O’Neal played on the then-fledgling Symetra Tour, then joined TV’s “School of Golf” show in 2015.
Blair O’Neal had a successful youth golf career that included highlights such as winning the 1997 Arizona Junior Golf Association Ping Phoenix Junior Championship, being a member of the 1997 U.S Junior Ryder Cup Matches and the AJGA West Canon Cup Team, and playing for the Arizona State golf team. Twice she was NCAA long-drive champion.
What helped O’Neal get back into golf was a chance to appear twice on the Golf Channel’s Big Break. She finished second at Prince Edward Island despite having only a month to prepare. She won in the Dominican Republic. She played on the then-fledgling Symetra Tour, which began in 2004, then joined the network’s “School of Golf” show in 2015.
A participant in the 2024 Tournament of Champions, O’Neal made headlines in the 2020 edition of the event when she played while six months pregnant. She finished sixth, playing from the same set of tees as the men.
“I figured it would be a really cool experience to be able to look back on and say that I did it with my little baby,” she said with a smile that lit up the Four Seasons Orlando.
Her first son, Chrome, was born later in 2020 and she had a second son, Canon, in 2022.
Aside from making regular appearances on Golf Channel, O’Neal has played in numerous celebrity golf tournaments and has been a popular influencer with more than a half-million Instagram followers.
Blair O’Neal, due to have a second son in December, plans to compete in the LPGA’s Tournament of Champions.
There’s been a lot of mom talk on the LPGA of late, and at the season-opening Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions, that extends to the celebrity division, where Blair O’Neal plans to compete for the first time as a mother of two.
O’Neal, who is due to have her second son Dec. 3, plans to compete Jan. 19-22 at Lake Nona Golf and Country Club in Orlando. The event brings together LPGA winners and 50 celebrities, with former pro athletes including Major League Baseball stars John Smoltz, Roger Clemens and Justin Verlander, NFL Hall of Famer Marcus Allen and country music stars Toby Keith and Lee Brice.
Danielle Kang won the 2022 edition by three strokes over Brooke Henderson.
For a while, O’Neal was the only woman who competed in the celebrity division of the TOC until LPGA Hall of Famer Annika Sorenstam, another mother of two, started playing a couple years ago. Sorenstam lost in a playoff last January to former MLB pitcher Derek Lowe.
O’Neal, 41, played collegiate golf at Arizona State and started a modeling career after college. In 2010, she won the Golf Channel’s Big Break Dominican Republic and then played on the then-Symetra Tour for several seasons before joining the “School of Golf” show in 2015.
In 2020, O’Neal competed in the TOC while six months pregnant with son Chrome and finished sixth, playing from the same set of tees as the men.
Blair O’Neal reports that son Chrome is obsessed with golf. (courtesy photo)
For O’Neal and husband Jeff Keiser, growing their family has been a challenge. It took several years for O’Neal to get pregnant with Chrome, undergoing six IUI (intrauterine insemination) procedures before finding success.
This time around, after a series of three IUI procedures, the couple decided to undergo IVF last spring. After the first embryo transfer failed to implant, O’Neal fell ill with West Nile virus last fall.
“I thought I was dying,” she said, “It was awful.”
After O’Neal recovered, the couple was down to their last frozen embryo.
“We had to become OK with the fact that if it didn’t work, that it was alright,” said O’Neal. “That was just the path that we were supposed to be on. I feel like once we got to that point and didn’t expect everything just to work out perfectly, it made us a little bit calmer, made us little bit happier through the process, that it was going to be OK.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 in 5 women in the United States with no prior births struggle with infertility, though it’s a subject that’s not often talked about.
O’Neal said they didn’t tell anyone in their families about fertility treatments that first time around.
“I get it when people don’t talk about it,” said O’Neal, “because it’s just so sensitive and you don’t want to have to explain yourself all the time when it doesn’t work. It’s just like delivering bad news when you’re already handling it yourself.”
When she did get pregnant, O’Neal shared the good news on social media. The ugly comments and body shaming that followed, however, was the worst she’d ever experienced on social platforms. O’Neal said she has shared less this time around, “just because, who wants that?”
She reports that son Chrome is obsessed with golf. His simple mantra “see ball, see hole” would serve most well.
