Reality is closing in on Eimi Koga. The 2011 state high school golf champion is in her last semester at Moanalua High School and anticipating her college career at Washington, currently ranked No. 1 in the country. She is transitioning out of junior golf and Hawaii, which have been her life for seven years.
Koga is also appreciating that life more than most 17-year-olds, after getting hit in the head by a shanked golf ball Oct. 31. One moment she was playing a practice round with three Asia-Pacific Junior Cup teammates at Waikoloa. The next she was lying on the 14th fairway with a ringing in her head and Hawaii Golf Hall of Famer Kevin Hayashi applying ice and getting an ambulance.
The stray shot, from 50 yards away, hit Koga on the left side of her head.
"I guess I tried to turn," she recalled. "I don’t really know. I wasn’t fast enough."
The ambulance took her to the hospital for scans and tests. "They said I had a dent in my brain a quarter of the way through," Koga says. "There was internal bleeding filling up inside. They had no brain surgeon, so I went back (to Oahu) to Queen’s (for surgery). I don’t remember much."
That she remembers anything is astonishing. That she was released from the hospital in three days, "felt like myself in about a week" and was playing in the HSJGA’s Michelle Wie Tournament of Champions a month later went beyond.
The 2010 Junior World champ was second at the TOC, won the Acura Hawaii Pro-Junior Skills Challenge with Dean Wilson last month and played in the Hawaii Pearl Open last week with more than 100 male pros. She didn’t make the cut, but Koga, a skinny 5-foot-9 phenom, clearly has little to prove at this point.
"They said I couldn’t play golf for six months and couldn’t go back to school until January …," she recalls. "Fortunately, I was able to recover really, really fast."
She took off one month, when her father wouldn’t let her hit balls. Two weeks into it, he took her to Pearl Country Club "just to look around" and allowed her to putt. Koga putted so much that at the TOC her short game compensated for the skills she lost in her layoff.
Initially, doctors also told her not to "use my brain."
"I don’t know how that works out — maybe zone out in front of the TV or not text much?" Koga says. "But I was already using my brain."
They gave her the OK to golf again four days before the TOC and Koga got on the plane, confident in her putting and with no clue what else to expect.
"I wanted to see my teammates and friends again," she said, "because last time they saw me I was lying on the fairway."
It was a remarkable year. After finishing third in her state high school title defense, Koga won her state junior championship and took third in Junior World’s oldest age group. She drained the winning putt for Hawaii in theGirls Junior America’s Cup.
Then, in the space of a few seconds on Halloween, everything changed.
"When I got hit and I was in the hospital, I wasn’t sad or mad I got hit," Koga recalls. "I was more really depressed I couldn’t play the Asia-Pacific Cup because I’d been waiting for that tournament how many months. It’s the (most fun) tournament of the year and I wasn’t even there 24 hours. I was really sad, but all my teammates texted me and they were calling me with how they were doing. It was pretty good I wasn’t thinking about the injury. Maybe I would have been more terrified. I didn’t know it was life-threatening."
In the space of a month, her life was back to normal, whatever that is for a gifted high school senior heading off on a huge adventure in a few months. Koga looks the same and sounds the same, but even she knows she is changed.
When she made her "senior speech" last summer at her final HSJGA tournament, Koga characterized it as emotional. Looking back, she is more emotional, and appreciative.
"I was just explaining how, in the beginning playing HSJGA, I didn’t know it was such a big part of me," Koga recalled. "You get to travel all the time. Other friends stay home and I travel all over the world playing and competing. I’m making life-long friends.
"What happened at Asia-Pacific Cup, I was so fortunate. I think because I had the surgery and injury I realized how fortunate I am. All those friends cared for me that I didn’t even know I had. I’m really lucky to have all of them."
