With the long-awaited inaugural U.S. Senior Women’s Open approaching in July, I thought I would dig up the column I wrote back in 2010 following that year’s Legends Tour Handa Cup in New Hampshire. The column, through my editor, developed into a call for the U.S. Senior Women’s Open to be inaugurated in golf fan-friendly Rochester. While the 2018 Open won’t be in Rochester, the Chicago Golf Club is a historic, fitting, and worthy venue. (The longtime Rochester LPGA event had just become a major in 2010, hosting the LPGA Championship amidst a year of economic turbulence for the LPGA. It would end in 2014 with the new 2015 Women’s PGA Championship traveling to a different venue each year and Wegmans dropping its sponsorship of the local, well-attended LPGA tournament after the event’s 38th year.)
Daily Record (Rochester, NY) (Dolan Media)
September 14, 2010
Commentary: Senior Women Deserve USGA Event … in Rochester
Michael Giuliano
In the world of professional golf, there is a very clear divide between the male players – who often look forward to turning 50 years old so as to qualify to play on the “Champions Tour,” i.e. the Senior PGA Tour, as it was known in less marketing-driven times – and the female LPGA players, who still largely wander in the wilderness once they reach that “certain age.”
Of course, it could be said that the division is more oddly jagged than that. In fact, the U.S. Golf Association holds U.S. Open Championships for male and female professionals (and qualifying amateurs) and U.S. Amateur Championships for men, women, senior men and senior women, among others. It also holds a U.S. Senior Open to cater to PGA professionals over 50 to determine the “national champion” of the birthyear-challenged crowd. There is no comparable event for senior professional women. They are left out in the cold.
Twenty-seven-time LPGA winner Jane Blalock – who won in Rochester in 1979 – founded the Legends Tour several years ago to give the female set its own professional events to play.
Over this past Labor Day weekend, Sept. 4-5, the Legends held the Handa Cup competition between U.S. and International professional senior women golfers in Portsmouth, N.H at Wentworth By The Sea Golf Club, a Donald Ross course situated on the coastline, its only relief from the elements being nearby New Castle Island. Portsmouth also happens to be Blalock’s hometown.
The U.S. team won the event 27-21, the closest result since it began in 2006 at The World Golf Village in St. Augustine, Fla. It was a fan-friendly competition; the players seemed to go out of their way to make it so.
With the winds whipping off the coast Saturday morning, the feeling on the first tee was as much reunion and clambake as sober competition, which it also was as demonstrated by U.S. team captain Kathy Whitworth’s scrambling up and down the first hole to lend encouragement to all of her players at the start of their round.
The enthusiastic greetings, stories and laughs flowed freely until the first shots were hit in Saturday’s two-player team competitions. The forced carry over water to a shallow, bunkered and slippery green at the championship’s first hole – a 376-yard par 4 that played directly into a stiff, gusting wind each day of the event – ensured the players got down to business with dispatch.
Of course, the serious demeanor lasted only as long as the golf. After she and Sherri Turner won their match Saturday morning against Sally Little and Anne Marie Palli and began walking to the back of the green to head to the clubhouse, Hall of Famer Pat Bradley, 59, a winner at the LPGA event at Locust Hill Country Club in 1977 and 1985, noticed an embarrassing oversight: Bradley’s mother, Kathleen, of Westford, Mass., was in the bleachers next to the green to greet her daughter following play, only to have been overlooked.
Those sitting near the Bradley family matriarch noticed Mom’s disbelief and made the appropriate noise of a somewhat entertained consternation. Dutifully, Bradley jogged back across the green to hug her mother. She also greeted nearly everyone else seated there in the process.
Bradley’s brother, serving as her caddie last week, would make his way back to the stands just moments later to join in the family reunion. The smiles and guffaws were an indication of a short break before the afternoon matches began. In Bradley’s case in particular, her trademark methodical, grinding style of play would continue.
Bradley grew up playing at Nashua (N.H.) Country Club against much-older members in the 1960s. As related by Sandy Keenan in “Sports Illustrated,” Bradley “learned to compete under pressure by playing pickup golf at Nashua for $10 a round. The guys called the afternoon stakes match the Hatreds because the games could get pretty hateful,” she told the magazine. “There was a lot of swearing and what we call ‘color’ out there.” The men were pressured by Nashua’s PGA club pro into letting Bradley play in their Hatreds matches.
