When she beat defending champion Annika Sörenstam to win the 2022 U.S. Senior Women’s Open, Jill McGill joined Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, JoAnne Carner, and Carol Semple Thompson to become the sixth player to ever win three different USGA championships. The more surprising part might be that it was the Tenison Park golf coach’s first professional win—at age 50. The take? A cool $1 million.
Thirty years ago, the 6-foot-tall Denver native won the 1993 U.S. Women’s Amateur and 1994 U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links—her first two USGA titles—during her junior and senior years at the University of Southern California. She had a semester left when she decided to turn pro. She did well enough to snag some good endorsement deals and travel the world, playing in Europe and Asia. But big wins proved to be frustratingly elusive, and more than anything, McGill wanted to be a mom.
She retired in 2010, at the age of 39, when she became pregnant with her first child, Bella. At the time, her husband, Patrick Byerly, was the head of business development and marketing for a number of marathons. It was while he served as president of the Dallas Marathon that McGill gave birth to their second child, Blaze. Along the way, the family spent a year in Cabo San Lucas, where the director of golf for Cabo Del Sol spotted McGill’s skills and offered her a teaching job. When the family moved back to Dallas, she started giving golf instruction at Tenison Park and playing league tennis at Samuell Grand.
The more surprising part might be that, at age 50, it was her first professional win for a cool $1 million.
Although she continued to play occasional tournaments, raising her kids was her focus, and recreational tennis became her new passion. What she never expected was for the serious advice of her 10-year-old daughter—and the occasional pettiness of tennis competitors—to free her from decades of doubt and prepare her for the win of a lifetime. We’ll let her tell it.
“I’ve tried to explain this to people: having been removed from [the pro tour] and just having other life experiences, my head space and my mental game was like somebody I’d never played with before, purposely, and it was great. Afterward I was like, why couldn’t I have figured this out 20 years ago? But I’m on my own time frame.
“I was really accepting what was going to happen instead of trying to make it happen, knowing that if I truly enjoyed the process—and if I was really able to release tension, release whatever baggage I had going into it that was precluding me from performing optimally—then I had a chance. There was just a calmness even though I was nervous. What tennis did for me is allowed me to learn how to compete in an arena without basing your worth as a person on your results.
“Bella said to me, ‘Mom, remember, just go out and do your best and have fun.’ And I was like, ‘Yup. Pretty much that’s true.’ She wanted to come to the tournament from the beginning, but they were in school. And I’m like, ‘You can’t miss school. I’ll make you a deal: if I’m in the top 10 going into the weekend, you guys can fly out.’ And so on Thursday, the first thing she says is, ‘Mom, you’re tied for 13th.’ And I said, ‘Yep. You’re right.’ She goes, ‘You can do it, and I want to come. So just go out, do the best you can, and have fun. I know you can do it.’ I mean, how great is that? I’m like, maybe she does listen to stuff I say.
“On Friday, at some point during that round, I was five under par. I was four under for the tournament, and I think I was tied for second at some point or tied for third. I don’t know. But I knew that I was rolling to the top 10. So they came out. It was super cute. Bella was so excited. She wanted to dress like me.
“A friend of mine said, ‘Don’t have your kids come out there. This is your week. Tunnel vision, baby. Just do it.’ And I said, ‘I can honestly tell you that having them here seeing me in this position is more rewarding than anything else could be. I wouldn’t have it any other way.’
“In the car driving to the golf course, I don’t know what happened, but I had this conversation in my head like, ‘All right. You ready to let all the shit go? You ready to let it go?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m ready to let go. Let’s do it.’ Literally it was like, It’s a new chapter, a new opportunity separate from that other debacle of having played on tour and never having won, having been runner-up. Coming from such a highly touted amateur player and not living up to other people’s expectations or your own.
“I struggled with it. I didn’t like tour life. I didn’t like being on the road like that. I’d always wanted to have a family. In hindsight, had I had the wisdom of looking at it and working at it smarter not harder, maybe it would have been different. Maybe it would not have been different. Maybe this is the journey I’m supposed to be on.
“And this was the moment.”
This story originally appeared in the April issue of D Magazine with the headline “Free Your Mind.” Write to [email protected].
Author
