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With 3:50 showing on the first-half scoreboard clock on the night of February 23, 2021, action stopped at the Ferrell Center in Waco, Texas, for the obligatory under-four-minutes media timeout. The two teams retreated to their respective benches. Things were not going well for the home team. After a three-week pause because of COVID-19 issues, the Baylor men’s basketball team, undefeated, with 17 consecutive wins, trailed last-place Iowa State, 32-22, in a Big 12 Conference matchup. The smallish, pandemic-caused crowd of only 2,350 sat mostly silent.
From above the concourse, a student, dressed in a white Baylor pullover and blue jeans, had descended the stairs and walked toward the court. As the players huddled around Coach Scott Drew on the Bears’ bench, Baylor cheerleading captain Ashley Sivadon stood on the baseline attempting to muster support for the home team. A few feet away, Baylor Assistant Athletic Director David Kaye began putting things in motion.
Kaye had about three minutes before game action resumed, and everything was set. The plan Cooper Dossey conceived with Kaye was for public-address announcer Derek Smith to call out Sivadon’s name and invite her onto the court to receive an “award.” Sivadon heard her name, and somewhat confused, with no idea what was going on, made the short walk from the court’s baseline. From behind her strode Dossey, a member of the Baylor men’s golf team. He had an engagement ring in his pocket and a heart beating hard against his chest. Sivadon didn’t know Dossey was at the game, let alone right behind her, and she didn’t realize members of her family, Dossey’s family, her friends and his friends were all seated in the stands. This was definitely not shaping up as your regular TV timeout.
As Sivadon tentatively walked toward the scorer’s table, Dossey, in his white Baylor gear, surprised Sivadon, went to one knee and said, “Here’s your award” followed by “Will you marry me?” The crowd came alive.
“I don’t even know if Ashley really said ‘yes.’ She was kind of like, ‘What are you doing here?’” Dossey recalls. “She was pretty thrown off, but it was awesome. It was exactly what we wanted.” He slipped the ring on her finger. “I was totally glad that we came back and won that game too. That was the cherry on top.”
Final score: Baylor 77, Iowa State 72. Oh, and Ashley did say “yes.” Hugged and kissed him, too.
Una publicación compartida por Cooper Dossey (@cooperdossey)
Six weeks later, the Bears won their first hoops national championship at the same time Sivadon was getting used to adopting Dossey as a future last name and thinking about what life might look like as the wife of a professional golfer.
Dossey was going places, and he was taking Ashley with him. Since then, though, the couple’s path has been a bit circuitous.
Now, five months into their marriage after their February 2022 wedding, the Dosseys cherish the time they do get to spend together at their home in McKinney, Texas, as Cooper is playing his first season on PGA TOUR Canada, a place he hopes leads to his PGA TOUR membership. After three tournaments in Canada, Dossey is in solid position, No. 7 on the Fortinet Cup standings. The top-five Fortinet Cup players at season’s end earn 2023 Korn Ferry Tour membership.
“From the moment we started dating, Cooper had made it very evident that he wanted to pursue a professional golf career. And I just never questioned that. I told him that I was in his corner and would support any dream he had because you don’t get to do that a lot. A lot of people don’t get to chase their dreams,” Ashley explains.
Dossey is doing this with Ashley firmly a part of his team, and while there are other married players on PGA TOUR Canada, there aren’t many—and none as young as 24-year-old Dossey. That makes the 2021 Baylor grad something of an anomaly among professional golfers with visions of PGA TOUR greatness. Ashley is also slowly learning more about a sport that she plans on being a part of their lives for, well, forever.
You can pardon her for not knowing much at first about her now husband’s chosen sport, though. As a Baylor cheerleader, Ashley was used to watching games in the Ferrell Center, with the women and men both winning national titles while during her time in Waco. And the football team was getting good again, in the top 20, playing its games across campus at McLane Stadium.
“Before I first met Cooper, I was with one of my good girlfriends. She said to me one day, ‘Hey, that’s Cooper Dossey. He’s the best golfer at Baylor.’ And I was like, ‘That’s very cool. Good for him. We have a golf team?’”
