Rachel Heck has always had a complicated relationship with golf.
It has brought her joy, purpose, stardom, injury, misery, redemption, opportunity. Now, finally, at age 23, Heck has found the most elusive thing of all: contentment.
These days golf is merely a pleasant diversion for a young woman of myriad talents. An analyst at KKR (the behemoth private equity firm) and second lieutenant in the Air Force, Heck recently made a cameo at the Augusta National Women's Amateur. She arrived in Georgia with a very uncharacteristic lightness of being.
“It’s so rare to go to a tournament with truly no pressure on my shoulders, no expectations,” Heck says. “For the past four years—really my whole life—I’ve wanted to win every tournament I entered. In some ways it was expected. But now I’m in a totally new stage of life and I’m enjoying the game in a different way and grateful just to have the opportunity to compete.”
Heck grew up in Memphis in a golfing family. Her older sister Abby would graduate from Notre Dame with the third-best career stroke average in program history. Younger sister Anna would win a high school state title and is now playing for the Fighting Irish. The Heck girls pushed and prodded each other and Rachel took the family success to an entirely different level: As a high school freshman, she won the Tennessee state open by a Tiger-like 15 strokes. She would go on to become a two-time national Player of the Year. But even amid such dominance Heck had metaphysical stirrings.
A back injury sidelined her for a stretch during her senior year of high school and she felt lost without golf. “Since I was 3 years old, I said I was going to be a professional golfer,” she later told Golf Magazine. “I wanted to find something away from golf, something that felt like my own. Golf is so individual, so I thought, What’s the opposite of that? What’s something where I’m a small part of something so much bigger than myself?“
She decided to join the Air Force ROTC, complicating her life as a freshman at Stanford. Yet Heck became just the third woman in NCAA history to sweep the postseason by winning the conference, regional and national individual tournaments. Well-spoken and with a girl-next-door appeal, Heck made a killing in the burgeoning NIL marketplace.
But superstardom turned out to be more challenging than she could have imagined. Heck’s sophomore year was abridged by mononucleosis—she still won twice—and her junior mostly wiped out by mysterious pain that was ultimately diagnosed as thoracic outlet syndrome, a condition in which nerves or blood vessels between the neck and shoulder are compressed. Like Cher and the biblical Adam, she had a rib removed, which she still totes around in a test tube as a macabre keepsake.
Nearing the end of her senior season in 2024, Heck was leaning toward not turning pro. All that was missing was a happy ending and it finally came when Heck holed the clinching putt to give Stanford the national championship. She ran into her teammates’ arms and an unlimited future.
During the long days at the Stanford practice facility, Heck became friendly with a donor named George Roberts, who is the R in KKR. That relationship led to an internship and ultimately a job offer as an analyst on the global client solutions team. Heck advises KKR’s institutional clients on their portfolio, working on the 50th floor of an office building in downtown San Francisco. Over the winter she took a short leave to attend the Air Force’s Defense Information School. She graduated as Second Lt. Heck. As a reservist she will have to serve for a couple weeks each year as a public affairs officer.
Heck is still figuring out where golf fits into her new life. She is looking forward to joining the Air Force golf team and is already a sought-after ringer for company scrambles. She hopes to play a handful of NCGA and USGA events each year; if Heck makes time for even a little practice, she figures to be a force on the amateur circuit for the foreseeable future.
But for now Heck has a modest goal: “I need to play more so I can get a tan,” she says. “My whole life I’ve been out in the sun playing golf but now I’m pale like every other office stiff.”