Estimated read time: 7-8 minutes
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Kyra Phillips enjoys a mulligan. A do-over. A chance to right a wrong.
"Oh my God, did you see that?" she says as her golf shot from a sand trap flies over the green and snaps a few tree branches.
It's not a giggle that comes next during this recent round at Druid Hills Golf Club.
Not a chuckle.
It's a leaning-back, mouth-to-the-sky guffaw from the spunky CNN anchor who first learned on the links how to laugh at herself.
Here's poise: Crack a joke and whack the next shot.
On the course, with little makeup and red hair pulled into a ponytail, Phillips is a free spirit, not the serious face you might have watched last week parsing voting patterns.
Here, she's the twinkly-eyed jokester who poked fun at herself on the Late Show with David Letterman after CNN accidentally broadcast her bathroom conversation a few months ago.
Like a golfer who tries a Hail Mary shot, Phillips risked making herself look worse on Letterman.
But the person who taught her to break 90 also told her always to do one thing: Be yourself.
He's gone now, but never far away when she's on the links.
Maternal grandfather Ken Mangan greeted her arrival in the hospital fresh from winning his club championship. That trophy with her birth date is one of her most precious mementos.
Pictures at age 2 show her riding like a koala on his pull cart. She was about 4 when her biological dad left and Mangan, a former Golden Gloves boxer, became the alternate.
"Golf is how we bonded, and that's why we were so close," says Phillips, 38, while practically sprinting around the course.
"It was one of life's simple lessons, and he led by example. And he never even swore!"
Grandpa might have cringed a few times on the crisp, cloudless autumn day as she shoots a 94.
Phillips hasn't played much since starting her live CNN Newsroom show that runs every weekday afternoon from 1 to 4 p.m.
The round gets more zany when she becomes so immersed in talking that she forgets to putt out on one hole and starts teeing up on the next.
"I have grip issues," she says on No. 14. "I have a lot of issues, and grip is just one of them!"
After whiffing her drive on No. 18: "I am in a different place, peeps! I gotta zone in! Holy mackerel!"
Hitting out of a bunker on No. 18, commenting on the microphone incident in which she called her sister-in-law a control freak: "It could've been so much worse. I could've dropped a bunch of F-bombs ... and I would be drinking soup in a homeless shelter!"
Self-deprecation makes a twosome with her steeliness. Phillips sports a competitive streak and the skills to match.
A petite 5-foot-4, she can pound a 225-yard drive. On the greens, she's a demon with an old putter, its red paint chipped so much that you can barely read "Budweiser" on it. She's got a laser eye for the center of the hole --- all the while telling stories.
"You know when you're on," she says bluntly, making three consecutive pars after a photographer shows up. In this casual round, her golf vanity shows when she marks no more than an 8 regardless of how many strokes she really takes.
Grandpa's first lessons were to be patient, practice a lot and give 120 percent to everything. And that's what she did at age 10 when she went after her first scoop.
A classmate's father tuned pianos for the author better known as Dr. Seuss. Phillips got his number and an interview for her fourth-grade newspaper.
Golf helped her get the kind of stories that led to four Emmys and various reporting prizes.
As an investigative reporter in Los Angeles, Phillips invited her sources on the SWAT team and homicide detectives to join her on the course.
While probing country club discrimination, she met wisecracking LPGA Hall of Famer Amy Alcott, and the two see each other at least once a year. It's easy to see why.
"She does not hold back," Phillips says of Alcott. "She is raw and uncensored. She's great."
"We always have a lot of laughs and swear at each other and let it rip," Alcott said later in an e-mail. "I spend a lot of time in the trees and water hazards looking for her balls, and she says, 'Well, Alcott, isn't it boring to hit it so straight all the time, you Hall of Famer, you?'"
At Druid Hills, Phillips' technical difficulties force her into tight spots on the oak-lined, 94-year-old course.
She fishes her ball out of a hazard. She hits a wrong ball. Swish, swish, swish go the piles of golden leaves as she searches for another wayward shot. Dipping into her golf bag, Phillips shows off a Blue Angel headcover, a gift after she flew in one of their shows. A golf towel with a federal military insignia came from a general who granted her an exclusive interview after Sept. 11. Among her celebrity interviews, Donald Trump is one of the latest who shares her love of the game.
In 1999, Phillips was at KCBS in Los Angeles when CNN expressed interest. Then-chief Rick Kaplan surprised her by holding the job interview at the Country Club of the South in Alpharetta.
"He had shoes for me, clubs --- talk about pressure," she says. "I was shaking on the first tee."
She used golf as a test, too. When her boyfriend John Assad got serious, she told him he had to learn the game. They married, and now Assad, a financial adviser, rivals her in the low 90s. (Her best score is 82.)
They used to play at Roswell Country Club but dropped the membership after life and work got crazy after Sept. 11.
That year, her grandfather died of a brain tumor, and to honor his memory she helps host a golf tournament each spring at Chateau Elan to benefit the Brain Tumor Foundation for Children.
He used to worry about her dangerous work assignments, but she saw them as steppingstones to exotic golf locales, for one.
She's teed off in Antarctica ("No full swings because I had on too many clothes"), off an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf ("We hit a whole bunch of balls before the war started") and in the sands of Bahrain ("Hit it, lost it, hit it, lost it").
The patience needed in golf comes in handy as an anchor during a crisis.
"You have to be calm, think about everything you say, have that attention to detail and watch your questions carefully," she says. "You really have to think before you speak."
One letup can ruin a golf round. One slipup --- on camera or off --- can turn an anchor into tabloid fodder, her family stalked by gossip-hungry reporters. "That's how I'm known now," she says, rolling her eyes about the infamous bathroom broadcast and shrugging as she strides across a green on the back nine. "That really blows."
Does it? Now TV watchers know her personality: down to earth, even a little earthy.
A microphone on the course would confirm that impression. And the spirit who follows her here wouldn't want her to replay anything.
Just be who she is, with every swing, with every word. KYRA PHILLIPS' DREAM GOLF FIVESOME:
> Phil Mickelson
> Patrick Dempsey
> The Pope
> Donald Rumsfeld TOP 10 LIST
After her bathroom microphone incident, which occurred during a presidential speech, Kyra Phillips read this Top 10 lists of excuses on the Late Show with David Letterman:
10. Still haven't mastered complicated on-off switch.
9. Larry King told me he does this all the time.
8. How was I supposed to know we had a reporter embedded in the bathroom?
7. I honestly never knew this sort of thing was frowned upon.
6. I couldn't resist a chance to win $10,000 on America's Funniest Home Videos.
5. I was set up by those bastards at Fox News.
4. Like you've never gone to the bathroom and had it broadcast on national television.
3. I just wanted that hunky Lou Dobbs to notice me.
2. OK, so I was drunk and I couldn't think straight.
1. You have to admit, it made the speech a lot more interesting. AN OCCASIONAL SERIES ON GOLFING WITH THE STARS
Copyright 2006 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
