Her Mood Is Wrong for Golf
The name is right out of the pages of “Little Women” or one of the Bronte sisters’ novels. The face is right out of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The grin is that of a kid seeing her first circus.
You ordinarily think of the great California golfers, you think of Ken Venturi, Gene Littler, Billy Casper, Lawson Little, the Dutra brothers.
But no one from anywhere ever played the game with the pure joy of Amy Alcott, who came out of the pitch-and-putts of Santa Monica to brighten up the tour of the Ladies PGA nearly 20 years ago. Freckle-faced, smiling, her eyes dancing, she always manages to look as if somebody bought her a balloon or told her a funny story. No one has ever seen her down. You’d think golf was fun instead of the 18 holes of torture we know it to be, ordinarily as much fun as having a breech baby.
Amy Alcott was as born to play golf as her idol, Katharine Hepburn, was to make movies. At an age when other little girls were trying on their mother’s clothes and trying on lipstick and flowered hats and high heels, Amy was trying on Size-4 cleats and windbreakers and hitting plastic balls into trash barrels in the family backyard in West Los Angeles.
By the time she was toddling, the family had ripped out the rose garden and put in a sand trap. Other kids played in sand boxes, Amy had traps. She was in the sand more often than a Bedouin.
On a clear day at her house, it looked as if it were raining golf balls. The sound of breaking glass resounded through the neighborhood until her father, in some exasperation, threatened to have her pay for the repairs herself. “I can’t become a great player hitting plastic balls,” Amy protested. The family compromised, erecting a huge net over the house. “The neighbors thought we were always getting the house fumigated,” Amy recalls. The gardener kept planting over the sand trap thinking someone had made a terrible mistake.
No one had. Other kids wanted to grow up to be Marilyn Monroe or Ali McGraw. “I wanted to be Sam Snead,” Alcott recalls.
Because she was self-taught, her swing was as simple and uncomplicated as a kitten with a string. But when she finally took her game to a private course (Riviera), her crusty old mentor, Walter Keller, watched her pitch a ball 30 yards over a flag. “Didn’t you see the pin was in front?” he demanded. Alcott shook her head. She couldn’t see that far (140 yards), she admitted. She was playing par golf with 20/100 vision.
When they got her eyeglasses, she won the State Amateur at 14 and broke Babe Didrikson Zaharias’ record at Pebble Beach by one stroke. She won the USGA Junior Girls’ national championship in 1973 and once shot four 69s in a tournament at 14.
But it is her indefatigable cheeriness that marks Amy Alcott’s game. She is as resolutely optimistic as the proverbial kid who knows there must be a pony at the bottom of the pile of manure. “I defy the ball not to go in the hole,” she says. “Even on bad days, I can’t see any reason for a three-putt--or even two.”
Alcott needs only two victories to make the LPGA Hall of Fame. Unlike other sports, women’s golf puts up exact standards for its Valhalla: You must win 30 events, including at least two “majors”--one of four designated tournaments--or win 35 with one “major” or 40 tournaments of any variety.
Alcott has won 28, including four majors. She needs to win only the LPGA Championship to become the second player--Pat Bradley was the first--in the modern history of the game to win all four majors.
Although she is only 35, Alcott has been on the tour 17 years, which makes her one of the grandes dames, except she rejects the role. “When I was young, I was rebellious and hungry. I don’t consider myself rebellious, but I’m still hungry.”
She added: “I still play with the same set of clubs I played with 17 years ago. They’ve been rechromed and refaced and rewrapped. But they’re like a set of old friends. They don’t get old, they just get more character.”
Alcott was put on the tour by a congress of weekday players at Riviera who ponied up $2,000 apiece to start the little tomboy who used to sneak on the course at twilight by the fence at No. 6 on her way. Among the sponsors was Dean Martin and the spaghetti-maker, Bob William, who went to his friend, Jack Nicklaus, to ask his advice on what Amy should do. “Tell her to stay in school,” was Jack’s cryptic counsel.
Alcott, as usual, ignored advice, particularly from other golfers. “There weren’t any full scholarships around for girls in California,” she said with a shrug. She got an offer from Dartmouth to play on the men’s team there. “But I thought, ‘Why should I be sitting in a lab cutting up a frog when I wanted to be out on a fairway cutting a three-wood into a guarded green?’ ”
Alcott bypassed college. She is glad of it. So is golf, where she is one of the few marquee names in a sport barnacled with bit players of late.
There used to be a popular song, “Once in Love with Amy.” Golf has been in love with Amy since she came on the tour, freckles, grin and a set of clubs that included a putter she picked up at a restaurant where the owner had installed a miniature golf green for customers waiting for tables.
She is one of 123 golfers teeing it up in the Nabisco Dinah Shore, a major she has won twice, at Mission Hills this week. You’ll have no trouble recognizing Alcott. She’ll be the one smiling, chatting and acting as if the whole thing is a ride at Disneyland. If she’s throwing a club or kicking a ball-washer or yelling at her caddy, it’s not Amy. It’s somebody named Donna or Sandra or Debbie or Jan. If she looks as if she just made 2 on the 18th hole, that’ll be Amy. Even if she made 9.