Out of the Rough : Laguna’s Sally Little Battles Back Into LPGA’s Elite Ranks After Illness

When she first strode into the unforgiving field of the Ladies Professional Golf Assn. tour 18 years ago, Sally Little looked like Princess Diana and played like Wyatt Earp.

Fourteen years later, she had picked her rivals’ collective pockets on the golf course to the tune of $1.2 million to become the LPGA tour’s 12th millionaire.

But on the road from rookie to riches, Sally Little became so desperately ill that she could barely hold a club, much less control it. She suffered bouts of depression and near-constant pain. Within a month after her final appearance on the 1982 tour, she was forced to make a choice between her career and her life.

For an entire year, throughout 1983, she gave up golf, suffering not only from endometriosis--a debilitating glandular growth in the pelvic cavity--but from the effects of the drugs she was taking to treat the condition. It was a process, she said, that turned her into a weakling, robbing her of the concentration, strength and will needed to succeed at one of the most unforgiving of sports.

But last year, after capturing one of the LPGA tour’s major championships, a rejuvenated, newly confident Sally Little was voted the Ben Hogan Comeback Player of the Year. The award, given by the Golf Writers Assn. of America, recognizes a golfer, male or female, for overcoming a debilitating disease or injury and rising once again into the game’s top ranks. She is No. 14th on the all-time list of money winners, despite the layoff.

Today Little, 37, appeared vibrantly healthy as she strolled along the sand at Shaws Cove a couple of blocks from her Laguna Beach house and spoke about her native Cape Town. It was Laguna Beach’s similarity, both in geography and climate, to the South African port city that drew her to Orange County.

But her first stop in the United States was Buffalo Grove, Ill. In 1971, at 19, she won the South African match-play and stroke-play championships and was the low individual scorer in the World Amateur Team Championship.

Little decided to come to the United States in hope of joining the pro tour. Through mutual friends, she was introduced to and moved in with golf equipment corporation executive Mike Metzgar and his wife, Vicky, in Buffalo Grove. Using the Metzgars’ home as a base, Little played in seven tournaments in 1971 and was named LPGA Rookie of the Year.

“I was pretty lost when I first came over here,” Little said. “I was very young emotionally, and I was totally out of my element. I really learned to play professionally out on the tour, unlike all the people coming up now who have experience through college. If it weren’t for Mike and Vicky, I don’t think I would have stuck it out.”

As she became accustomed to the loneliness and pressure of the tour, she continued to improve. Two years after undergoing arthroscopic knee surgery to repair cartilage damaged in an old motorcycle accident, Little won her first LPGA title in 1976--holing an 80-foot bunker shot for a birdie on the final hole at the Women’s International tournament.

However, all was not well. Little was found to have endometriosis. A potentially serious disease, endometriosis occurs when tissue identical to the uterine lining grows abnormally elsewhere in the body--in Little’s case, in the abdomen.

Though a relatively common disorder, endometriosis “can be very serious,” said Dr. William Benbow Thompson Jr., vice chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at UC Irvine.

“It can produce an intestinal obstruction, infertility or adhesions. Pain is the primary complaint,” said Thompson, who has not been involved in Little’s case.

Her doctors, she said, “had put me on normal birth-control pills, and that didn’t seem to help it. In fact, it seemed to make it worse. I’d go in and out of feeling well and fighting it. I was basically a very healthy individual until that happened, and I just slowly got worse and worse. I had fatigue and a lot of cramping. I wasn’t feeling very good at all. It had gotten really bad.”

Little underwent a hysterectomy in 1976, but the disease returned, and she began a regimen of drug treatment.

Though uncured, Little continued to play on the tour and, each year from 1976 to 1982, she finished among the top 10 money winners. But the disease wore on.

“It was devastating,” she said, “because they put me on this heavy, heavy hormonal medication, and that just wipes you out metabolically. It affects other people differently, but I felt awful.”

She was taking both Depo-Provera and Danocrine, hormonal medications that Thompson said are seldom used together. Their side effects vary from person to person, he said, but “both can have side effects that are undesirable.”

Mike Metzgar, who had moved to Southern California in 1976 to become the owner and president of Pinseeker Golf Corp., a golf equipment manufacturer in Santa Ana, said his former charge was “weak as a kitten. She’d play two or three rounds, and she was just too pooped to pop. She’d play three rounds and die on the fourth. Before that, she was known as Sunday Sal.”

Little underwent surgery a second time in December, 1982, and continued taking the medication under a doctor’s orders.

But the downward spiral continued. Drained and listless, Little officially dropped out of the tour a month later.

“I didn’t want to play at all for almost seven months,” she said. “I knew I had to basically give up my profession to get my health back. . . . I lost a lot of weight, about 25 pounds, and I looked terrible.”

On the advice of another touring pro, Beth Daniel, she went to an allergist, who determined that the combination of drugs she was taking was “actually poisoning me,” Little said.

She found a doctor in Denver “who took the time to really look into my case. She really didn’t prescribe anything for me. She told me I needed to go on a program to detoxify, to get this medication out of my system and build up my immunities. My immune system was just shot. I feel like she saved my life.

“I went the natural way, holistic care. Food and vitamin supplements. I felt an improvement within the first two months. I had a lot more energy, and I wasn’t as listless. But it took me two years.”

Little returned to the tour in 1984, but her play was tentative.

“I went through many, many days and weeks of feeling that I probably wouldn’t be able to compete again,” she said. “I still was not physically capable of performing on the level of fitness you need. Your mind-set is such that you’re used to competing and playing in a certain way, and all of a sudden I didn’t have that. I lost it completely, lost my feel and lost my confidence.

“I was hitting it all over the lot. You start questioning your ability, and I did that a lot for the next two or three years.”

One side effect of the drugs was water retention, which most affected her grip, a fundamental key to good play: “I didn’t grip the club the same way. I changed my grip three times just trying to feel the same as before.”

Then, in January, 1988, Little visited teaching pro Tommy Tomasello in Myrtle Beach, S.C. He retooled her grip and swing, and her shots began to go where she wanted them to.

“By then I was starting to feel really strong again,” Little said. “And in December of last year, I went on a tremendous physical fitness program, endurance workouts with weights and riding a stationary bicycle.”

In May, 1988, she was tied for the lead at the LPGA Championship going into the 16th hole of the final round. She faded and finished third, “but I had been playing well for a number of weeks in a row,” she said. “I felt like things were starting to return.”

Then, four weeks later, after battling the long-hitting Laura Davies to the final hole of the Daphne duMaurier Classic in Canada, one of four LPGA majors, Little beat Davies by sinking a 30-foot putt for birdie.

She finished the year with four top 10 finishes and winnings of nearly $140,000--enough to persuade the Golf Writers Assn. of America to vote Little the Ben Hogan Award.

“It’s an incredible award to get,” she said. “I think it was tremendous that the writers voted for a woman. That doesn’t happen very often.”

Today, Little is out on the tour for all but about three months of the year, boomeranging back to her hillside home in Laguna Beach every few weeks.

Little--now a naturalized U.S. citizen--has installed a small gym in her house and uses it each day that she is home. She keeps a small book of inspirational writings on a table near her stationary bicycle. It is titled, “Each Day a New Beginning.”

“I feel wonderful,” Little said. “I feel my career is so close to being really good again. I’m being really patient. It’s just a matter of getting it all together now. Everything’s just so much better than it’s been in so many years.”