Hurlbut Resolves to Smooth LPGA’s Rough Roads

If you’ve ever picked up a golf club or placed a tee, the idea must have run across your mind, no matter how pitiful your swing, how feeble your putting.

Life as a pro golfer, you thought. Wouldn’t that be grand?

Never mind pulling in the big bucks by racing up and down a basketball court or back and forth across a football field.

Among pro athletes, it’s the golfers who seem to have it made. They show up in their fancy sweaters and slacks, put in a few hours at some posh country club, sink their final putt, kiss the ball, toss it into an appreciative crowd and pick up their $50,000 check. Heck, some of these people don’t even look like they sweat.

Pressure? Yeah--should they wear that rainbow cardigan Saturday or save it for the final round?

Well, before you hand in your resignation down at the insurance office and pack up the clubs for a life of fame and fortune, spend a few minutes with Laura Hurlbut. Her story is a lot more typical than those of a Nancy Lopez or a Jack Nicklaus.

Hurlbut, 28, has been on the golf tour for nearly six years. In that time, she has won a total of $16,759 heading into this season. The best she has ever done in a tournament is a tie for 23rd. The most she has ever won in a single event is $1,800. The most in one year--$10,000.

Yet it costs Hurlbut about $25,000 a year just to survive out on the road. Why bother if the only list you’re on is leading money losers?

Yet here she is, back near her old neighborhood, teeing it up in this week’s GNA/Glendale Federal LPGA Classic at the Oakmont Country Club with as much optimism as a leading money winner.

“It’s been a rough road,” says Hurlbut, who attended Louisville High and still lives in Woodland Hills. “But I believe inside me I’m going to make it. That is all that matters. It doesn’t matter what others think.”

Traveling rough roads is nothing unique for the younger members of the tour, but the obstacles Hurlbut found in her path were certainly not par for the course.

Medical problems have plagued her on and off almost from the start of her career. In fact, her health has allowed her to play only about half the time over the past two years.

The first time she went to qualifying school to get a slot on the tour, she swung right past the opposition, finishing fifth among 95 golfers.

So much for the good times.

Her spotty play forced her to return on three more occasions to qualify. One of those times, she didn’t make it and spent a year working in an insurance office.

But now, surgery has corrected the physical problems. And Mike Adams has taken care of the mental part.

It was last August at a tournament in Illinois that Hurlbut was introduced to Adams, a teaching pro. He came along at just the right time.

“My perseverance level was shot,” Hurlbut recalls. “I had had it. I felt like I was just spinning my wheels.

“Mike watched me hit a few balls and told me I’d be crazy to quit. He told me I just hadn’t had the right teaching.”

Although she has made the cut only once in four tries this year heading into the Glendale event, Hurlbut feels she already can see improvement in her game. And not necessarily from anything she’s done differently. No, it’s more a case of what she thinks about what she’s done.

“I had a bad attitude,” she says, “Really bad. I have had to learn that whatever happens out there, happens. You have to forget about it and move on to the next shot. Some people can play when they’re angry. I can’t. You’ve got to learn to remain the same whether you get four birdies in a row or four bogeys.

“People might look at me and think, ‘Why doesn’t she just give up?’ Well, for the first time in four years, I feel ready to play. I’m determined to prove I can play this game.”

They are not all non-believers. At first, her parents backed her with the money to live on the tour. Then a group of five Valley friends took over the financial load. Now she has found a local woman willing to pay the bills, a woman she’d rather not identify.

Knowing she is playing with other people’s money, however, doesn’t add any pressure to her task.

“They’ve chosen to do this,” she says. “They understand what can happen. Remember, they can also make money if I do well. Real pressure is when you don’t have anybody backing you. Believe me.”

Heard enough? So maybe this isn’t the ideal life after all.

Maybe it’s better to just play with the guys now and then. And when you firmly set down your tee, take a few practice swings, peer confidently at a distant green, move smoothly into your backswing, smash the ball and then watch as it disappears into that lake five feet in front of you, you can take heart from the thought that your weekly paycheck, not to mention the groceries, aren’t disappearing with it.