Tour Is New Home for Booth

How monotonous: 70, 70, 70, 70.

This may sound like the weather forecast. But it’s what Kellee Booth shot during four rounds of some of the most tense, taut, stomach-churning, palm-sweating golf you can imagine.

Booth, a 23-year-old from Coto de Caza who has jet-black hair and who can make a perfect stranger seem a best friend in one afternoon, shot those four 70s to earn her LPGA card for the 2000 season.

More than 100 golfers gathered in hurricane-humbled Daytona Beach last month. Only 19 of them would earn their LPGA cards.

Can you imagine? Your life for the next year, and maybe the next 10 or 20, is determined by whether you hit your drives straight, your irons strong, your putts firmly. The course was soggy from the pummeling of hurricane season. Practice rounds had to be fought for and squeezed in during storms. And after the first two rounds, play was rained out for a day.

“A day to sit around in the hotel and try to stay calm,” Booth says.

Booth is talking while she dines on cashew chicken and sunshine at the Irvine Spectrum.

She is in the midst of moving into the first home of her own, a condo in Rancho Santa Margarita. Her parents, Jane and Mike, will be moving to Florida in December, a necessity for Mike’s civil engineering job. Lucky for Kellee. Now she can have a West Coast home and an East Coast home as she embarks on her professional golfing career.

It has been a great year for Orange County female athletes. Lindsay Davenport of Newport Beach won Wimbledon and was ranked as the No. 1 women’s tennis player for a large part of the season. Julie Foudy of Laguna Niguel and Joy Fawcett of Rancho Santa Margarita were integral members of the U.S. women’s soccer World Cup champions. Booth has never met any of these women. She has heard “that they are all great girls,” and she seems a bit surprised that she would be considered in the same class.

But more than qualifying for the LPGA tour, Booth’s string of 70s earned her medalist honors at this toughest of tournaments.

“When Kellee called me and told me she had shot another 70 on the last day,” Jane says, “I asked if she had won. ‘By seven shots,’ she told me. That’s a pretty impressive resume.”

Jane should know. Jane was a fine amateur golfer in her own right. She was a college player at Arizona State, where Kellee also went, a Curtis Cup member, a second-place finisher once at the U.S. Open. But in the early 1970s, when Jane was getting out of college, it was nearly impossible, unless you were at the very top of the money list, for women to make a living playing professional golf.

“It just wasn’t something I could justify as an option,” Jane says now. “Plus, I was only 5 feet 2. I couldn’t imagine keeping up with Kathy Whitworth and Carol Mann. I finished second to JoAnne Carner in the U.S. Open.” Carner’s nickname was “Big Mama.” Jane could have disappeared in “Big Mama’s” shadow.

So Jane is not a stage mother trying to live through her daughter. It was Kellee’s dad, Mike, who was the caddy for Kellee. Jane stayed home in Coto de Caza, attending to the business of selling a house and readying for a cross-country move. Kellee was not forced into golf, though she was pointed in that direction.

“Mike and I would take her out on the cart with us when we played,” Jane says. “I will say that from the time she was about 5, we’d let her hit a few balls when we played and she never missed the ball.”

But Kellee also had played soccer. It was Kellee’s decision, when she was about 13, to concentrate on golf. It was Kellee’s decision on going to Arizona State, where she could major in business, and it was Kellee’s decision, after graduation and a year as an amateur, to go to qualifying school.

“I never heard Kellee say, when she was growing up, that she wanted to be a pro,” Mike says. “That wasn’t an all-consuming thing with her,” Jane says.

Kellee says it was her play this summer, winning four tournaments, making it to the semifinals at the U.S. Amateur, finishing in a tie for 37th at the U.S. Open, that convinced her her game would work on the pro tour.

Yes, she has heard horror stories of qualifying school, of the people who shoot 69 one day and 89 the next and 71 the next and 84 the next and then chew their nails and use calculators to follow everybody else’s scores. She watched four good friends in a playoff with five others for the final three tour spots this year.

“But, honestly,” Kellee says, “I was never that nervous. I had played the course [at another tournament] last May so I felt comfortable. My game seemed to be working. When I shot a good score the first day, I think that just relaxed me.”

There is, now, a whole new world waiting for Booth. She has signed with an agent. Coming onto the tour as the qualifying tournament medalist, Booth hopes, will help her get some attractive deals from club and clothing manufacturers. She is eagerly waiting for a packet from the LPGA that will tell Booth which tournaments early in the year she can have direct access into.

Most of all, Booth can hardly wait to start her life as a pro golfer. Was Booth born for this? “I don’t know about that,” Booth says, laughing, “but I know it’s what I want.”

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com