Tee Time in Tonga: How golf found Karen Darrington where she least expected it

by Shane René, IGA Administrator of Media & Communications

After Karen Darrington stumbled into golf as a freshman at Brigham Young University, happily shrugging at an invitation to try out for the women’s golf team, the life in the game ahead of her might have read like a fairy tale.

Then, in 2023, Idaho’s most decorated amateur golfer left her clubs behind to spend 18 months on the other side of the world.

“I didn’t even check to see if they had a golf course,” she said. “Then when we got here, driving away from the airport, we drove right by it.”

Tonga Golf Club has been Darrington’s home course for more than a year now, making her the only living member of the Idaho Golf Hall of Fame to hold a season pass at a golf course that routinely uses rakes and rebar for flagsticks. Cups are changed just a couple times each year. There is no irrigation. She paid $65 for the season.

But Darrington, of Boise, isn’t on a golf vacation. She went to the Kingdom of Tonga, a series of 170 islands due east of Australia, to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, emerging from a two-year retirement to work as a dental hygienist. She says she’s the first hygienist the island has ever had. And her clinic serves people from other South Pacific islands, where healthcare is a luxury.

“Last week, we had 30 young adults from Papua New Guinea come and they had never been to a dentist, they only have one or two changes of clothing, they don’t have showers in their homes,” Darrington said. “We made a partial denture for a girl, because she didn’t have any front teeth, and she just started crying – she just couldn’t believe it. She’s got teeth now. She can smile.”

Taken by how little this girl had, Darrington invited her into her home and gave her some clothes out of her own closet. The girl, she said, was overwhelmed by the gifts.

“I have so many blessings,” she said.

“What are your blessings?” Darrington asked.

“My mother bought me this suitcase so I could come over here.”   

Darrington says she told her husband, Phil, that she wanted to do something humanitarian when they began looking into mission opportunities almost two years ago. After a phone call with a friend who had connections with a couple schools with dental clinics in Tonga and Samoa, they seemed to be circling a perfect opportunity.

It would mean that she would be inducted in absentia with the inaugural class into the Idaho Golf Hall of Fame, but she felt she had to go.

“Karen is God sent!” said Maggie and Finau Puloka, who moved back to the Island from Seattle three years ago and recently started a junior golf program. “She was here when we started the golf program for the kids, and helped in everything we needed. Karen not only coached, mentored, and provided snacks, she also gave them health tips.”

Finau was one of the first people Darrington played with at Tonga Golf Club, along with his friend, Neil Armstrong (a non-astronaut Tongan). Armstrong, looking at the tattered set of rentals Darrington was using, told her that he had clubs for her to keep for her stay.

Golf equipment for kids is especially rare; so, Darrington got in touch with a friend who volunteers for First Tee Arizona, getting him to ship boxes of youth clubs, wiffle balls, and other equipment to Seattle, from where Maggie and Finau brought them to the island. Maggie took it upon herself to purchase uniforms – red polo shirts and khaki shorts – for the kids to wear during clinics. She says they need more resources if they want to keep serving more kids.

Once a plantation – and then a horse track before being converted into a golf course in the 1960s – Tonga Golf Club does not have a practice area. The 10-30 kids who show up for clinics will split up with a few instructors across a few of the club’s nine holes and learn the basics. Darrington has been surprised at the natural ability some of these kids have, and her heart aches for how limited the opportunities are to play for the country’s youth.

“There is a big rugby field right where we live and I was just out hitting balls and some little neighborhood kids saw me and came over and they just sat down because they were just fascinated to know what I was doing,” Darrington said. “Pretty soon it was like the Pied Piper; all of a sudden, these kids started coming out of the woodwork.”

Darrington will return to Idaho in April and intends to play in her usual slate of state championships this summer. But the last 18 months of her golf life, set against the backdrop of grinding poverty and some of the world’s most at-risk communities, has reframed what the game means to her. And it’s something she’s still trying to wrap her head around.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” she said. “I still want to play, but it’s just like, it’s not at the top of my list. I’m going to be thinking, I should be doing something else other than fiddling around, sitting in my hot tub or playing golf or going shopping, because for a year and a half it’s just been so different. We just take so many things for granted.”