[ad_1]
He was wearing shades of pink, not his trademark orange. But Kenyatta Johnson had no trouble recognizing Rickie Fowler when he surprised the woman he called his “fellow Olympian” with a video message on Tuesday.
“Keep crushing it out there,” Fowler told her. “Love seeing what you do.”
Fowler taped the video for Johnson, who won the gold medal in golf at the 2011 Special Olympics Summer Games in Athens, Greece, during a break in his preparations for the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard. He’s sending her some autographed tournament-themed Cobra and Puma gear, too.
“I was really surprised,” Johnson says with an infectious smile shortly after viewing Fowler’s message. “I was shocked.”
The 42-year-old Johnson has been a Special Olympics athlete for nearly 30 years. Early on, she competed in track and field, basketball, bowling, soccer and even speed skating. Now, Johnson concentrates on golf and tennis, as well as coaching younger athletes in some of those other sports she once played.
Along the way, Johnson has participated in World Games in Raleigh, North Carolina (1999), Athens and Abu Dhabi (2019). The gold medal victory in Greece was particularly satisfying for Johnson, who trailed Australian Amanda Patterson by five strokes entering the final round and won by nine.
“I was nervous,” says Johnson, who’s a big fan of Michelle Wie West and now, Fowler, who was a member of the 2016 U.S. Olympic Team in Rio de Janeiro. “So, the last round, I said just shoot, just shoot. I was just calm when the last hole came. OK, I think I got it. So, I just shot the ball in the hole. And oh, I actually did win it.”
Johnson first signed up for Special Olympics, which serves children and adults with intellectual and physical disabilities, when she was 13. She remembers that as a kid “I never talked, so I guess back then they thought something was wrong with me because I never really spoke.”
Taking that leap of faith and putting herself out there, though, wasn’t easy for Johnson.
“At first I was nervous, you know, because back then you go to school, they’d be like, oh, you do Special Olympics, or you know, the r-word,” Johnson says. “So first I was kind of scared, but I tried that anyway.
“A couple of years later, I think, I went to my first Florida Games and then that’s when I said, wow, I could actually be myself, especially I don’t have to hide.”
[ad_2]
Source: PGA tour
