Fink, Brand Conquer Monster, Qualify for L.A. Championship

If screams are heard coming from Oakmont Country Club over the next few days, don’t fret. There’s a good explanation.

The course is a monster. Just ask the any of the 18 women who teed off Monday in the Los Angeles Women’s Championship qualifier at Oakmont.

Natasha Fink and Julie Brand managed to escape unscathed, each shooting one-over-par 73, and qualified for this weekend’s LPGA tournament.

Oakmont’s greens were so fast Monday that players routinely sent 15-foot putts motoring six or eight feet past the hole. They were so slick that a stroke anything less than perfect sent the ball trickling off line. They were so hard the players had a great deal of difficulty getting approach shots to stick close to the hole.

“I saw the greens doing things I’d never seen them do before,” said 20-year Oakmont member Cherie Zaun, who shot 87 and finished last. “They were so fast it brought out subtleties I didn’t even know about. This was the toughest I’ve ever played the course.”

Brand, a 23-year-old former two-time college All-American at the University of Miami, decided to play in the qualifier because it is on the way to Hawaii, where she plans on playing in next week’s LPGA tournament.

Fink, a 26-year-old from Graz, Austria who spent the last three years on the European LPGA Tour, was making her first attempt to make an LPGA tournament.

Neither player had a practice round over the weekend because Oakmont members chose not to allow it.

“Sometimes it’s an advantage to play a course for the first time,” Fink said. “You don’t know where the bad spots are and you aren’t thinking about where not to hit the ball.”

Fink hit only five fairways on the narrow course, but did not three-putt. Bogeys on 10 and 11 dropped her to two over, but a par-saving 30-foot putt at 13 revived her. A birdie at 15 put her in the lead.

Brand had 15 pars, a birdie on the par-3 third hole, and bogeys at 12 and 16.

Local favorite Heidi Voorhees, a 1990 Notre Dame High graduate, was even through five holes, but had back-to-back bogeys at Nos. 6 and 7, then double-bogeyed No. 8--a hole in which her drive ended up behind a large Oak tree and she had to punch out.

Several Voorhees putts barely missed on the back nine and her tee shot at the par-3 11th hole missed the green by three feet and found a bunker, lead to a double bogey that was too much for Voorhees to overcome. She finished with an 83.