'A warrior,' on the course and off

Missy Farr-Kaye has been weaving her way through her life for nearly an hour, talking about her late sister, Heather Farr, her own bouts of breast and colon cancer, coaching the Arizona State University women’s golf program and the 2017 national championship team.

There is tragedy and triumph in her words. She smiles and cries, the memories still vivid. She laughs when she tells the story of how her great-grandmother’s 1899 diploma from the Normal School of Arizona helped her become ASU’s coach, and through the telling she leans into a philosophy that has guided her through all of it.

“You don’t know what you can do until you have to,” Farr-Kaye says. “And then when you have to, you do it.”

Long before Heather Farr would become an All-American golfer at ASU and be inducted into the Sun Devils’ Hall of Fame in 1990, and long before Farr-Kaye won national championships as a player (1990), assistant coach (2009) and head coach (2017) — the only individual in the history of collegiate golf to accomplish that feat — the two sisters spent countless hours at Papago Golf Course under the watchful eye of their father, Jerry.

Missy, three years younger, naturally looked up to her older sister. They were extremely close, the way siblings can be, and also had knock-down fights, the way siblings do.

“I realized at a very young age that she was stronger than me,” Farr-Kaye says. “She might have hit me a few times and left a couple of bruises. So I would yell at her and then run.”

Farr-Kaye admired everything about Heather. The way she swung a golf club. The way she could walk into a room and people would just flock to her. Farr-Kaye, on the other hand, was an introvert, comfortable in her sister’s shadow.

“If she had a skirt, I would have tucked in behind it,” Farr-Kaye says.

She did just that, following Heather to Xavier College Preparatory, a private, all-girls Catholic school in Phoenix, where they both won state championships.

By her senior year, with Heather off to ASU, Farr-Kaye had discovered her own identity. The sense of self was empowering, so much so that for a moment Farr-Kaye thought about playing collegiate golf at the University of Arizona. She even took a recruiting trip there, much to Heather’s chagrin.

“When she found out, she about killed me,” Farr-Kaye says. “I was like, ‘Hey, maybe it’s the right place for me.’ She was like, ‘OK, whatever.’ She really had to control herself. And I went down there, and I was miserable the whole time. I remember coming back and saying to Heather, ‘I didn’t like it.’ And she was like, ‘I told you.’”

As Heather turned pro on the LPGA Tour, Farr-Kaye continued to hone her skills at ASU, with an eye, again, on following her sister.

Then, in the summer before Farr-Kaye’s senior year, Heather was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“My entire world,” Farr-Kaye says, “fell off its axis.”

Heather left the tour and returned home. She endured experimental treatments in Los Angeles while Farr-Kaye went through LPGA qualifying school and turned pro. Then came a bone marrow transplant in Denver.

Farr-Kaye talked to her sister as often as she could while on the road, but there were no cellphones or FaceTime conversations back then.

Finally, she decided it was more important to be at home, supporting Heather.

Golf, their shared love for so many years, became an afterthought.

“When Heather was so sick, the last thing we did was go to golf courses,” Farr-Kaye says. “I didn’t walk on a golf course for at least two years. We would go to the mall, or we’d go to a movie, things like that. That was all she could do.”

Heather died in November 1993. Farr-Kaye was 25 years old and had just started her own family.

“So I’m trying to figure out how to be a mom and how to do all that, and it was a really rough time for my parents, so I’m trying to make sure they’re OK,” Farr-Kaye says. “My whole world really changed because I had never been responsible for anybody else. Now I have a baby. Now I have parents that I’m worried about. It was a really, really tough time.”

A couple of years passed. Farr-Kaye had a second son. One day, her father said to her, “Let’s go hit some balls.”

On the driving range, it hit her. She missed the game.

“It had been a long time since I had thought about golf,” she says. “So I started playing. It gave me that haven I needed again.”

After Heather died, doctors told Farr-Kaye she should have annual mammograms. Farr-Kaye wasn’t concerned. She was convinced Heather’s breast cancer was a “one-off” and would never happen to her.

But when she was 30 years old, a second mammogram revealed precancerous cells. Farr-Kaye had a double mastectomy. Doctors told her they didn’t need to do anything else and that she would be fine.

Ten years later, at the age of 40, Farr-Kaye felt a lump under her armpit. The radiologist, who was a friend, said, “I think you need to prepare yourself.”

It was breast cancer. 

“Now we’re talking about survival,” Farr-Kaye says.

Farr-Kaye thought about Heather. About how she fought cancer. About how she would get sad or angry but never gave up. Farr-Kaye told the doctor, “This is how I roll: Throw everything you got at me. Throw the kitchen sink at me. Just don’t kill me.”

Eighteen months of chemotherapy followed. One day, she felt fine. The next day, she couldn’t walk to the end of her driveway. She lost her hair, but hated the wigs she tried on, so she wore scarves around her head. She refused to let anyone take a picture of her bald head.

