For These Women, Bucking Tradition Is Par for the Course : Golf: Female executives find companionship and an opportunity to network on male-dominated turf.

After a workday that often stretches to 12 hours, the CEO of STAT Tech Services Inc. in Burbank packs a cellular phone into a bag of clubs, plugs a Miles Davis CD into the car stereo and heads to Brookside Golf Course in Pasadena as fast as rush-hour traffic allows.

Out on the driving range, the rest of the foursome--company presidents and owners all--are already whacking buckets of balls in preparation for the time-honored business tradition of a gentlemen’s game of golf. Except these are no gentlemen.

This high-powered quartet belongs to the Executive Women’s Golf League (EWG), whose members are among a growing number of successful businesswomen discovering the advantages to mind, body and networking of the game Mark Twain called “a good walk spoiled.” The league boasts 225 members in Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley--among 10,000 members nationwide--and in its own way has become a source of empowerment to women still seeking to break social barriers.

“Why do I play golf?” asks Judith Ferber, the straightforward founder and chief executive officer of the diagnostic medical firm STAT Tech. “So I don’t drive myself nuts--and my kids nuts as well.”

Whether it’s in Pasadena, Pacoima, Burbank or Woodland Hills, Ferber and her playing partners meet without fail on a weekly basis at one course or another, bucking convention while forging friendships as long and strong as a great drive.

From Oct. 27 to 29, Ferber and the other three Valley residents who comprise her regular foursome will switch their focus from companionship to competition when they participate in the league’s 1995 Western Regional Golf Conference at the Industry Hills Sheraton in the City of Industry, the first such EWG competition to be held in Southern California. Registered players are expected to surpass 125, marking the greatest participation so far in the conference’s short history.

The league was the brainchild of Nancy Oliver of Palm Beach, a golf marketing specialist who never learned to play the game. “After 15 years in the golf marketing business, everyone assumed that I played golf.”

Not wanting to admit that she didn’t, Oliver made excuses and declined invitations to play until finally it became too awkward to continue the ruse. “There was no way I was going to admit I couldn’t play,” recalled Oliver, who says one day on the golf course she finally sneaked over to the side and asked someone to show her how to swing a club.

She got to thinking that there must be hundreds, even thousands, of women in the same quandary--wanting to learn to play but lacking the opportunity or the support. Knowing exactly what she wanted, she approached a local course owner and persuaded him to allow her to set up a series of golf clinics for women. “You’ll never get five women out here,” he said.

But the first day in November, 1991, 28 women arrived to learn everything from rules, technique, equipment, proper attire, terminology, and business protocol.

That same year, according to the National Golf Foundation, more than 780,000 women between the ages of 18 and 49 took up the game of golf. Today more than 40% of all golfers are women, representing the fastest-growing segment of the market. That trend is being borne out in greater Los Angeles, where EWG membership doubled in the last year.

“Other people find God--I found golf,” says Shelley L. Becker, a partner in the newest of Ferber’s companies, Burbank’s Prenatal Features Imaging Services, and among Ferber’s fortysomething foursome recently at Brookside.

Becker, a recent grandmother who often looks bemused, came to California 20 years ago just as new tools for medical diagnoses were emerging. There was really no way to study ultrasound technology except hands-on, the former X-ray technician recalls, but even that challenge was not so rewarding as golf.

“It’s such a challenge that it keeps you coming back,” Becker says as she prepares to drive down the fairway. “The hardest thing for a golfer--male or female--when they find golf is when they can’t hit the ball. . . . Sometimes you’re good and then your chest gets all puffed out and then you hit a shot like that,” she continued, wincing at a misshot.

It happens to everyone from the pros on down, but a lack of confidence in their game has kept some women out of a sport in which men are sometimes openly hostile or, at best, patronizing. Many private clubs, including Lakeside Country Club in Toluca Lake, still bar women from prime tee times.

Some of the friction may stem from the fact that men and women play somewhat differently. Women tend not to hit far as men do, a handicap that forward locations help compensate for. And while men undeniably enjoy the social aspects of golf, women find them to be more competitive among themselves.

“I think there is more pressure on men, “ says headhunter Linda Morse, another EWG member who owns the Burbank employment firm HR Only.

Member Kathy Malmfeldt, a real estate appraiser, agrees: “You’ll notice every man says his game is in the 80s even if he shoots a 200.”

Ferber and Becker recall an incident at Griffith Park when a foursome of men behind them kept calling them “girls” and urging them to hurry it along even though, up ahead, another group of golfers was still approaching the green. The women waited, realizing they could hit someone.

Finally, after they played the hole--driving past the point where the slower golfers had stood and farther than the hecklers behind them--”the guys apologized,” says a grinning Becker, who--with a daughter who has worked as a stock race car driver--is no stranger to speed.

For members of EWG like Malmfeldt, the gregarious president of Southwest Realty Advisors of Burbank, and sharp-witted Morse, the support of other female golfers is critical. “If it weren’t for the EWG, I don’t think I’d be playing golf. I’d be too worried about my game,” Morse says.

“Everyone is very supportive of each other,” agrees Malmfeldt. “When I play with EWG, all I have to worry about is my game. I play with my husband too, but then I have to worry about his emotional well-being.”

In general, women who do brave the golf course find that golf is “career enhancing, helping them to gain entrance into the informal ‘club’ of executives” according to a recent study by the executive search firm Korn / Ferry International and UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management.

“Typically corporations filled charity tournament foursomes with men,” says Oliver, EWG’s founder. “Now it would be a social faux pas to not invite a woman vice president into the game, and that vice president must be able to golf.”

At a recent tournament to benefit breast cancer in San Diego, Ferber says she played with vendors associated with radiology who were willing to cut their prices for her company STAT Tech, which she said grosses more than $1 million a year in a field that until the last few years has been dominated by men.

Larry Bell, vice president of Global Services for AT & T in Atlanta, was shrewd enough to realize seven years ago that the women in his department weren’t taking advantage of the opportunity to entertain business clients that golf offers, and he set about to change that.

“I was somewhat naive,” he says. “I saw it as a training issue.”

He brought EWG into the picture three years ago and, although employees pay for their lessons, AT & T is one of the first corporations to recognize women’s business golf as a legitimate business expense. It will also sign on as one of the league’s corporate sponsors next year, joining Time magazine and Titleist and Foot-Joy Worldwide, a golf accessories maker.

“I can’t say enough good things about the EWG,” says Bell.

Despite such gains, the otherwise self-confident Morse admits she’s still intimidated by the idea of taking a client out for a round of golf. “How can you relax and hit the ball and try to sell somebody something?” she asks.

Even as she ostensibly relaxes, though, Morse’s mind is always at work, always thinking of her current business, potential new businesses and how to find a market niche. Suddenly, surrounded by her pals in drab shorts and polo shirts, inspiration seizes her.

“Fashion,” she says. “Somebody should do something really wild with women’s golf fashions.”