This week, O’Neal will be on hand to host HGV’s Viva! Las Vegas member pro-am Sept. 19-20 at Bali Hai Golf Club. O’Neal, who already has her “School of Golf” shows taped for the rest of the year, always envisioned herself as a working mom.
At the TOC in Orlando, organizers have announced a three-night private concert series that will include En Vogue, Grammy-winning country-pop star Maren Morris, pop star Ellie Goulding and Paris Hilton.
“I’m going to do everything in my power to be there,” said O’Neal of the LPGA’s biggest party.
New mom Blair O’Neal will compete for the first time since giving birth to her first child at the LPGA Diamond Resorts.
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Florida – It’s a week of firsts for Blair O’Neal at the Diamond Resorts Tournament of Champions. First time competing since giving birth to son Chrome last April. First time traveling as a family of three.
“He’s been a rock star,” O’Neal said of nine-month-old Chrome. “I was the one who was a wreck.”
Typically, O’Neal, 39, is the only woman in the celebrity division of the TOC and last year. While competing six months pregnant, she finished sixth playing from the same set of tees as the men. Hall of Fame pitcher John Smoltz has won the celebrity title the past two years.
“My belly was so big,” she said, laughing. “I look back and I’m like I can’t believe I played that many rounds and played as well as I did, and how big I was and how pregnant I was.”
This year, O’Neal is joined by LPGA Hall of Famer Annika Sorenstam, a fellow Diamond Resorts ambassador. The pair talked about motherhood during Tuesday’s pro-am party. Sorenstam, a mother of two, started her family after retiring from the tour in 2008.
O’Neal, a former Symetra Tour player turned model and TV personality, said she has played less golf since giving birth to Chrome than she did while she was pregnant. She’s taking it in stride, noting that a top-10 finish at Tranquilo Golf Club is always a good goal for this week. Her work on Golf Channel’s “School of Golf” sometimes comes in handy too.
“Out here on the golf course today I hit a sand shot and I had a crazy lie, plugged a little bit,” said O’Neal. “I said to my caddie, my husband, ‘Oh, we did a tip on this shot yesterday! This is good.’”
Photo courtesy of Blair O’Neal
With O’Neal’s husband, Jeff Keiser, on the bag again this week her sister and fiancé are looking after Chrome.
Other playing moms in this week’s field include Brittany Lincicome and Stacy Lewis, who won for the first time as a mom last year at the Aberdeen Standard Investments Ladies Scottish Open.
“I definitely look up to all the women out on tour who are juggling both,” said the Arizona-based O’Neal. “Being a mom is a full-time job, and it does change your perspective on things. But I also think it can help you too. You want to do good for your baby and be a good role model for your kids. … You’re still the same person you were before you had that child. There’s just a lot more love in your life.”
Top golf news recapped: Driving Relief was a huge success, the PGA Tour details how to safety return and the LPGA pushes back its restart.
Live golf is finally back, the Tour details how it will safely resume play and the LPGA pushes its season restart once again.
Take a look at the week’s top stories on the latest episode of Golfweek Rewind featured below.
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Driving Relief
Live golf is back on TV. The team of Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson defeated Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff in TaylorMade Driving Relief, a charity match to benefit the COVID-19 relief effort at Seminole Golf Club. Next up is The Match: Champions for Charity at Medalist Golf Club this Sunday where Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson will be joined by Peyton Manning and Tom Brady.
Safe return
In a conference call and letter to Tour personnel, the PGA Tour outlined how it hopes to safely bring the game back in the era of COVID-19. Key points, players’ reactions and details on testing for Tour personnel can be found on our website.
LPGA pushes restart
The LPGA will not resume July 15-18 with the Dow Great Lakes Bay Invitational. The tour announced Friday the event was canceled, further pushing the tour’s return. The next event on the revised LPGA schedule is the Marathon LPGA Classic July 23-26 in Ohio.
For more news on the official hosts for the 2025 and 2030 PGA Championships and why a new mom is our Hero of the Week, watch the latest episode of Golfweek Rewind featured above.
Golf Channel’s Blair O’Neal gave birth to her son, Chrome, in the middle of a pandemic. She tells Golfweek about the highs and lows.
