Lori Atsedes (Pro golfer)
Lori Atsedes was once competing in a golf tournament, when Hurricane Irene struck. And so the tournament was postponed and Atsedes went to the plaster store to buy and paint an early Christmas present for her mother.
“When you play every day,” says the 45-year-old pro golfer with her leisurely drawl, “you don’t have to play every day. That’d be like saying, ‘Would you like to work every day of your life?’”
But she’s been playing since she was 13 and touring as a pro since 1989, and since her first win at the Central Florida Challenge in 1992, she’s recorded more than 17 first-place finishes on the McDonald’s Sunshine mini-tour, won the Futures Tour five times, qualified three times for the U.S. Open, and was a member of the 1989 Women Professional Golfers European Tour that visited nine different countries, though not Greece.
“Greece wasn’t a place I went to,” she says. “But you cover a lot of ground on the European tour. And there’s an eight-week Asian tour.”
In 1998, Atsedes posted a season-low 67 during the second round of the State Farm Rail Classic and finished 28th at the Star Bank LPGA Classic, but coping with the rigors of the tour and its finances are still a challenge. Ten years ago she took two years off and cooked at an Outback restaurant to raise enough money to continue playing professionally.
“I cooked at the Outback at night and played golf during the day,” she recalls. “I just hit balls in the field, I wasn’t working anywhere at a golf course. You have to have the money behind you in order to play golf. And I didn’t go out looking for it, I just got it myself.”
She came back strong to win the Central Florida Challenge and qualify the first time for the U.S. Open.
“That was exciting, yeah,” she says, “because I had quit playing golf for two years. Then I played in my first U.S. Open and it was one of the hardest golf courses I’ve ever played on in my life (Oakmont in Pittsburgh). And I’ve gone back since and tried to play the course and I can’t play the course.”
There is also the toll of the travel (she packed her car last March and just unpacked it this month for season’s end) and the demands a pro golf career makes on personal life.
“You travel on Mondays, you practice on Tuesdays, and you start playing on Thursday, usually,” she says. “And when you’re not playing, you’re thinking about it.”
She’s single, which makes the commitment easier, but she says there are also mothers and couples on the tour.
“There’s a lot of married couples that balance it out pretty well,” she admits. “You don’t play a lot of weeks in a row and you go home and you balance things out. You can have the best of both worlds.”
Atsedes lives in Florida, but she was raised in Ithaca, New York and it was her father, Jim, who got her into golf. He played it all his life and tried to turn pro on the senior tour at 50.
“He was one of the top amateurs in New York State,” she says. “He got us started. I started playing pretty regularly after high school. It was just something to do to stay close to Dad.”
But then at 18 she moved to Florida to be closer to the links.
“It’s a game that teaches you a lot of life lessons,” she says. “If you play golf and don’t have patience, you’re going to learn it. You can’t play professional gold without learning something day by day. And it’s a performance sport: you don’t get a paycheck unless you play well, so are you going to learn something during those times?”
She supplements her winnings by playing pro-ams and signing contracts with clubs and endorsement contracts for shoes and bags and clubs (“There’s a lot of different ways to make money”), but she says it takes a clear head plus a steady hand on the course to make it all work.
“What we do for a living takes a lot of re-evaluation and making sure you’re looking at things with the right perspective and the right motives,” she says. “It’s just an interesting game.”
An obsessive game as well. “You can tell a lot about a person by watching them play golf,” she concedes. “Somebody who you might think is mild-mannered off the golf course, you get him on the course and he starts throwing clubs and you’re like, Wow!”
As for seniors who take up golf to relax, she says, “There’s not too many old-timers who play golf that aren’t out to beat their buddies. You ask a few. Nobody likes to lose.”
Atsedes is deeply-religious (“I feel like I play golf for God”) and her sister Georgette was born blind and raised by her “yiayia” in the Greek Orthodox church.
“They had a really unique bond,” she says. “And they went to church and she took Greek lessons.”
Like every other golfer, amateur and pro, she hopes to improve her putting (“There’s not a golfer on tour that won’t tell you their putting could always be better”) to supplement her natural power on the drives (“I was always very strong; I was a long hitter”).
“I still have a lot to learn and playing full time is a definite benefit,” she says. “All I can tell you, I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing and I hope to continue doing it.”
But her dad had two restaurants in Ithaca when she was growing up (The College Spa and Dimitri’s) and cooking is now an off-course passion that might prove a second career.
“I like to cook for a lot of people,” she confesses. “And I know I want to have a restaurant. Just a dinner restaurant. I don’t know where.”