“John Wirbal made us do it,” explained Nashua Country Club alum Mike Lupica.
Today, Bradley, along with fellow greats Jan Stephenson and Jane Blalock, has been lobbying the USGA, which has a de facto monopoly over American golf’s purported “national championships,” and likely legal rights to any event billing itself as a “United States Open,” to create a Senior Women’s Open.
Blalock told me on Sept. 3 that it has been difficult even to get a hearing. She noted the USGA’s rather odd explanation that it is concerned over the profitability of such an event. The USGA made a $7.8 million profit in 2009, by the way. “The last time I looked, the USGA was a non-profit,” Blalock said.
The long-festering frustration on the part of these snubbed women seemed to come to a head this past summer. Former LPGA player Martha Nause, much to the approval of her peers, decided to make a statement and enter local qualifiers for the Men’s Senior Open held at Sahalee Country Club in Washington earlier this year. She didn’t qualify, but her attempt made an impact.
The July 10 edition of The New York Times, appearing during the U.S. Women’s Open in Oakmont, Pa., noted the lack of a comparable senior women’s event. USGA Executive Director David Fay, explaining the lack of a national championship for senior women players, drew a distinction between the creation of the Men’s Senior Open, first held in 1980, and a possible women’s version.
“The PGA Tour was fully supportive of this (the U.S. Senior Open) because that was in the genesis of creating what’s now known as the Champions Tour,” Fay said. “Right now, the environment for women’s professional golf at the older level, it’s not truly a tour.” Considering the fact that the USGA is a non-profit that asserts it exists for the “good of the game,” Fay’s statement no doubt rubbed the over-45 Legends Tour players the wrong way.
But you wouldn’t guess that from the positive attitudes seen Labor Day weekend in New Hampshire, at what probably was the biggest professional golf event ever held in that state. Bradley applauded the gallery after finishing play on Sunday. She had just lost her singles match against Canadian Gail Graham in sudden-death.
Nor would you know it by watching JoAnne Carner, 71 – affectionately known as “Big Mama” to galleries throughout much of her career – banter with the gallery during the course of the event. Carner’s golf swing appears blissfully unaware of her age as she slams her drives further than players a quarter-century younger. The gallery was impressed when Carner cut the corner on the par 5 eighth hole, carrying her drive over the beach and rocky shoreline to reach the lush fairway beyond. For the sake of variety of personality, and making a strike against political correctness, Carner even is known to light up a cigarette or two during her warm-up on the practice range and during play.
Blalock, now CEO of the Legends Tour and owner of a sports management company that runs golf clinics for women – targeted specifically at women in the corporate world – said she expects the number of senior women’s events will increase to nine in 2011. She said she hopes to attain a dozen Legends Tour events by 2012. Although the present economic circumstances make corporate sponsorships difficult to attract and keep, Blalock noted that, from a potential sponsor’s perspective, “optimism is not a bad thing.”
The charitable endeavors involved with such events combined with the competitive golf make them well worth it, she said. “It’s wonderful for the spirit of a community,” she said.
Blalock recalled the former champions event held by the Wegmans LPGA at Locust Hill in 2006 for former Rochester winners, most of whom were Legends Tour players. “We drew 26,000 (spectators] on a Tuesday afternoon. You saw incredible energy,” she said.
Many of those players – Bradley, Lopez, Sheehan – have played and won at Locust Hill over the past 34 years and gained large followings among fans in the process. A handful competed in the 1973 U.S. Women’s Open held at Country Club of Rochester.
Blalock said she knew from the support at the 2006 Rochester champions tournament – won by Bradley – there would be a market for the Legends Tour and, hopefully, a USGA event for these women.
Blalock also couldn’t help but wonder: “Wouldn’t Rochester be the perfect place for it?”
Michael Giuliano is a Rochester-based freelance writer and an attorney editor at Thomson Reuters.
Bringing LPGA Legends Back to Rochester, NY 