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Dana Rader - new LPGA president

By Roy Waters | The News Herald

Published: October 13, 2009

Burke County had a first recently when one of our native athletes was elected to the highest office of their professional organization.
Golfer Dana Rader is the new President of the Ladies Professional Golfers Association of America's club pro division, making her dad, Vernon, and all the folks at Mimosa Hill Golf Club very proud.
The Dana Rader Golf School that she operates from the Ballantyne Resort just south of Charlotte, is considered one of the country's top golf instructional destinations.
Rader is ranked among the nation's top 50 golf teachers by both Golf Digest and Golf Magazine and writes an instructional column for the Charlotte Observer. She is the author of Rock Solid Golf, a book in which she presents her straight-forward model for life-long success both on an off the golf course.
Rader took up the game playing with her father but it wasn't long until he turned her instruction over to Mimosa Hills pro, the late Joe Cheves.
My son played basketball at Freedom High at the same time Rader did, and I saw her play many times. She was a very good player but the opportunities for girls to play at a higher level were very limited at that time. She attended Pfeiffer College but had to play on the mens golf team.
After college, she attempted to qualify for the LPGA Tour without success but found her calling soon after as a teaching pro at Charlotte's Myers Park Golf Club.
Rader is a very motivating Christian speaker and anyone who heard her eulogy at the Cheves' funeral will not soon forget it.
Speaking of Cheves, Arnold Palmer recently celebrated his 80th birthday and one of his last televised competitive rounds was played with Cheves. They were paired together in the final group of the first shoot-your-age golf tournament. It proved to be a fitting crown to the great career of our local and state hall of famer who set the worldwide record a few years earlier by shooting a round of 64 at age 81, a whopping 17 shots below his age.
On a final note, Forbes magazine recently reported that Tiger Woods became the first athlete to earn $1 billion from his sport. His earnings included tournament prize money, endorsement deal, appearance fees, bonuses and profits from his golf course design company.
North Carolinian Michael Jordan ranks second at $800 million.

Roy Waters is a sports columnist for The News Herald. Waters was baseball and basketball coach at Salem High School from 1955-66, where his teams won 18 championships. In 2007, he was inducted into the Burke County Sports Hall of Fame.