The “Stuck at Home With” series profiles players, caddies and staff in the women’s game who are making the most of an unprecedented break in tour life due to the coronavirus pandemic. New stories will be posted every Tuesday and Thursday.
Blair O’Neal delivered a baby boy during the height of a global pandemic.
Behind all those gorgeous and idyllic Instagram posts was a mom in full on stress mode, and who could blame her?
“Being so pregnant, you’re already pretty emotional because your hormones are going crazy,” said O’Neal of Golf Channel’s “School of Golf.”
“But with everything going on in the world and so many unknowns with COVID-19, it was pretty scary. Was I going to be able to have my husband in the delivery room with me?”
Surely she wouldn’t have to do this alone. Husband Jeff Keiser wasn’t even allowed in the room for the final ultrasound.
Mercifully, New York hospitals started allowing one guest into hospital rooms, paving the way for Arizona. The rule changed one week before Chrome Andy Keiser made his grand entrance on April 7 at 5:47 a.m., weighing 8 pounds, 1 ounce.
“It’s such a roller coaster,” O’Neal said of motherhood. “One hour things are going good, and the next you don’t know what happened.”
Blair O’Neal with husband Jeff Keiser and son Chrome Andy (Photo credit: Ryann Lindsay)
O’Neal, who turns 39 on May 14, had her baby shower one week before the U.S. started going into lockdown. With diapers and wipes on backorder, even getting the essentials has been worrisome.
“I think I’ve ordered over 300 newborn diapers over Amazon,” she said.
O’Neal put herself on strict quarantine before she gave birth and hasn’t been anywhere but the pediatrician’s office since. For a while, she said, Chrome must have the thought the world consisted entirely of two people, their house and the backyard.
Over the weekend, grandmas came over to meet Chrome for the first time, wearing masks. Everyone else has had to stick to FaceTime and Zoom. For great-grandparents, O’Neal prints out pictures and sends them in the mail.
“I know it’s not touching and smelling and feeling,” she said of the restrictions, but doctors and nurses had constantly stressed the need to isolate.
Being first-time parents with no help hasn’t been the easiest either.
“It’s been a wild ride to say the least,” she said.
O’Neal, a former Arizona State and Symetra Tour player who began a modeling career after college, already has an Instagram account for Chrome, though she has yet to post any photos to it. The couple brainstormed the baby’s unique name while on a road trip for New Year’s. They started shouting out different names – colors and metals – when Jeff looked down at the handle of the car and threw out Chrome.
O’Neal said less than 1 percent of babies in the world have the name, and that appealed to her. Chrome’s middle name, Andy, comes from Jeff’s late grandfather. O’Neal thought the combination of names was both strong and sweet.
Photo credit: Ryann Lindsay
Over the weekend, O’Neal enjoyed her longest stretch of sleep to date: five hours. They’ve been averaging between one to three hours. Since it’s not possible to bank sleep, O’Neal recommends that expecting moms take as many long showers as possible. Even five-minute showers are now a luxury, she said.
With Golf Channel re-airing “Big Break” episodes, O’Neal watched her victory from 10 years ago in the Dominican Republic. On Monday, Golf Channel re-aired the Prince Edward Island series marathon. She’d forgotten much of the drama.
In a way, the whole world has pressed pause right along with O’Neal’s maternity leave. She had a photographer come by to take a family portrait on the front porch from a safe distance.
“I feel like I want to baby-spam my whole page,” said O’Neal of her Instagram account, which has 545,000 followers.
“I try to keep it under control somewhat. No one loves your baby as much as you do.”
Click here to read more from the “Stuck at Home With” series.
O’Neal, 38, started a modeling career after college. In 2010, she won the Golf Channel’s Big Break Dominican Republic and then played on the Symetra Tour for several seasons before joining the “School of Golf” show in 2015.
O’Neal is married to Jeff Keiser, who works in finance at PetSmart’s corporate headquarters in Phoenix.
Blair O’Neal mapped out the bathrooms before she played the Diamond Resorts Tournament of Champions. That intel proved important.
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LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – For a little while at least, a woman who is six months pregnant led an otherwise all-male field packed with all-star athletes.
