DIFFERENT COURSE : Sherk Weathers Storm as Only Woman in Golf Event

Moments after Cathy Sherk strode off the 18th green at Lookout Point Country Club here in southern Ontario Friday, a howling rain poured down and a mighty wind began to blow.

It was as if someone had called upstairs for a display of symbols, after a week of heavy symbolism. Sherk had been the symbol of women competing against men and was at the center of a national media barrage, having become the first woman to qualify and play in a men’s professional golf tournament.

And although Sherk, who played for five years on the Ladies Professional Golf Assn. tour, was cheerily handling the attention, there were certainly dark clouds hovering over her golf game.

“I wasn’t as embarrassed today as I was yesterday,” Sherk said Friday, after finishing with a round of 81 in the $100,000 Ontario Open, playing, of course, from the men’s tees. It might have been nine over par, but it still represented a tremendous improvement over her 91 of the previous day, a round that included five double bogeys.

It has been a tough week for Sherk, who lives in Toronto, especially with the eyes of Canada upon her. Sherk earned the right to play here after shooting a 72 in a qualifying tournament in nearby Port Colborne.

Since then, she has been ballyhooed--incorrectly--as the first woman to play in a PGA-sanctioned event. The Ontario Open is not a PGA event, it is an event on the Canadian Tour, and it is not specified as a men’s event, although no women had ever played in it.

Sherk, 39, is the first woman to have qualified for an open event, but she is not the first to play in one. Babe Zaharias played in the 1938 Los Angeles Open, shooting 84-81 from the men’s tees but missing the cut at Griffith Park. She had been declared a pro after endorsing a line of sporting goods and she entered the tournament because there was no such thing as a women’s pro tournament then.

Then in 1985, Kathy Whitworth and Mickey Wright played in the Legends tournament on the Senior PGA Tour.

And in 1986, Tracey Kibsey, a club pro from Winnipeg, became the first woman to play in a Canadian provincial open. But Kibsey did not have to qualify for the Manitoba Open because there wasn’t a full field that year. She played in the first two rounds, shooting a 76 and then a 71, missing the cut by a stroke.

Sherk was not that close. Her two-round total of 172 was well above Friday’s 149 cutoff.

Her disastrous first day was something from which she could not recover. Was she nervous?

“Well, I haven’t eaten in three days,” she said. “I slept last night but I don’t think I’ve slept for three nights before, either. My stomach has been in knots. I tell you, I don’t know how I teed it up. I don’t even remember yesterday morning.”

That may be for the best. This course, about 90 miles southeast of Toronto and eight miles west of Niagara Falls, is enough to knot anyone’s stomach. The first hole drops 164 feet from tee to green. Several fairways snake through narrow canyons in what is known geographically as the Niagara Escarpment. A downhill ski run was once operated alongside the 10th fairway.

“I was humbled by a great golf course,” Sherk said after Thursday’s round.

Friday’s weather made it worse, what with winds gusting to 40 m.p.h. and intermittent thundershowers.

Sherk took it all with good humor. Tall and husky, she briskly walked the hilly course, smoking and chatting, while trailed by a ragtag gallery that grew as the day wore on. Making it more homey was Sherk’s 14-year-old son, Chris, who was her caddy.

Sherk’s partners in the threesome--Jeff Boismier and Brian Hanson--lent strong moral support, even while getting overshadowed by a lesser player.

“It helped me to focus,” Boismier said. “I really enjoyed playing with Cathy. She deserved to be here.”

Boismier and Hanson had talked to Sherk Friday morning before they teed off and told her to forget Thursday’s round and relax.

“It meant a lot to me,” she said. “They have been really supportive.”

Sherk might have received some support simply because she’s from this area--she used to be a member at Lookout Point--and she’s not trying to rock the boat. She said this tournament is special because it’s at Lookout Point and because there was a special ceremony for club professional Gordon McInnis, who has been her coach for 17 years.

“I was certainly not trying to be smart or make a point by qualifying,” she said. “I talked to a lot of people because I was very nervous about doing this thing. I didn’t know if it was right or what. It was definitely not a women’s lib movement thing at all.”

Sherk’s reception here is starkly different from what Kibsey got in 1986. Kibsey, an assistant pro at St. Boniface Golf Club in Winnipeg, said Friday that she has nothing but bad memories from her experience at barrier-breaking.

“A lot of people were not happy with my entering the event,” she said in a phone interview. “They said they thought I was being a little facetious.”

Kibsey said she entered because there were not many options for professional women golfers in Canada.

Asked if she felt snubbed at the tournament, Kibsey said: “Let’s put it this way. If I hadn’t been in the tournament, it would have been OK by them. They put up with me. No one went out of his way to make me feel welcome.”

Sherk wants no part of that action. She has been accommodating with reporters, and there have been many, but she doesn’t care to be singled out.

“I’m not the only person at this tournament,” she said. “I wish everyone would also pay attention to the other guys.”

Sherk, who turned pro at 29 after winning the World, Canadian and U.S. amateur titles, still retains her LPGA card but is non-exempt, which means she must qualify for each tournament in which she plays. When she was playing regularly, from 1979 to 1984, her husband and son traveled with her.

“We took Chris with us when he was 4 years old,” she said. “We got a trailer and a truck and off we went to tour the countryside for a year. We found every zoo and every park from Los Angeles to New York City. It was a great experience for all of us.”

Now, Sherk says, she plays only a few LPGA events a year. By allowing her to play here, the tournament organizers have used “a liberal interpretation of what an Open is,” said Bob Beauchemin, the commissioner of the Canadian Tour, which governs both male and female professional golfers in this country.

“There is a loophole there, and each event can put its own conditions on entry,” he said from Toronto. “I have mixed feelings on it. There are a lot of people interested in Cathy playing and that inadvertently helps expansion of the game. On the flip side, I cannot imagine a woman playing in the PGA.”

Sherk, who has tried to make this clear again and again, has no interest in playing on a men’s tour. She simply wanted to play at this course.

“I didn’t have many expectations of doing well in this tournament,” she said. “I knew that if I played lights out, I’d be in at 150. I know these guys are fantastic. There’s no way I had even an expectation of making the cut unless I just put two rounds together that were just dynamite.”

There were no explosions from Sherk here, but, apparently, that’s the way she wanted it.