Kai Trump’s surprising LPGA invite achieving its goal

On a Sunday in May in 2017, a little girl stood on the final hole of the Senior PGA Championship in Virginia, watching Bernhard Langer win the event by a shot over Vijay Singh. The girl, Kai Trump, was beside her father, Donald Trump Jr., at a course owned by her paternal grandfather, Donald Trump, then in the first year of his first term as president of the United States. Kai Trump, wide-eyed and 10, looked happy to be there. She was already way into golf. 

Eight years later, her grandfather is in the first year of his second term as president and Kai is captain of the girls’ golf team at the Benjamin School in South Florida. Her mother (Vanessa Trump) is dating Tiger Woods, whose 16-year-old son, Charlie, also attends the Benjamin School. On Tuesday, Kai announced that she has accepted an invitation to play in a mid-November LPGA event in Florida sponsored by Annika Sorenstam.

“What’s up, guys?” Kai said at the start of her 37-second poolside video announcement, posted on TikTok, where she has 3.4 million followers. “I am thrilled to announce that I will be making my LPGA debut in November at the Annika.”

Tuesday night, Kai did a 15-minute Sirius XM radio interview with Sorenstam and her husband, Mike McGee, son of Jerry McGee, a prominent PGA Tour player in the 1970s. McGee said that, according to his math, Kai had more than 8 million followers, combining her different social-media channels.

“I couldn’t do it without my team,” Kai noted.

“I could use some help on my content,” Sorenstam said.

Kai Trump is a good junior golfer with LPGA aspirations who has committed to play golf at the University of Miami, starting next year. There are hundreds of other female teenage golfers with similar profiles. Kai was invited to play in Sorenstam’s event because her paternal grandfather is president of the United States and because her social-media following is massive. Nobody is disputing that.

“I would imagine, since the Tuesday announcement, that this is one of the most talked-about women’s golf tournaments that has probably ever existed,” Justin Sheehan, chief operating officer of the tournament’s host club, Pelican Golf Club, said in a phone interview Thursday. “It’s on news channels and sports channels. The numbers of social-media impressions, I guess they call it, are staggering. Love it or hate it, it’s getting people to talk about the event.

“We’re on a mission to grow this game. Seeing the impact Caitlin had last year was fairly eye-opening.”

Caitlin Clark, the star point guard of the WNBA’s Indiana Fever, put her promising golf game on public display at last year’s tournament, playing in the pro-am with Sorenstam. Clark will play in this year’s pro-am again. Sheehan, a former teaching pro who has worked with LPGA players, described Clark as a single-digit golfer with unlimited upside. 

Sheehan, along with his teaching-pro wife, Nathalia Sheehan, played nine holes with Kai Trump at Pelican this year. Asked for a scouting report, Sheehan said that Kai had an impressive swing and LPGA length and, like all young players, was learning about shot selection. (Her caddie for the tournament will be her friend Allan Kournikova, the 21-year-old brother of the retired tennis player Anna Kournikova.) Sheehan declined to make any sort of prediction for what Kai might shoot in the four-day tournament, which begins Nov. 13.

Last year, the 36-hole cut was two over par, 142. Given Kai’s scoring in junior events, where her scores are often in the mid-70s or higher, making the cut would be an astonishing achievement. Sheehan noted that sponsor’s invitations at many professional tournaments go to players with a wide range of skills, including local pros and famous athletes.

Sheehan said that in the event’s first year, in 2020, his future wife, competing as Nathalie Filler, played in the tournament on a sponsor’s exemption. Filler’s main playing qualification was that she was the North Florida PGA Player of the Year. By any ordinary measure, she’s an excellent golfer. Competing against the best players in the world, Filler missed the cut by 12. 

As Tiger Woods has often said, getting better at golf comes as a series of “baby steps.” His goal, rising in the game as an amateur, was to dominate at every level at which he played. But he did play in the 1992 Los Angeles Open, on a sponsor’s exemption, as a 16-year-old amateur — and the reigning U.S. Junior Amateur champion. Steph Curry has played in professional events as a sponsor’s exemption, as a scratch golfer and one of the best basketball players in history. Annika Sorenstam played in a PGA Tour event, the 2003 Colonial, on a sponsor’s exemption, and as the most dominant woman golfer in the game. Sheehan noted that Bryson DeChambeau’s social-media following — his videotaped efforts to break 50 on a short course in the company of people including Steph Curry and President Trump — has brought golf to an incalculable number of new-to-golf viewers. He expects Kai Trump’s participation in an LPGA event to do the same. The key numbers here are not her scorecard totals but her social-media reach.

The birth-certificate name of the November event is The ANNIKA driven by Gainbridge at Pelican, but players and fans call it the Annika, for the tournament host, the 55-year-old Swedish golf legend who lives in Orlando. Gainbridge, a financial services company, is the tournament sponsor, responsible for the event’s $3.25 million purse, 15 percent of which ($487,000) goes to the winner, if the winner is a pro. You can say, with near certainty, that the winner will be a pro — a Nelly Korda, a Charlie Hull. (Kai Trump will compete as an amateur.) The tournament will be played on the “reimagined” Donald Ross course at the Pelican Golf Club, near Clearwater, Fla. Justin Sheehan, a former teaching pro, is the club’s chief operating officer, and the invitation to Kai Trump comes at the behest of Pelican, which is granted one of the tournament’s three special exemptions.

Ryan Dever, the tournament director, said in an interview that he extended the invitation to Kai via her agent and that “the communication has been through Kai’s team.” 

The event is the last full-field event of the LPGA season, four rounds with a 36-hole cut and 108 players, three of whom are in the field by special invitation.

One spot is reserved annually for a member of the winning team of a collegiate event sponsored by Sorenstam, the Annika Intercollegiate. The winning team was Wake Forest and the team decided that Anne-Sterre den Dunnen of the Netherlands, a senior, would represent the team at Sorenstam’s LPGA event.

A second spot is given by Gainbridge and went to Lauryn Nguyen, a promising Northwestern University golfer. Like Kai Trump, Lauryn Nguyen is making her LPGA pro debut. But, unlike Kai, she did not announce her participation in the event by way of a TikTok posting that traveled the world reaching hundreds of thousands of people.

It really is an extraordinary 37-second clip. In it, Kai is standing beside a golf net beside a backyard pool with a little putting green and chipping area on the side. The pool has a basketball rim for pool dunking and the hedge behind the pool is trimmed to perfection. She is wearing a TaylorMade hat (her grandfather’s preferred brand) and a sky-blue Benjamin School golf shirt that matches the sky above her. The final punctuation of the video is a nothing-but-net iron shot with a smooth, controlled backswing and finishing with good balance. She’s wearing little white ankle socks. She has an interesting speaking style, by which she throws down her right hand to emphasize certain syllables. Millions have seen it. Pretty soon here, millions will see her swing in an LPGA event.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.