s season began. As such, her season was plotted early on as to allow as much time at home as possible.
“The whole process, I wanted to come home as much as I could,” Thomson said. “My dad was such a huge supporter of my golf that he really wanted me to continue playing.”
Just how huge a supporter is what turns the loss in terms of her season from painful to devastating.
“A lot. He was my biggest fan, my biggest supporter,” Thomson stressed. “He was just the person I would call before and after any tournament, any round.
“We’ve played a lot of golf together, we travelled a lot,” she added. “When I was a junior and an amateur, he came with me to probably about 90 percent of my tournaments and then I went on to college, he came to quite a few of those events.
“We were kind of a team.”
Which led to some tough decisions on how best to make her father happy.
“It was difficult because I wanted to play, too, and I know that he really enjoyed watching me play,” she said, her voice hesitating. “It’s kind of hard to talk about it.
“I guess I am really happy, though, that I did grind it out and play the events that I did, because I had two events this summer that I actually did pull something together and put some good scores together.
“And back home, I knew he was watching it on the computer and he was following me every shot, so I know he was really excited and really happy to be a part of that.
“And golf is such a mental game,” Thomson added. “Something like that makes it very difficult to have the focus and the energy and the drive to really compete.”
Her new coach, Tom O’Connell, the resident pro at the Falls Country Club over in International Falls, said he’s been impressed with how Thomson was able to put a season together with the loss of her father.
“The hardest thing to do in the world in sport is to act on something rather than react,” he noted. “Every other sport, you have some kind of instincts where you get to respond to a tennis ball coming over the net, the puck coming down the ice. . . .
“Golf is frozen in time and you have to do all the action on the ball, and that makes it difficult. Golf takes so much internal trust,” he remarked.
Not to mention the competition on the course, he added.
“To make cuts on a tour that’s one step below the LPGA, it’s a pretty good thing.”
Thomson made a pair of cuts a week apart—in Batavia, Ohio and St. Anne, Illinois—in late June and early July. After playing a tournament in Syracuse, N.Y. from July 20-22, she came back to be with her father.
Their last days together were “just spent time together like we always did,” she said. “He came to the golf course with me, which was one thing we always did together.
“Even if he wasn’t really able to play at that point, he just enjoyed coming out and being part of what I was doing.”
She took some time off after his death, and spent some time struggling to decide whether or not to return to the tour, said her mother, Maureen.
“She had some tough decisions to make, as you can I’m sure understand, with his health that she persevered at times,” she noted. “I know that she was wondering whether she should not go out for the season, and I know and she knows it’s her dad’s wish, and that’s what we’ve all worked hard for.
“She did very well considering the amount of stress she was under.
“I mean, he was her best friend, he was her coach, you know, just such a big part of her golf life,” Maureen Thomson added. “Without dwelling too much on that part of it, to go forward and feel you know the way she did feel for the loss . . . I can’t be any prouder of her because of her year and her situation with her dad.
“She is a trooper.”
Thomson took a month off before returning for the final tournament of the year in Albany, N.Y. in early September.
“I wanted to play it because I knew it would be really difficult to go back out there, but I kind of forced myself to do it because I knew it would help me in the long run, being more prepared for next year,” Thomson said.
There wasn’t much of a fairy tale lining to the end of the season.
“I didn’t do too well,” Thomson laughed. “I struggled. I was kind of struggling with my game and was trying to find something all week, something to click . . . unfortunately, it didn’t really happen.
“Each day I kind of had a bad stretch of holes that really cost me, and so I didn’t make the cut, but I’m still happy that I went and it was reassuring to know I still really enjoyed being out there and competing.”
“I know that took a lot of strength to go back and meet up with a lot of girls [on the tour],” her mother said. “I can tell that it’s made her a stronger person. She’s going to go forward with this.”
O’Connell, meanwhile, is hoping her third year on the tour after enduring so much this past season will be the one where everything clicks.
“It’ll be interesting to see. I think she can do it . . . I think this’ll be the turning point year, one way or another for her. I expect to see her do some good things.
“She’s an awful good golfer,” he stressed.
For now, Thomson is home for the season, helping her sister, Candice, at the Dairy Queen their father owned. She spends a good chunk of her time training for next season and said the cold weather makes her eager to head for warmer climes for tournaments.
While in town, though, she enjoys seeing friends and family, playing volleyball, and enjoying the life she can’t have on the tour.
“I just, I enjoy being a normal person for a little while, as strange as that may sound,” Thomson said. “Having a normal lifestyle, where you get up and go to work and have that time to be with friends and family at the end of the day.
“I really miss that when I’m on the road.”
She reflects on her year, and said she’s proud of what she’s accomplished.
“I’d say that no matter what, I think this year has made me a lot stronger a person and a player,” she remarked.
“I think that it was really, really hard to focus when I was going through a lot of these emotions this summer, so I guess it was a true test of my abilities to focus and I guess knowing that what I went through this year will teach me a lot down the road, that I can face a lot of stuff out there.”
And as for next year, that’s a whole new season.
“As far as my game goes, I think by springtime I’m going to feel a lot more confident,” Thomson said. “I get a chance now—I do like the off-season because it’s always the time you can look at all the elements of your game and look at how the whole year went, and think about what you did well, what you could do better, and then figure out how you’re going to do it better, what to work on.
“I enjoy the time because now I’m able to make all the little adjustments and just work really hard. I think in that respect, I’ll be a little more ready and I know mentally I should be a little bit fresher.
“It will be different. It will be definitely different next year without my dad,” she admitted. “But you know, I’m doing this for myself, too. It’ll be a new chapter.”