If Johnson had not been swinging a stick near his apartment on the perimeter of the Haliman Golf Course in Tallahassee, Fla., in 2007, Jan Auger would never have noticed him.
She crossed a couple of fairways to greet the kid.
She asked Johnson why he wasn’t in school, he fibbed that he was home-schooled. He had, in fact, dropped out in the eighth grade. He lived by the golf course in a two-bedroom apartment with his mother, grandmother and five other kids. He was a former standout baseball player but gave it up when he couldn’t afford to keep up with his buddies in travel ball. Before meeting Auger, Johnson played exactly one round of golf with a friend and his dad.
He’d never spent any time of any kind with his own father.
Sensing something special in the boy, Auger invited him to the course and told him there’d be a 9-iron and bucket of balls waiting for him. He soon showed up at the course, and there he found a literal second home—and something more valuable than that. He found a life.
“Golf saved me,” Johnson said. “It gave me a reason to live, gave me a purpose.”
Kamaiu plays mini-tour events and also on the Advocates Pro Golf Association Tour.
Established in 2010, the APGA Tour is a non-profit organization with the mission to prepare African Americans and other minority golfers to compete and win at the highest level of professional golf, both on tour and in the golf industry through hosting professional tournaments, career development and mentoring sessions.
He had several successes on the APGA Tour, including five straight top-10s and winning the APGA Tour Championship in September.
A year ago, Farmers Insurance President and CEO Jeff Dailey heard Kamaiu telling his story to a group of reporters at Torrey Pines, where the APGA played a concurrent event on the North Course on the Saturday of the PGA Tour’s Farmers Open.
Dailey was awestruck. “Here is a well-spoken guy who seems like a good human being, a good golfer, and he’s never gotten a break at all,” Dailey said.
A couple months later, Farmers signed Johnson to an endorsement deal that is paying him $25,000 annually for two years. Dailey also introduced the golfer to Bill Powers, co-founder of Cambridge Mobile Telematics, a data analysis firm that works with insurance companies. Powers pledged another $20,000 per year for Johnson.
Then came the Webex call Johnson got in November. He’d captured the APGA Tour Championship.
Johnson was told that Dailey wanted to congratulate him. They got on the video call, and that’s when the CEO informed Johnson he’d been chosen for an exemption into the 2021 Farmers at Torrey Pines. It would be his first shot in golf’s big leagues.
One of the first people Johnson called with the news was Ramon Alexander, who served as a mentor and “big brother” to the boy in his teenage years. Now a member of the Florida House of Representatives, Alexander welcomed Kamaiu to live with him in Tallahassee when his mother moved back to their tiny hometown of Madison, Fla.
By the time Kamaiu began living with Alexander at age 16, the golf course and those around it had provided plenty of life lessons. Alexander, a product of First Tee, founded a non-profit organization, Distinguished Young Gentlemen of America, which works with at-risk youth. Johnson enthusiastically participated, and the group funded the studies that eventually earned him his GED.
He could not play the Farmer’s due to a positive COVID test, but received exemptions into the ATT at Pebble Beach, Arnold Palmer at Bay Hill and now The Honda Classic.
More good things have come along.
Johnson received his first formal club-fitting by Titleist after playing all these years with off-the-rack equipment.
