It was August of 1982. I was a 20-something living in Lake County at a time when Hamburger Hill was just being built, there wasn’t a traffic light anywhere to be found in our area, and you could dial in one of four television channels from the antennae atop Mount Konocti. My younger brother was just getting started in the radio business and I decided to visit him in his new hometown of Scotts Bluff, Nebraska.
I played in the Western Nebraska Amateur that weekend in nearby Gering, Nebraska. Earlier in the week I also took a 200-mile road trip to Denver. I decided to spend a day at the Denver Post Champions of Golf Tournament at the Pinehurst Country Club. It was one of 11 golf tourneys that year on the fledgling Senior PGA Tour for golf professionals ages 50 and older. Looking back on those early days of senior golf, one can immediately surmise that the senior circuit of those days wasn’t the well-oiled machine that the PGA’s Champions Tour is nowadays with its multi-million dollar purses spread out over the course of 26 events.
The total purse for all 11 senior tournaments back in 1982 was $1.6 million. The schedule was very scattershot. They played once in April, twice in June, once in July, three times in August, once in September, twice in October, and once in December. The three August events took some skills in nationwide travel as the senior set went from Denver to Syracuse to Salt Lake City. The United States Senior Open also was in just its third year of existence and its total purse was $150,000. The winner, Miller Barber, pocketed $25,000. The money that was being paid out for senior golf was comparable to what the PGA Tour was awarding back in 1967, some 15 years earlier. Yet for most of the senior competitors, it was a career-altering mulligan. They couldn’t compete against the likes of Tom Watson and Seve Ballesteros on the regular tour, but they could let the fans take that walk down memory lane while they played for much more money than was available to them some 25 years earlier in the late 1950s.
Because the senior tour didn’t have a lucrative television contract or big corporate benefactors such as Charles Schwab, they came up with a unique way to raise money for their tournament purses. Normally about 40 senior pros played in these events, but the pairings were in competitive pro-am formats for three of the four rounds. You’d see a Hall of Fame golfer such as Arnold Palmer or Billy Casper paired with three amateurs. The amateurs paid big bucks for the privilege of playing with the senior greats and the tournament committee was able to offer purses in the neighborhood of $150,000 with the help of pro-am revenues. After the 11 Senior PGA Tour events concluded in December, Barber was the circuit’s leading money winner with three tourney titles and $106,890 in the bank.
Of course, the senior tour grew because of star power. The Denver tournament that week in 1982 was won by Arnold Palmer. Casper won twice that year as did Don January and Arnie. Bob Goalby won a tournament and so did Dan Sikes. The seniors would be joined within the next few years by the likes of Lee Trevino, Jack Nicklaus, Chi Chi Rodriquez and others who would sell the value of senior tour golf. Senior golf was entertaining and would be lucrative.
Last weekend the third annual U.S. Women’s Senior Open was held at the Brooklawn Country Club in Fairfield, Connecticut. An old-time A.W. Tillinghast (Baltusrol, Winged Foot, San Francisco) design that first opened in 1895, Brooklawn is a very cool site when it comes to holding a senior women’s major. Jerilyn Britz won the U.S. Women’s Open there in 1979 and Gary Player won the 1987 U.S. Senior Open at Brooklawn.
While there wasn’t a lot of drama in last week’s Women’s Senior as evidenced by the eight-stroke margin of victory registered by Annika Sorenstam, it was great to take another walk down memory lane when it comes to classic women’s golf. Sorenstam was in many ways the Arnold Palmer of the LPGA Tour from the 1980s through the turn of the century. She won 72 tournaments on the LPGA Tour and 10 of those victories were major championships. Sorenstam “retired” from women’s golf back in 2008 to start a family. One of the inducements for her return to competitive golf was to allow her children to experience their mother from the perspective of a former golfing great. Making it a family affair, Annika’s husband, Mike McGee, served as her caddie as the recently turned 50-year-old romped to her first senior golf triumph.
Yet while the Senior PGA Tour grew by leaps and bounds from the days of tht third annual U.S. Senior Open back in 1982, I don’t believe the same is possible for a future Senior LPGA Tour somewhere down the line. Part of the problem is marketing and money and television ratings, but more importantly is the fact the current senior women golfers don’t have the same “wow factor” that Palmer, Casper and the rest of the senior men had almost 40 years ago. The field at the U.S. Senior Women’s included such name players as Laura Davies, the winner of the inaugural Senior Women’s in 2018, this year’s runner-up Liselotte Neumann, Juli Inkster, and European Solheim Cup captain Catriona Matthew. However, there isn’t a lot of name brand depth to the senior women’s field.
On top of that, Sorenstam, who could most probably carry an LPGA Senior Circuit the way Arnold Palmer did so in the early 1980s for the PGA Seniors, was particularly evasive about how much more competitive golf she intends to play. She wouldn’t even commit to returning to the Women’s Senior next year at the NCR Country Club in Ohio to defend her title. She seems to be enjoying family life, she doesn’t exactly need the money, and currently there are just four Senior LPGA tourneys on the calendar for 2021.
So while I would willingly spend money to watch the aforementioned greats of senior women’s golf alongside others such as Trish Johnson, Helen Alfredsson, Rosie Jones, Michelle Redman and Michelle McGann. among others, I do believe I find myself in the minority. The Golf Channel and the major networks aren’t going to spend big bucks on senior women’s golf and there is probably limited interest, even among the game’s hardcore fans who could just as easily watch the Korn Ferry Tour from Farmington, Utah. All of which is too bad. Last week’s U.S. Women’s Senior Open truly was a great walk down memory lane, and while Annika took all the drama out of the festivities, there is no doubt that great golf was being played.
