The LPGA season officially began this weekend in Orlando, with the world’s best women golfers all congregating at Tranquilo Golf Course for the inaugural Diamond Resorts Tournament of Champions.
For one of the 26 competitors, Pernilla Lindberg, she didn’t have to travel far to get there.
- Pernilla Lindberg has called Orlando home for the last 7 years
- Lindberg won the ANA Inspiration last March, in 8-hole playoff
- Lindberg and Daniel Taylor are set to get married at the end of January
Daniel Taylor and Pernilla Lindberg are traveling the world together; whether it’s climbing the Great Wall of China or posing inside the Olympic rings in Rio de Janiero. The two’s relationship is interwoven with a ton of international adventures.
“We met quite a while ago now, in 2009 at Q-School for the European Tour in Spain,” Taylor said of first meeting Pernilla.
“I was caddying for another player at the time and Pernilla was playing herself and we ended up being pair together in the last rounds. At the end of the week I actually asked her if she needed a caddy …it seemed like a good excuse to stay in contact.”
Daniel and Pernilla ended up working together for her first six years on the tour and falling in love along the way.
“A caddy-player relationship to start off with is, you spend a lot of time together, and there’s a pretty intense atmosphere our there as you are in a competitive setting,” Lindberg explained of the relationship. “So when you throw in the extra emotion of us actually being a couple obviously it gets extra intense.”
A partnership they’ve mastered. But when the golf bag is packed up, it’s home life that kicks in. And for the couple who met in Spain, started dating in Slovakia, they get to call downtown Orlando home.
“Daniel convinced me to come down here and the only thing that I really knew about Orlando at the time was kind of Disney, International drive and kind of the touristy areas, but once he showed be downtown and Winter Park I was sold,” Lindberg said.
And it helps that you can play year round on the golf course and mix in big city living.
“We love just being able to walk around the lake, go outside your door and walk the lake, pop out for a coffee,” Taylor said of living in downtown.
“Being from Europe that is a common thing, not having to drive places so being downtown –it feels like one of the only cities in the U.S. that we’ve been to where you can really do that.”
This week the two began another season on the LPGA Tour, albeit Daniel is on a different bag this year (Ariya Jutanugarn), but for the first time the two didn’t need to pack up a suitcase to play.
“I haven’t played a tournament on the professional level where I’ve actually slept in my own bed,” Lindberg said. “So it’s going to feel a bit different to wake up in the morning and head to a tournament from home.”
And that’s what she did for the Diamonds Resorts Tournament of Champions in Lake Buena Vista.
To qualify, she had to get a win on the tour in 2018, which for Pernilla came last March in California, at the ANA Inspiration. It was a 8-hole playoff victory alongside Daniel.
“All the hard work finally paid off and to be able to do it with Daniel on the bag was just it meant so much,” Lindberg said of the win.
“Obviously that win –it would have meant a lot even if I had had a different caddy but it made it a special moment being able to share it after all the hard work we put in together.”
And while the lifestyle they’ve created is alluring, it’s a lot of hard work being on the road for 35 weeks a year.
“It helps so much that we have each other out on the road. I think it would be a completely different situation let’s say if Daniel had a job here at home in Florida and I was out on the road all those weeks by myself that would be just way to hard but I am very –we both are very lucky in that aspect that we have each other and now we get to travel the world together,” Lindberg added.
The two are getting married at the end of January and will pick up the LPGA Tour in February at the VIC Open in Australia.