Late-Blooming Golfer Already Delivering

There are serious golfers and there are serious golfers.

And then there is Jericho Gonzales Trianna.

Three months ago, Trianna finished second in the L. A. City Tournament of Champions, an event for club champions at Rancho Park in West Los Angeles.

Trianna was eight months pregnant at the time.

And she didn’t stop there. Two days before giving birth to daughter Shiloh, her first child, Trianna was still playing golf.

Now that’s serious.

Perhaps Trianna is just trying to make up for lost time. The 33-year-old Van Nuys resident had never played a full round of golf until a decade ago. Now she is the defending champion of the Los Angeles City Women’s Golf Championship that is being held this week at the Sepulveda Golf Complex.

Trianna began defense of that title Wednesday, shooting an 82 on the Encino course that left her 11 strokes behind the leader, Donna Watson of Yorba Linda.

Ten years ago Trianna took up the game that she had seen other members of her family play for years and took to it immediately. Within a few weeks, she was shooting in the 80s.

Six years ago she quit her job at a savings and loan company, lived off her savings and devoted herself entirely to golf.

“I told myself, ‘Let’s see how good you can get,’ ” she recalls.

A year later, she began to find out. Trianna finished third in the National Ladies Club Championship.

But by 1984, her savings had run out and she returned to work, first as a waitress, later in her current position as a real estate appraiser. That was also the year her career, not to mention her life, really turned around. That was the year she met Lenny Yearwood.

Yearwood, a former professional golfer playing out of his native Trinidad, wound up as Trianna’s teacher, caddy, husband and father of her child.