Salimah Mussani took a one-stroke lead in the PGA of B.C. Women’s Championship on the pentultimate hole, played on the 8th hole of Surrey’s Hazlemere Golf and Country Club on Sept. 9. She birdied the par-four 251-yard hole to take the lead from her closest competitor, Ashley Zibrik of Shaughnessey Golf and Country Club.
But Mussani didn’t know she had the lead. Without a leaderboard, she was counting her own and Zibrik’s strokes in her head. After 35 holes, she thought they were tied with the final hole ahead of them.
“I changed my strategy a little bit on last two holes,” said Mussani, adding that the green was reachable from the tee box. On 8, she pulled out her driver to give her a chance at a birdie shot, which she made afer she dug out of the bunker.
“I thought we were all square,” she said. At that point, Mussani, a Canadian junior and women’s national champion, was playing for the win.
On 9, the last hole of the tournament and another par-four, the women played from the red tees at 334 yards out. Mussani used her driver to power the ball into the wind. That and her next shot -- using a nine-iron to lay up on the green -- were two of the best ones she hit all day, she said. She sunk the eight-foot birdie putt.
“I probably wouldn’t have played the same strategy if had known [the score],” she said. She carded 75 both rounds two win by two strokes.
Approaching the green, Mussani’s inner coach held her focus. “My self-talk on the last three holes was, ‘You’ve done this so many times before, you know what it takes to get it done. Get it done,’” she said.
She set herself up for a three-foot putt and sunk it. “I thought that was to win. Turns out I ended up winning by two.”
A competitive golfer who played and coached at Stanford University, Mussani, 35, knows what she’s capable of. She’s also acutely aware of her limitations. Fourteen years ago she was diagnosed with lupus, a hard-to-identify auto-immune disease that turns the body against itself and can target any tissue or organ, potentially leading to death.
Four out of five people aged 15 to 45 who have lupus are women. Known as the disease with a thousand faces, lupus is genetic, is not contagious, and presents differently in each person. An estimated 50,000 Canadians have lupus, but the B.C. Lupus Society believes the number is higher because the disease goes undiagnosed. Mussani's grandfather and aunt also had lupus, she said.
As a student-athlete at the University of Texas, Mussani, who was born and raised in Ontario, was on the Longhorns golf team when she first started to struggle with her health. Determined to continue her promising career, she travelled for tournaments, played in hot weather and pursued an intense schedule. She won the Texas 5A championship and after two years she transferred to Stanford, which suited her better, and continued to rise.
Mussani turned pro in 2002 and competed on the LPGA tour and Futures tour. She left her competitors wondering when she’d suddenly withdraw from tournaments before the final round.
“I put myself through a lot of things I shouldn’t have,” she said. Numerous doctors urged her to quit the game.
In 2007 she accepted an offer to coach at Stanford as an assistant. Life on tour was costing her too much. “My health was more important,” she said, and began her career as a coach. She was with the NCAA Div. 1 program for three seasons.
“I started feeling better. I wasn’t travelling every week, I wasn’t in the sun. I decided to play again. I quit a great job to go play again,” she said. “Six months into it, […] I was in the hospital again. My body just can’t handle it. I had to make a concerted effort to give it up.”
Mussani moved to Vancouver and is now a teaching professional at the University Golf Club and Burnaby's Riverway Colf Course. She competes on occasion, as she did last month in the PGA of B.C. championship. She knows her limitations and how to recover when she takes it just a little too far.
“I used to get really upset about it. I remember instances when I had to call the tournament director and say I wasn’t going to make my tee time — that was very frustrating.
“If I sat around in my apartment for the rest of my life, I’ll probably be OK. But who wants to do that? When I get flare-ups, it’s usually a result of high exertion.
“But I know if I just lay low, stay in my apartment, don’t exert myself for three or four days, I can shake it away,” she said. “At this point in time, I know what I can do and what I can’t do.”
A life on tour behind her, but Mussani will still compete a few times a seasons. The win at the PGA of B.C. championship won’t be her last.
“When I made that last putt, I gave it a pretty good fist pump,” she said.
Mussani will deliver the keynote speech at the B.C. Lupus Wellness and Education Symposium at St. Paul's Hospital Lecture Theatre on Oct. 25. To register, visit bclupus.org.
