Even in high school, I'd tell my mom I was sick of swimming and wanted to try to play golf. She wasn't too happy. She'd say, 'Think about this.' And I'd always end up getting back in the pool.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Summer I was 13, my grandfather and my father taught me how to play golf. I took lessons that summer, and I played every day that summer. I probably would've kept playing, except I realized that girls don't watch golf; they watch tennis. So I let my golf game go dormant and started playing tennis.
If I didn't swim my best, I'd think about it at school, at dinner, with my friends. It would drive me crazy.
I'd go to swim practice, put my face in the water, and I didn't have to talk to anybody. Swimming was like my escape, but it was also like this huge prison because I felt like I had to swim up to people's standards.
When I'd get out of school in the afternoon, I would go to the golf course, and I just picked the game up. And when I was 13 years old, I could shoot 70 - even-par 71, one over par and then something like that. I just took a liking to the game.
I can't imagine what I would be doing if I wasn't swimming. It is what I want to do now; it is what I want to do in the foreseeable future, and that is what I'm focusing on.
Playing sport was somewhat frivolous, but I liked it. I rebelled a little bit, and wouldn't go to music lessons and things like that, but I would go and play ball. My parents learned to love it because they saw how much I got out of it.
I was a hotshot as a junior. When I was 18, I really got into fiddling around. I completely lost interest in golf, and I guess all I could think about was going to college, getting married and having babies.
I was going to be a concert pianist, and when I was in high school, my parents were scared to death that I would focus too much on that too soon. And that I'd end up in some sort of dead end, and not fulfilling whatever potential they thought I had.
When my first semester grades came out, my mom and dad told me I wouldn't be playing football.
Tennis was always there for me, which was lucky. I would go play baseball, basketball, football, hang with my brother, do whatever, and at the end of the day I'd come back and say, 'Hey, Mom, would you hit 15 minutes worth of balls with me?'