Without Them, It’s a Hollow Hall of Fame

Women’s golf as an industry slays me. Oh, they play the same drive-and-an-eight-iron, two-putt-Rhode-Island game the men play, they have the same magicians around the green, the long hitters and the crafty course engineers.

But take a look at the unreasonable expectations they lay on themselves. I never cease to marvel, shake my head in disbelief.

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one, it bears repeating, but women’s golf requires a player to reach 30 victories before she qualifies for their Hall of Fame. That could be one out of 10 tournaments in your salad years for most players.

And, oh, yes, two of them have to be major championships. If you don’t win any major championships, you have to win 40 other championships. Forty!

Do you know how many men would make it under those conditions? Fifteen.

On the regular tour today, only Tom Watson would make the grade. Sam Snead, Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer and Billy Casper are the only ones over 50 in wins, and only two other players, Cary Middlecoff and Walter Hagen, won 40.

Trevino wouldn’t make it (27 wins). Neither would Gene Littler (29), Raymond Floyd (22), Johnny Miller (24), Gary Player (21) or any of two dozen otherwise icons of the great game.

Suppose baseball had a requirement you had to bat a lifetime .350 to reach Cooperstown? Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby would be lonely.

The LPGA Hall of Fame is harder to get into than a Bank of England vault. You got a better chance of making the House of Lords.

Take Amy Alcott. Now, nobody in skirts or shorts ever struck a golf ball with more skill and authority than Amy. And 29 times she mounted a victory stand. And she has won her two majors. In fact, she has won five of them, including the major she’s here to play this week, the Nabisco Dinah Shore, celebrating 25 years of play.

Sound like a Hall of Famer to you? Me too. I mean, what do they want her to do? Walk on water? Multiply loaves and fishes? She has won more than $3 million, sixth on the all-time list.

Alcott is cheerful about it. She always is. Golfers play by the rules. And they’re their own rules. If some male chauvinist pig laid them out for them, there’d be marching in the streets.

Amy needs some suffragettes. But she’s not worried. She’ll get the 30th this week, she assures you. Alcott is nothing if not positive. And she is only 40. Most pros play their best golf at that age. She loves this course. She has won three times here--1983, 1988 and 1991.

The LPGA may have another historical gaffe to embarrass it. Laura Davies, the belting Brit who hits a golf ball as far beyond her contemporaries as John Daly does his, is going to need a whole bunch of wins--she has 10--or that Hall of Fame is going to look as silly as Cooperstown without Babe Ruth.

Davies hits the ball so far it glows on reentry. She should probably get in the Hall of Fame on length alone. She not only hits the ball farther than any woman, ever, she hits it farther than most men.

Now, pros who can hit the ball 320 yards off a tee often have trouble hitting it 10 feet on a green--or 20 yards from a fairway bunker. But not Davies. Her ground game is so deft, she often leaves the driver in the bag in the interest of playing designer golf.

If Davies doesn’t make the Hall of Fame, she will know one place to go to fix the blame.

The 18th hole at the Dinah Shore is a great place to hold a picnic. Also to go canoeing. It’s a great place if you’re a duck. It’s a 520-yard sylvan paradise with two bodies of winking water on the left and stands of eucalyptus trees on the right.

But its placid exterior belies the inner soul of a serial killer. It specializes in cutting the throats of golfers who wander innocently on its vigorously defended turf. Nancy Lopez, no less, once took a nine on it and missed the first 36-hole cut of her life.

On the face of it, No. 18 looks made to order for Laura Davies. A drive and a four-iron, right?

Wrong!

The job of any 18th hole is to hold the fort, guard the integrity of the game, sort out the ribbon clerks, restore order and golf monarchy, put the peasants in their place.

It would seem Davies would be No. 18’s kind of player. It would docilely await her as a member of golf royalty. It would be driver off the tee, and the hole would be at Laura’s mercy, lying there with its paws up.

The trouble is, No. 18 is a kind of Bolshevik. “That hole doesn’t like me,” Davies says.

She has tried to lure it into her camp. She has tried every tactic to get in its good graces.

If you use the driver off the tree, as Laura has tried, you may get on the green with a three-wood. Except that green is surrounded by water. Now, three-woods do not know when to stop and back up like a self-respecting iron. They are as water-seeking as a dowsing rod.

Even when they stop short of shipwreck, they may end up in three-putt range. You can often get your third shot closer from the other side of the water than the other side of the green.

So Davies sometimes has to resort to romancing the hole, to teeing off with a two-iron. This is like sending it flowers, like standing on 15 in blackjack or saying “I’ll play these” with two small pair in poker. It’s defensive golf, conduct unbecoming a Laura Davies.

Davies is a bet-and-raise type, the tour’s version of Nick the Greek. She’ll bet on which wall a fly will light on, she admits. She is a hole-card player. The better bookies list her as a company asset. The casinos around Palm Springs will see almost as much of her as the Mission Hills fairways this week. She may even get a bob down on UMass in the Final Four. When she had gone missing a bit earlier this week, a colleague wondered plaintively, “Is there a dog track around here?”

Davies might not make the LPGA Hall of Fame, but she has made something more impressive, the British peerage. She’s an M.B.E. (Member of the British Empire). Any day now, she may be, so to speak, knighted by the Queen and become Lady Laura Davies.

Amy Alcott will settle for an occasional round with President Clinton. But while Burke’s Peerage is nice, it’s too easy. And no Hall of Fame can call itself one if it doesn’t have Lady Davies and America’s Little Woman, Amy, in it.