Cooper and Ashley soon met, she learned that Baylor, indeed, does have a golf team (a pretty good one) and there are distinct differences between birdies and bogeys. As their relationship developed, Ashley remembers meeting Dossey’s family for the first time, at a college golf tournament in Dallas. “It was a seven-hour round, so it was a very eye-opening experience,” she recalls.
Since then, she’s learned to enjoy walking the golf course following Cooper. “I’ve often joked that I would stay fit or stay in shape as long as Cooper was playing golf because it is so many miles walking as I watch him,” she says, smiling. “I like to walk all 18 holes. I like to get six or seven miles of exercise.” She reached her limit at a tournament at Pinehurst in North Carolina, however, when Cooper played 36 holes in one day. “I think we walked 14 miles, and I was like, all right. I think that’s where I tapped out.”
Six weeks after their engagement, Cooper, with graduation only a couple of months away and a first-team All-American who reached as high as No. 24 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, traveled alone to suburban Phoenix for one of PGA TOUR Canada’s 2021 Qualifying Tournaments in advance of the summer season. Through 54 holes, Dossey was tied for 15th place and poised to earn at least conditional Tour status. A good final round, something in the 60s, could get him a full card. Instead, he shot a 3-over 75, tying for 30th, not good enough for even conditional membership. Just like that, the soon-to-be college graduate failed to nail down the job he expected.
That’s when Cooper and Ashley started hearing whispers here and there, a twinge of skepticism from people about their pending wedding. Why are you guys getting married so young?
Don’t you want to be financially stable before you get married?
Ashley, why are you marrying someone who doesn’t even have a job?
“Yeah, I got some backlash for sure,” Cooper remembers, “but I didn't date Ashley [because] of others’ opinions, and I didn’t ask her to marry me because of what others thought. It was our decision together, and that's all that mattered to us. I wanted to marry her. And she wanted to be my wife somehow, for some reason.”
Ashley freely admits she knew exactly what she was getting into marrying a professional golfer, with the expected highs and lows and all the travel that can keep couples apart. Even with that, she was all in. The way she figured it, her fiancée missing out on his PGA TOUR Canada membership was merely a detour on the road. It was nothing that they—emphasis on the plural pronoun—couldn’t overcome.
“I saw I had the opportunity to take the mindset of like, Where do we go from here? It really allowed us to re-center our focus and just really learn to lean on each other,” she explains. “He was really successful in college, but it kind of made us realize, it’s going to be a lot harder to get to that same point (as a pro). It was just, What do we do now?
“I think at that point, it kind of hit me because I heard it through his emotions,” she continues, remembering the phone call from Phoenix when she found out her future husband didn’t get his card. “I think I just tried to stay calm, because I knew that that wasn’t the end all be all. But I do think it probably hit me more when we got to October. We were sitting in the kitchen, and he looks at me and he’s like, ‘Ashley, I don’t have anywhere to play. I have to play mini tours.’ It was then I was like, OK, we can either be really upset about this or we can choose to look at this and say we have an opportunity here, and we’re going to figure this out.”
Una publicación compartida por Cooper Dossey (@cooperdossey)
Meanwhile, Dossey would see former Walker Cup teammates and guys he played college golf against already playing on the PGA TOUR. It wasn’t that he was necessarily envious or jealous. His feelings related more to his self-belief that he was as talented they were. Hitting the mini-tour circuit wasn’t where he wanted to be. Then again, in golf, you’re only good as what your record shows, and all the college accolades and the amateur record really meant nothing. Dossey did have to go to the mini-tours, where he decided to attack his career with enthusiasm, work on his game and try to make ends meet to support him and his soon-to-be wife.
“I think my game is ready. I really do. I think I think Ashley is ready for that. But we might not be, and I think God has us exactly where we're supposed to be,” Cooper says about his “mini-tour” season and this year playing PGA TOUR Canada. “And that's good for us. It may stink at times. It hasn’t been princesses and ponies and big checks and nice cars. It’s been a grind. And I think it makes me want to work harder so that I can do that for her one day.”