But she survived. Then it hit her again.

In the fall of 2020, Farr-Kaye had a colonoscopy. When she woke from the procedure and the doctor was standing over her, she knew from her experience with Heather and her own bouts with breast cancer that the news wasn’t good. Doctors, she said, don’t unexpectedly show up at your bedside to tell you you’re not sick.

“I don’t think it’s cancer,” the doctor told Farr-Kaye, “but you have a growth in your colon that I couldn’t take out.”

A week later, the doctor called her. 

“He said, ‘I’m quite shocked, but it’s malignant, and I need you to come in today,’” Farr-Kaye recalls. “I was like, ‘My world, it just keeps flipping again.’”

Surgery was performed a week later, and, again, Farr-Kaye underwent chemotherapy, this time for four months. But she didn’t skip a tournament ASU was competing in, and she told only a few people how her body had again betrayed her.

“I was like, ‘If I think I’m OK, then everybody around me is going to be OK,’” says Farr-Kaye, whose cancer has been in remission for nearly five years.

Former ASU athletic administrator Don Bocchi, who oversaw the women’s golf program, calls Farr-Kaye “one of the toughest people that I know."

“I can’t think of anybody tougher,” Bocchi says. “And she handles those things with so much grace. It’s remarkable.”

Longtime ASU coach Linda Vollstedt, who retired in 2001, describes Farr-Kaye in a simple but meaningful way: “She’s a warrior.”

Farr-Kaye is the longest-tenured female coach in the ASU athletic department and the only current coach to have won an NCAA title; the women’s golf team has reached seven of the last eight NCAA championship tournaments under her guidance.

“People talk about great coaches at ASU. She’s one of the great coaches,” Bocchi said. “You don’t win a national championship and not be a great coach.”

And to think, Bocchi had to push Farr-Kaye to become an assistant coach in 2002. 

Farr-Kaye was concerned the job would take too much time away from her family — “I just wanted to be a mom. That’s really important to me,” she says — but Bocchi pointed out that other female coaches at ASU, including then-women’s basketball coach Charli Turner Thorne, were able to balance their responsibilities.

“I was like, ‘OK, maybe I can do this a little bit,’” Farr-Kaye says. “Let’s take this part-time gig and see how it works out.”

Farr-Kaye remembers the exact moment that uncertainty vanished. She was having trouble connecting with a student, and couldn’t figure out why the student was being so snarky to her. Then, one day during the 2002 season, Farr-Kaye was trying to help the student with her game.

“You’re better than this,” Farr-Kaye told her.

“And she finally listened,” Farr-Kaye says. “She said thank you, and a light went on in my head. I felt the same way as when I had kids. I was meant to be a mom. And I knew then I was meant to be a coach.”

Thirteen years later, when the opportunity to become head coach came up, Farr-Kaye didn’t need to be convinced. Her youngest son, Cameron, was 21, so her days of being a full-time mother were over. She loved the program and bled maroon and gold. 

It was time.

Farr-Kaye left nothing to chance. Before her interview with then-athletic director Ray Anderson, she went to Kinko’s and put together a six-page bound document detailing her coaching philosophies. She also brought two diplomas to the interview: Her own, and the 1899 diploma her great-grandmother Minnie Adeline Perry had received from the Normal School of Arizona, which went through several name changes before becoming Arizona State University in 1958.

“You know, my roots are pretty deep here,” Farr-Kaye told Anderson.

The job was hers.

Two years later, she led ASU to the national championship.

Monica Vaughn, a member of that team and the individual NCAA champion in 2017, said Farr-Kaye’s personal story inspired the Sun Devils.

“Here is our coach who is just like this bad-ass woman who has been through so much and faced so much adversity and had to deal with so much in her life,” Vaughn said. “If she can go through that, we can kick ourselves in the butt and do what we know we need to do to get this done.

“We wanted to win for us, but we wanted to win for her, too.”

Farr-Kaye is 57 years old. She’s thought about retirement, but she’s having too much fun to quit now.

“This job invigorates me on a continual basis,” she says. “And I’m a bit of a double nerd. I’m a golf nerd, which is no longer as much of a nerd as it was a long time ago. It’s a cool sport now.

“And I’m a coaching nerd. I’m a student of coaching, and I still learn so much from all the coaches here at ASU."

So she flies all over the country to recruit, and spends hours and hours on the driving range with her players, and reads self-help books in order to become a better coach and, wouldn’t you know it, that little girl who was content to tuck behind her sister’s skirt is, as Vaughn put it, one “bad-ass woman.”

Her life now — as a coach, a mother, with every decision she makes and everything she does — goes back to those 20 words: “You don’t know what you can do until you have to. And then when you have to, you do it.”