Natasha Oon made it to Boston for the FM Championship. Her golf clubs did not. Just three days before teeing it up, the LPGA rookie was left chasing an airline for the equipment her livelihood depends on.
“I didn’t think it was gonna happen, but it happened,” Oon said on Instagram. “I took a flight, and guess who didn’t make it? My golf bag.” She summed up the chaos in the video caption: “kind of in shock atp lol.”
Oon used a tracker she’d placed inside her bag and found it was still sitting near Edmonton, at an airport-adjacent location in Leduc County, nowhere close to Boston. And this was no throwaway week. Oon was headed to the FM Championship at TPC Boston in Norton.
With little she could do about the missing bag, Oon chose to enjoy the moment. Her friend and social media manager joked, “I didn’t want my bag anyway,” before Oon treated herself to “a lobster roll and a clam chowder, baby.” She then spent some downtime with Ryan while waiting for an update.
Then came the rescue. Ford helped Oon get around tournament week, while PING’s tour truck built her a replacement set on the spot. “I literally got to play the practice round with the same clubs, even when my bag wasn’t here,” she said.
Oon played her practice round with the replacement clubs, and later, her original golf bag finally arrived. Suddenly, she had two sets to choose from and laughed, “I don’t know which set to use.”
For LPGA players, a missing golf bag has become an all-too-familiar airline horror story.
Danielle Kang went through it before the 2023 Solheim Cup in Spain, when her clubs missed a connection in Amsterdam and she had to rely on backup sets while her captain and sponsors scrambled to help.
Leona Maguire faced the same chaos before the 2022 Evian Championship, with her clubs disappearing on a direct flight from Dublin to Geneva before eventually being found.
And at the 2019 Solheim Cup, Angel Yin arrived in Scotland without her clubs, missed a practice session, and had to walk the course club-free before her bag was finally returned two days later.
So Oon’s ordeal was hardly unusual, but the timing still made it brutal.
She was heading into the FM Championship, a $4.4 million event with a 144-player field featuring World No. 1 Nelly Korda and Jeeno Thitikul. It was also the final LPGA stop before the Solheim Cup in the Netherlands.
With the club chaos over, Oon had another problem: the leaderboard.
Natasha Oon Is Fighting More Than Just the Cut Line
Natasha Oon opened the FM Championship with a 4-over 76, leaving her T108 after the first round. She sits 12 shots behind leader Sei Young Kim, who opened with an 8-under 64.
Oon is scheduled to begin her second round at 2:11 p.m., with plenty of work to do to climb back toward the cut line. But for Oon, simply being back in this position has already taken a long road.
Her LPGA journey had been anything but smooth. After a strong 2023 Epson Tour season, where she recorded eight top-10 finishes and won the Murphy USA El Dorado Shootout, she earned her LPGA Tour card for 2024.
Then everything stopped. A sesamoid injury in her foot sidelined Oon for nearly two full seasons, delaying the rookie campaign she had worked so hard to earn.
She finally returned to competitive golf in March 2026 at the Epson Tour season opener in Florida. In one of her first competitive rounds back, Oon shot a 3-under 68 and admitted that simply getting back into tournament golf had been overwhelming after such a long layoff.
Her long-awaited LPGA member debut came later at the Fortinet Founders Cup. By then, Oon was approaching the season with a different mindset, saying she simply wanted to enjoy the opportunity after coming so close to wondering whether her LPGA career would ever really begin.