LPGA Has a Good Mix for Shore Tournament

Nobody’s in the kitchen with Dinah right now, because this week she’d rather be watching Laura Davies knock the stuffing out of a golf ball.

“It’s just brilliant what she does,” said Dinah Shore of Davies, the U.S. Open champion. “The girls just stand there, their eyes popping out. Having enormous shoulders and great body coordination, those are wonderful things, but I just have a feeling that timing and concentration--well, she’s got that, too, I guess.

“I just get a kick out of the swings and the distance that comes out of some of the smaller golfers, too, and then when you also get someone who powers the ball the way she does and has finesse, too, well, I’m just overwhelmed.”

A golf tournament begins today that seems to have all the necessary ingredients. Davies and a lot of other people are on the course with Shore, who has been sort of dividing her time recently.

She has been at either the Mission Hills Old Course, where the $500,000 Nabisco Dinah Shore tournament will begin today, or the newly opened course named after the person who may be the most famous graduate of Hume Fogg High School in Nashville, Tenn.

Who?

“Modesty forbids I mention the name of the new golf course,” said Shore.

The Dinah Shore Course, on which the pro-am was played, isn’t part of the 72-hole tournament that is the richest major championship in women’s golf and also offers the Ladies Pro Golfers Assn.’s highest regular-tournament first prize, $80,000.

Last year’s champion, Betsy King, is back to defend her title against a strong field that includes Davies, Nancy Lopez, JoAnne Carner, Ayako Okamoto, Patty Sheehan, Jane Geddes, Pat Bradley, Jan Stephenson, Juli Inkster and Amy Alcott.

If there is a favorite in the field, though, Shore couldn’t think of one. Her only experience with handicapping is the 20 handicap she plays with.

“I think somebody is going to come up from down in the pack,” she said. “There are a lot of predictables. Laura Davies is going to do it. Patty Sheehan is due. Betsy King is as strong as she can be. And Nancy Lopez, that beautiful determination and swing of hers. And Jan Stephenson, she’s always in contention. (There are) kids coming up--Jody Rosenthal, people like that. You can’t write anybody off.”

Shore said she will watch much of the tournament from the NBC booth, but not enough to suit her.

“I think I know the golfers so well,” she said. “And God knows I know every inch of these courses they’ll never see.”

The game of golf didn’t exactly come naturally to Shore. It was kind of thrust upon her. A former swimmer at Vanderbilt, Shore was a tennis player when the idea was conceived of a golf tournament to carry her name.

“I think I have some kind of natural something,” she said. “I’ve always been involved in sports. But at any rate, I was a tennis player. They said, no, it was going to be a golf tournament. I said, ‘Are you sure?’ ”

They were sure. David Foster, who was chief executive officer of Colgate-Palmolive, convinced Shore that the idea was sound. The first Dinah Shore tournament was played in 1972. Judy Rankin won it and earned $20,000, which was a women’s record. The total purse was $110,000 for 54 holes.

In 1982, the year that Nabisco became title sponsor, the Dinah Shore was the first LPGA tournament with a purse of more than $300,000.

Yet, even though Shore had a tournament named after her, there was one big problem to overcome. Two years after the first Dinah Shore tournament, in 1974, she complained that country clubs wouldn’t permit single women as members.

Since she lived in Beverly Hills, that meant Hillcrest, which is where she wanted to play.

Hillcrest relented and Shore became the club’s first single woman member. “They changed the rules for me,” she said.

All the publicity brought Shore other things, too. She received three definite marriage proposals and two others she considered iffy. She said they sounded more like propositions.

“They could have gone either way and I was afraid to find out.”

Shore said that one of the definite proposals offered her a property settlement up front, including custody of the gentleman’s membership in his country club in case they separated.

She said a couple of men sent pictures along, and references as well as credit ratings.

“Some of the others, I’m not too sure what they were offering, but I’ve got a good idea.”

There was more. Shore also received 112 out-of-town offers for memberships in golf and country clubs from as far away as New England, New York, Utah and Tennessee. She still works at Hillcrest with head professional Eric Monti. At Mission Hills, she works with Terry Wilcox.

“He’s my guru,” Shore said of Wilcox. “He’s helped me more than anybody because he simplifies everything. That’s what I need. Simple minds need simplifying.”

Shore said her game may be improving because she has been putting well, but golf has taught her to be wary.

“I could always clout the ball OK,” she said. “When one goes . . . when you’re putting fine, then you can’t hit your drives. And when you hit your drives, you can’t hit your fairway woods. When you hit your fairway woods good, you can’t hit your irons.

“Put it all together, and it spells m-o-t-h-e-r.

“It’s stunning, what the pros do. It’s so effortless. I was talking to some of the gals the other day. I said, ‘Gosh, do you ever go off?’ I was so off I couldn’t hit a thing. Well, they said everybody goes off.

“I said ‘Have you ever seen anybody go off like I did?’ And they said no. It keeps you humble.”

Shore keeps busy even when she is not on the golf course. Singing, which she once said is the only thing she really understood, is on her schedule in a concert tour in which she sings with symphony orchestras.

She is a board member for both the Boys Club of America and Junior Achievement. She recently appeared in an episode of “Hotel,” and her combination cookbook-life style book is due out in 1989.

But until Sunday’s final round of the Nabisco Dinah Shore is played, she is going to be preoccupied with golf.

“I am so hooked,” she said. “Golf is an addiction.”

So how long has she actually played it?

“Not as long as I wish I had,” she said.