To A Tee: Life On The Fairway

DBGC coach and former golf pro Mimi Ho Miu-yee reflects on family, discipline and the unlikely joys of a game she loves playing far more than watching. Elizabeth Kerr reports

PHOTOGRAPHY BY Andrew Spires

Mimi Ho Miu-yee is sipping a drink at Coffee Academics looking, for lack of a better word, very golf-y, albeit in bright pink. Perhaps to no one’s shock, she’s just finished a round of golf, and lunch, with her dad and she’s in between coaching sessions. The Discovery Bay Golf Club coach and former pro begins with greetings on behalf of her mum, artist and past Around DB profile Judyanna Li, before reflecting on what took her to golf, a sport some call ‘a good walk, ruined’. Mimi chuckles, not taking it personally, and admits she can see where all those golf jokes come from.

“I don’t really watch golf movies. I don’t really watch that much golf,” she says, surprising herself. “On a list of sports I want to watch, golf would be last. When people say, ‘Oh, I love watching live golf,’ I say, ‘You’re joking right now.’ You’re literally fighting for a spot to see a sliver of a player 170 yards away. And then you bust your ass running to the next hole. If I do watch golf, it’s at home and I let the cameramen do their work.”

Mimi is relatively new to the DBGC coaching gig, but she knows the course like the back of her hand. She’s the sporty one of the family, having tried everything from tennis to tag rugby, and when she discovered the competitive nature of golf, she was hooked. She’s happy to mention her best game at the DBGC par 72 course, but her worst? “Let’s not go there,” she chuckles.

Mimi’s family (mum Li, older sister and construction entrepreneur dad Danny Ho), has been living in DB since its earliest days in the 1980s. Mimi started playing at seven when her parents took up the game, at the time when Tiger Woods was peaking and spurring broader interest in the sport. “Seven is late, by the way. Right now, I’m coaching some kids that are three. It’s amazing,” she says of golf’s appeal. “For us, golf became a family thing, and it has thankfully stayed that way. There’s actually a good sense of a community to golf; it’s very sociable. And as cheesy as it sounds, you do learn a lot from it. It keeps you humble; you meet a lot of different people in different stages of life.”

Mimi, just shy of 30, was raised in DB, and after demonstrating a natural aptitude for golf, she attended Discovery College on a full scholarship ( Year 9 to 13). Though the Kowloon school she started at was a good one, the local school system couldn’t support her travel for golf tournaments when her career really started to take off. “I was actually falling behind in school. I’m not wired that way, to do the work in that manner. My sister did really well in that system but international school was the right path for me.”

Mimi is almost wistful as she recalls her golf development days as a kid, journeying well over two hours to Hong Kong’s only public course, Kau Sai Chau in Sai Kung, to practise. Her dad would lug her golf bag through the MTR, and occasionally take her golf clothes to work with him and pick her up after school to hit at a driving range.

“My dad made a lot of big sacrifices,” she says. Sacrifices that ultimately paid off when Mimi won a full golf scholarship from California State University, Fresno, where she also completed a master’s degree in Sports Administration and certifications in golf biomechanics, elite coaching and kinesiology. “We’re not football players,” she cracks.

But Mimi credits her DB home town, where she still lives, as a critical factor in shaping her career. “The course at DBGC is a tricky one. It’s quite challenging. It’s slope-y, it’s mountainous. I think any golfers that come out of training there have a really good short game. There’s a saying, ‘You drive for show and you putt for dough.’ At the end of the day, you’ve got to get the ball into the hole and DB trains you to be a really good short game player. It was a perfect environment to get me where I am now.”

Which is a former HKGA Junior Squad member (at age 10), a national team member (12), and an NCAA Division 1 athlete. Mimi had intended to stay in California and work at the collegiate level until Covid derailed her plans but returning to Hong Kong brought new opportunities. She got licensed by the Hong Kong PGA, coached at the American Club for 18 months and, in 2021, finally decided to go pro.

“I still had that itch to play,” she recalls. “I played with friends that had turned pro and I was, like, 'Dude, I still have my game.’ So I just bit the bullet.” Mimi played on the women’s Thai, China and Taiwan tours until 2025.

Currently Mimi coaches at the DBGC and teaches after-school programmes for kids from kindergarten age to 16, every day. She’s also an advisor at ChipChipGolfHK, which runs junior development programmes around the city that are open to all ages and all skill levels, designed especially to provide beginners with a feel for the game. “That’s how it should be,” states Mimi of making golf more accessible. She understands the perception of the game in Hong Kong as a pastime for the ultra-wealthy and would like to see that change. Mimi has scads of tips for anyone considering taking up golf.

“First, I say do it. You can play it forever; you can play with knee pain. You can’t play basketball in your 60s. Well you could but it’s not going to be fun. You can make the game easier or harder; you can choose how athletic you want to be. And again, there’s that humility element. Most people are not humble enough.”

Mimi encourages trying out driving ranges, skipping the coach to start, playing mini golf and buying second-hand gear. “In Australia, anybody can play; you can literally get off work and just go in your jeans. When I was in college in California, we’d go to some public courses in sandals. I get the negative impressions golf leaves, and in Hong Kong it’s a business thing. But it’s a game. Make some mistakes. Have fun.”

When Mimi’s not at the gym or coaching, she’s probably firing up some horror or dystopian science fiction on her Kindle (current read: “crazy” splatter punk novel Blender Babies). And because golf is one of those games whose fans have robust bucket lists (think baseball fans coveting a game beside Boston’s ‘Green Monster’), Mimi has a couple of targets too…

“Augusta,” she says immediately. “My teammate in college played its first collegiate women’s invitational, and the second year I was supposed to go with her as an assistant coach. Then Covid,” she laments. “And St Andrews. My dad is an official rules tester and he told me it’s pretty cool, but also really flat,” she finishes. “But really, in the end, the wind might be different and the ball might roll weirdly, so I could play DBGC one million more times. It’s never the same and I don’t think I’d get bored.”

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