Elston-Marshall puts LPGA dreams on hold

Lani Elston-Marshall’s longtime love affair with golf lives on.

But these days, the sport she once dominated as a young girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest, has been forced to share her affection with a variety of other interests, including a husband and her career as a sales representative and consultant for the Stryker Corporation, a company that specializes in orthopedic supplies.

“I always tend to take on a little bit more than what’s considered normal,” the former Lani Elston said during a telephone interview from her home in Grand Rapids, Mich., earlier this week. “I still love golf, and I always will. But I love my husband and my career, too.”

That means Elston-Marshall’s dream of playing on the Ladies’ Professional Golf Association Tour has been placed on hold – for the time being, at least.

“I never close doors on anything,” added Elston-Marshall, who was home schooled but played her prep golf at Ferris High School, where she was named the Greater Spokane League’s most valuable player four times. “I’m only 25 years old, and most people don’t play their best golf until they’re 30 to 35, anyway. I love the job I’m doing, and I want to give this (career) a shot, but if I feel down the road that I want to give professional golf a try, I will.”

Elston-Marshall had considered trying to qualify for the LPGA Tour after finishing her collegiate career at the University of Arizona in fall 2005, but health issues encountered by her grandparents prompted her to put that plan on hold and return to Spokane.

“It was a very interesting kind of fall,” she said of her final semester at Arizona, when she played in just four events and averaged 76.08 strokes per round, the third lowest on the team. “I was playing golf, and I was playing OK, but I decided to move home after I graduated to help with some family things that were going on with my grandparents.

“I felt like I needed to be there, because I thought we were going to lose them. Family has always been very important to me, so I made the hard decision.”

As it turned out, both of her grandparent fought through their medical problems and are still, according to Elston-Marshall, “hanging on, which is a real blessing.”

Elston-Marshall first met her future husband, Andy Marshall, in June 2004 on a blind golf date arranged by Arizona teammate Rachel Gavin. Marshall had played collegiate golf for one year at Texas-Arlington, before joining the Air Force.

His hopes of playing golf professionally were doused by back problems, but he can still move a golf ball.

“We’ve played some pretty mean games together,” Elston-Marshall said. “He’s still long, long off the tee – like 300 yards long, but some of the ball-striking games we play on the driving range, I can still win.”

The couple, who were married just about a month after their first date, moved to Michigan so Andy could enroll at Thomas M. Colley Law School in Lansing, where he will graduate in December. Elston-Marshall, after earning her degree in music from the UA, hired on with Stryker – a move she has yet to regret.

“I still have to laugh about that,” she said of neglecting her field of expertise to get into medical sales and consulting.

As part of a senior project in college, Elston-Marshall spent nearly nine months working with a couple of her professors to compose the music for a UA production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 and 2.

“It was a labor of love,” she said.

But it also cut deeply into the time she was devoting to golf.

Today, Elston-Marshall, who won more than 70 junior golf events from the time she was 9 years old and was named the Washington Junior Golf Association’s Player of the Year in 1999 after winning the WJGA state championship with a 54-hole score of 2-under-par 216, continues to keep golf on the back burner.

“I still try to get out as often as I can, and I’m definitely trying to keep golf a part of my life,” she said. “I even taught it all last summer on weekends (at the Okemos Golf Center neat Grand Rapids).

“Golf is still important to me, but I have a job I like and a husband I love, as well. And I feel like maybe, in a few years, if I want to try playing golf professionally, I’ll go play golf.”

With that option in mind, Elston-Marshall continues to play just enough to keep her game close to the level it was at when she was at Arizona, where she twice earned honorable mention honors on the Pacific-10 Conference’s all-conference team.

“If I feel, down the road, that I really need to give golf another shot, I certainly don’t think that I won’t be able to do it,” she said. “I still play a lot in the summer, and I trust my abilities and skills enough that I feel like it would all come back if I could focus on it a little more.”

Until then, however, Elston-Marshall will try to keep balancing her love for golf with all of the other important things in her life.

“But I still love the thought of playing on Tour and going after that dream,” she said.