In 2021, Dossey played wherever he could. All the while, Ashley worked full time and handled wedding plans for their February 12, 2022, ceremony in New Ulm, Texas. After a honeymoon to Cancun, Dossey, a freshly minted husband, traveled to Alexandria, Louisiana, for the All Pro Tour’s Coke Dr Pepper Open. Dossey finished his week of work with the unusual-looking, three-round result of 58-65-72. The 58 came courtesy of 11 birdies and an eagle, a 28 on his front nine and a 30 coming in. And, that’s not a typo: Dossey was seven strokes worse each day after his 58 yet still won. The victory, by a stroke over Mitch Meissner, who went on to win the 2022 PGA TOUR Latinoamérica Player of the Year Award, didn’t mean anything as far as getting Dossey closer to the PGA TOUR, but the payday was great, 33,000 smackeroos to be exact, and a bragging-rights 58.
Amazingly enough, he had to shoot the 58 to break his personal 18-hole record of 59, which—oh, by the way—he also shot. At the Korn Ferry Tour’s first stage Qualifying Tournament at the Golf Club of Houston in Humble, Texas, in September 2021, Dossey was 13-under in the second round, making eagle on the 18th hole to break 60.
Clearly, the talent is there.
“It’s hard to shoot that low, and it’s hard to break a barrier like that. That’s the thing about Cooper. I don’t think he sees a lot of barriers, and I think he’s starting to discover that,” says his college coach, Mike McGraw. “Good golf travels. The 58 came in a smaller event. So what? If you had put every one of the great players in the world from the PGA TOUR out there that day, how many people would have beaten his 58? Nobody. He would have shot the low score that day. That’s the way you look at it. Good is good.”
Buoyed by his stretch of excellent play (a 59 and a 58 has a way of doing that), Dossey a month later found himself back in Arizona, at the same course—The Wigwam—for the same tournament where he experienced such disappointment a year earlier. PGA TOUR Canada membership again was his goal. Dossey led the tournament through 54 holes but lost to Max Marsico on the final day, yet it hardly mattered. Dossey finished second, and PGA TOUR Canada was issuing nine 2022 cards. One had Dossey’s name on it.
Una publicación compartida por Cooper Dossey (@cooperdossey)
For the first time since college, Cooper Dossey had a secure job, a place to play that provided the path to the PGA TOUR that he sought. Now, not quite midway through his rookie PGA TOUR Canada season, thinking about everything that’s happened in the last two years, Dossey reflects on the last two years. In a twist, though, he chooses to assess himself as a person instead of as a golfer.
“I’ve matured a lot. I’ve matured off the golf course. But it’s also helped me on the golf course, giving me a better perspective. Golf should never be my first priority. It should be the Lord and then my family and then golf, and I think I had it flip-flopped,” Dossey observes. “That All-Pro Tour event in Louisiana helped answer some legit prayers financially. But I just feel like I have a different sense of confidence. I have a family to support now, with Ashley. We look forward to one day having kids, hopefully having kids, and it’s just given me a whole new perspective on how I practice, who I choose to practice with, going to workouts, all of those things.
“More importantly,” Dossey continues, “I’m just trying to be a better man for Ashley, which has helped my personality on the golf course, as well.” Adds McGraw, “His faith is very important to him. Honestly, I think getting married to Ashley is the best thing he’s ever done. She’s such an incredible lady anyway. But it allowed him to realize he’s a big boy now. I think it woke him up, that this is big-boy stuff. She’s great for him, and she supports his every move in professional golf. She wants him to chase that dream. I think it’s one of the best moves he’s ever made.”
Today the self-described grinder—but, seriously, how many true grinders have a 58 and a 59 on their resumes?—is preparing for this week’s Osprey Valley Open presented by Votorantim Cimentos CBM Aggregates outside Toronto. “I’ve always been really competitive. I don’t do anything spectacular. I just do everything good enough to get [the ball] in the hole.
And turning pro was a big goal of mine,” Dossey says. “I can’t wait for the rest of the season in Canada. I’m not going to chase Mondays (Korn Ferry Tour qualifiers). I’m not going to do any of that. And I believe God has me in Canada for a reason, and it’s to get a Korn Ferry Tour card. My dream was to play college golf. But I really want to be on the PGA TOUR, and this is the way to get there.”
That goal seems more than realistic. Ashley feels that way, too, and she will be there with him, at least figuratively, every step of the way.
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