Blair O’Neal, 38, mapped out the bathrooms before she even played one hole at the Diamond Resorts Tournament of Champions. That intel proved important, maybe more important, than the whipping wind on Friday at Tranquilo Golf Club. Bathroom breaks come every half hour these days.
O’Neal ultimately finished the day in sixth place on the celebrity board, eight points behind a trio of players including John Smoltz, Chad Pfeifer and Mardy Fish. Smoltz, an MLB Hall of Famer, won this tournament in 2019. Pfeifer, an Iraq vet who lost his left leg in an IED explosion, picked up golf as a form of therapy. He called the game a lifesaver and will keep a grounded perspective as he battles to stay at the top.
“I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing,” said Pfeifer, “keep having fun, and keep playing golf. Nobody is trying to blow me up or shoot at me, so life’s pretty good.”
Inspiration abounds here at Tranquilo Golf Club, where Hall of Famers pepper the tee sheet.
O’Neal, who played at Arizona State, is a former Symetra Tour player turned model and TV personality. This week is a family affair for O’Neal as she has husband Jeff Keiser on the bag.
Keiser works in finance at PetSmart’s corporate headquarters in Phoenix, so numbers are his thing. But this week he’s also in charge of making sure his wife stays comfortable and rested.
Blair O’Neal at the 2020 Diamond Resorts Tournament of Champions in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. (Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images)
O’Neal could count on one hand the number of rounds she has played these past six months. She wasn’t sure how her lower back would take five rounds of golf. Little things like a sun umbrella, naps and on-course PB&J sandwiches are high on the priority list and could mean the difference in stamina over the weekend.
O’Neal is due to give birth to a boy on April 13, the Monday after the Masters. She taped several shows for Golf Channel’s “School of Golf” in Orlando ahead of the tournament and will film more before heading back home to Scottsdale, Arizona.
“Once I go into the clubhouse and eat and sit down,” said O’Neal, “that’s when it hits, and that’s when he starts kicking around. When I’m out there, he’s quiet and sleeping.”
Blair O’Neal says she feels strong and can’t wait to create a special memory inside ropes as the only female in the field’s celebrity division.
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – Blair O’Neal hasn’t played much golf since finding out that she’s pregnant. Morning sickness hit hard that first trimester. The pro-am round at the Diamond Resorts Tournament of Champions marked her sixth round in sixth months. Had the tournament been held just a few weeks later, she probably wouldn’t have played.
But the timing worked out. She feels strong and can’t wait to create a special memory inside ropes as the only female in the field’s celebrity division.
“I figured it would be a really cool experience to be able to look back on and say that I did it with my little baby,” she said with a smile that lit up the Four Seasons Orlando.
O’Neal, who lives in Arizona with husband Jeff Keiser, is due to give birth to a boy on April 13, the Monday after the Masters. She taped several of Golf Channel’s “School of Golf” shows with Martin Hall earlier this week and will tape more after the TOC so that they’ll be stocked up while she’s on maternity leave.
📢Yes, I’m competing in this weeks #DiamondLPGA tournament 6 months pregnant☺️… I think it will be really cool to look back on & know I did it w/ my baby boy. To answer some of the questions I’ve been getting click here——>>>>☺️🤰🏼🏌🏼♀️⛳️#27weeks 💙 —> https://t.co/iGHL7RUzorpic.twitter.com/zgdi0Rbyk3
“It’s funny because everyone thinks ‘Oh, that baby bump, it’s going to help you hit the ball farther.’ No, no, no,” said O’Neal. “That’s not how it works guys. It’s the opposite.”
Six months into her pregnancy, she’s about two clubs short.
O’Neal, 38, played collegiate golf at ASU and started a modeling career after college. In 2010, she won the Golf Channel’s Big Break Dominican Republic and then played on the Symetra Tour for several seasons for joining the “School of Golf” show in 2015.
She plans to take a few months off after welcoming her bundle joy. But then it’s back to work.
“I absolutely am coming back,” said O’Neal. “I’ll be a working mom, and I’m just going to figure out how to balance it. I love to work.”
High on the list this week at the Diamond Resorts is keeping stocked up on snacks and rest.
“To be really honest,” she said, “I have to know where all the restrooms are because I have to go to the bathroom like every 30 minutes. That’s real talk.”
