Pro golfer Tiffany Joh shreds on land and water

When she took up surfing six years ago, pro golfer Tiffany Joh discovered there’s more than one way to shred.

In golf, “Some of my girlfriends are scared to hit the ground when they hit the ball, but you’re supposed to rip off some turf,” Joh, 31, said by phone from Palm Springs, Calif., before playing in the ANA Inspiration tournament. Earlier last month, she hit a hole-in-one at the LPGA Founders Cup, eventually tying for 16th place.

A two-time U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links Championship winner who started golfing at age 12 in San Diego, Joh has collected more than $1 million in career earnings since joining the LPGA tour in 2011. And thanks to her social media posts and golf parody music videos, she has also earned a reputation for her sense of humor; ESPN called her “one of the most entertaining players” on the tour.

It was at the end of her rookie year when Joh bought her first surfboard on impulse for the off-season.

Surfers shred waves, but Joh modestly said she’s not there yet. “In my opinion, surfing’s a lot more difficult to learn than golf.” Still, photos from her December sessions in Costa Rica with Surf Simply, a favorite surf coaching resort, show elan and tactical skills.

Recently, a golfer friend asked why it was taking her so long to master surfing. Joh explained that beginning golfers can hit a bucket of balls at the driving range, but with surfing, “It would be like every time you tried to hit a golf ball you had to sprint from 40 yards away, fight off six people and the ball would move.”’

Arriving in Hawaii this weekend to compete in the LPGA Lotte Championship at Ko Olina Golf Club, Joh will rent a surfboard to tackle the ultimate water feature — the ocean.

“When we played at Ko Olina last year, I paddled out to a nearby break called Tracks every time I had a spare 30 minutes,” she said. “I was pretty much paddling out for little tiny sessions at least twice a day.”

The 5-foot-6-inch Joh isn’t afraid to paddle out alone, whether it’s at her home break at La Jolla Shores or off Atlantic City, N.J., during a break on tour.

“The cool thing about Hawaii is, every time I go I meet someone who’s so helpful,” she said. “Maybe they just feel sorry for me cause I’m such a kook.”

At Tracks, a surfer greeted Joh because they were wearing the same Ping golf hat and later showed her the break at White Plains.

A couple of years ago, she tried Makaha for the first time on a small, uncrowded day, and a guy on a standup paddleboard helped her pick the right waves to go for and paddle deeper to catch them. He asked why she was in town and later dropped by the tournament to watch.

Speaking with Joh reminded me of a time when neither surfing nor golf was as accessible to women as today.

The first surfer-golfer I knew was my sister-in-law Anne Wallace, a gifted athlete and California girl. She welcomed me to the family by taking me out to her local break, Huntington Beach, where we saw a school of sky-blue porpoises and Anne turned to me with her wide hazel eyes and a smile that made her the most beautiful water creature I’ve ever seen.

In her teens, Anne had won several California Junior Golf Association tournaments but never competed on an interscholastic level. Her public high school, Long Beach Poly, didn’t have a girls’ golf team and denied her petition to start one. Nor was she allowed to try out for the boys’ team.

So in 1969, her father, Don Wallace, a lawyer, sued the State of California in one of the seminal cases that led to the 1972 passage of Title IX, the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act, named for the late Hawaii congresswoman.

Anne abandoned golf for surfing during her college years in San Diego but quit in her late 20s after a male surfer attacked and beat her up in the water at Huntington Beach. The soul of gentleness herself, she was shocked and terrified.

She returned to golf, winning numerous tournaments, including a victory at the Los Angeles Amateur Open in 1981, when she was six months’ pregnant and had to alter her swing, she said, to get around her belly.

When her children grew into surfers, Anne returned with them to the waves and found a balance between her sports. Once, while golfing in California, she got a phone call from an unknown number: It was world surfing champ and amateur golfer Kelly Slater. He’d heard about Anne, Slater said, and wanted to say hi.

She was in her mid-50s when a virulent cancer robbed her of life, but not before she had prepared herself and her loved ones for her death, which she faced as bravely as she would taking off on big, unpredictable waves.

I understood why Anne loved surfing, but not her attraction to golf. How could a free-spirited water person enjoy a slow-moving, land-bound game with a dress code? Conversely, how could Joh, after having been to the beach only a couple of times in her life, have fallen for surfing?

It’s because golf and surfing are actually very similar, Joh said.

Both are hard. “There’s really no short cut, which makes it really frustrating and really rewarding at the same time.”

And there’s the counter-intuitive stuff.

She remembered trying to paddle into a wave, “and whenever the nose was going under water, I would freak out and grab the rails, afraid I would pearl. But then I learned if you paddle really hard, sometimes it lifts the nose.”

In golf, a common amateur flaw is “people pick up their heads really fast because they’re trying to see where the ball is going.” She advises neophytes to keep their heads down and make sure the club is hitting the ball.

The two sports, however, aren’t physically compatible.

“Doing an excessive amount of paddling is not the best thing for my golf swing. Especially on a long board, surfing makes your shoulders really internally rotated, so I have to do a lot of stretches to open up my chest after I surf.”

But everyone cross-trains, she said. Before a round of golf, some girls jog, others lift weights. For Joh, surfing involves short bursts of high-intensity cardio “when I paddle out fast for a set” in between lower-intensity activity “when I’m paddling around looking for a peak.”

Last year, after a surfing friend had a skin cancer removed, Joh saw a doctor about a scaly patch on her scalp. It turned out to be melanoma and was removed. All is well, and now she golfs and surfs in a sun hat.

“I feel like surfing brings me so much happiness that it counteracts whatever physical problems it leads to.”

While happy in the surf, Joh is no Pollyanna: She’s familiar with the crowds and competition. But in the same way one bad egg can spoil a lineup, good energy can spread through a lineup, too, she said, and that’s what she focuses on.

“If I go out there and am really respectful of everyone and kind of erring on the side of getting less waves, people tend to be really helpful and kind.”

Times have changed: Women no longer have to sue to play sports or worry about assaults in the lineup.

The other day, I channelled Joh — and Anne — when I paddled out to Suis: I said hi and smiled, sincerely, at everybody.

Everybody smiled back.

“In the Lineup” features Hawaii’s oceangoers and their regular hangouts, from the beach to the deep blue sea. Reach Mindy Pennybacker at mpennybacker@staradvertiser.com or call 529-4772.