Tune in to The Golf Guy podcast featuring the great Amy Alcott. The program is hosted by Larry Stein. You can find the full podcast here: The Golf Guy
Listen in as Amy shares great memories and highlights of her hall of fame career, including how she got started in golf as a child, her experiences in junior golf, her influential coaches and mentors, navigating a successful global career, lifelong friendships created through golf and so much more.
When Amy Alcott, the LPGA star, heard that a golf course was going to be built for the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, she had a creative breakthrough: The course should be designed by a male-female design partnership. Intentionally or not, she was recirculating the legendary pairings of Pete and Alice and Alister and Marion. Alcott lives in Los Angeles, where Gil Hanse was renovating the Los Angeles Country Club. They started comparing notes. They complemented each other…
LPGA and World Golf Halls of Fame member Amy Alcott, ASU sports historian Victoria Jackson, and sports attorney Jill Pilgrim, who has represented the LPGA and USA Track and Field, visit Zócalo to discuss how Title IX transformed sports for women, and its unfinished work leveling the playing field when it comes to everything from equal pay to equal opportunity.
This discussion was moderated by Lindsay Gibbs, Writer, “Power Plays” Newsletter & Host, “Burn It All Down” Podcast.
Many of America’s most prominent architects since the advent of color TV — including the original Robert Trent Jones — made their names selling brawn. So 1981. Golf is way better when it’s in touch with its feminine side.
Construction, of every kind, skews male. But golf does not. It needs designers like Marion Hollins and Alice Dye and Amy Alcott.
“You still hear people say ‘men’s tees’ and ‘women’s tees,’ ” Alcott said. “There should just be tee colors and descriptions: forward, middle, back. Play from wherever will make you happiest.” Gender be damned.
Read the full article written by Michael Bamberger on Golf News.
The article included below was shared in a newsletter distributed by the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation.
The PGA just wrapped up the Genesis Invitational (formerly the LA Open) at Riviera CC in Los Angeles yesterday, so we thought we would bring you a classic Jim Murray on another class act who happens to be having a birthday today, Amy Alcott.
Jim Murray Memorial Foundation
by Jim Murray
Thursday, March 28, 1991
Copyright 1991 – The Times Mirror Company
RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. – The name is right out of the pages of “Little Women” or one of the Bronte sisters’ novels. The face is right out of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The grin is that of a kid seeing her first circus.
You ordinarily think of the great California golfers, you think of Ken Venturi, Gene Littler, Billy Casper, Lawson Little, the Dutra brothers.
But no one from anywhere ever played the game with the pure joy of Amy Alcott, who came out of the pitch-and-putts of Santa Monica to brighten up the tour of the Ladies PGA nearly 20 years ago. Freckle-faced, smiling, her eyes dancing, she always manages to look as if somebody bought her a balloon or told her a funny story. No one has ever seen her down. You’d think golf was fun instead of the 18 holes of torture we know it to be, ordinarily as much fun as having a breech baby.
Amy Alcott was as born to play golf as her idol, Katharine Hepburn, was to make movies. At an age when other little girls were trying on their mother’s clothes and trying on lipstick and flowered hats and high heels, Amy was trying on Size-4 cleats and windbreakers and hitting plastic balls into trash barrels in the family backyard in West Los Angeles.
By the time she was toddling, the family had ripped out the rose garden and put in a sand trap. Other kids played in sandboxes, Amy had traps. She was in the sand more often than a Bedouin.
On a clear day at her house, it looked as if it were raining golf balls. The sound of breaking glass resounded through the neighborhood until her father, in some exasperation, threatened to have her pay for the repairs herself. “I can’t become a great player hitting plastic balls,” Amy protested. The family compromised, erecting a huge net over the house. “The neighbors thought we were always getting the house fumigated, “Amy recalls. The gardener kept planting over the sand trap thinking someone had made a terrible mistake.
No one had. Other kids wanted to grow up to be Marilyn Monroe or Ali McGraw. “I wanted to be Sam Snead,” Alcott recalls.
Because she was self-taught, her swing was as simple and uncomplicated as a kitten with a string. But when she finally took her game to a private course (Riviera), her crusty old mentor, Walter Keller, watched her pitch a ball 30 yards over a flag. “Didn’t you see the pin was in front?” he demanded. Alcott shook her head. She couldn’t see that far (140 yards), she admitted. She was playing par golf with 20/100 vision.
When they got her eyeglasses, she won the State Amateur at 14 and broke Babe Didrikson Zaharias’ record at Pebble Beach by one stroke. She won the USGA Junior Girls’ national championship in 1973 and once shot four 69s in a tournament at 14.
But it is her indefatigable cheeriness that marks Amy Alcott’s game. She is as resolutely optimistic as the proverbial kid who knows there must be a pony at the bottom of the pile of manure. “I defy the ball not to go in the hole,” she says. “Even on bad days, I can’t see any reason for a three-putt – or even two.”
Alcott needs only two victories to make the LPGA Hall of Fame. Unlike other sports, women’s golf puts up exact standards for its Valhalla: You must win 30 events, including at least two “majors” – one of four designated tournaments – or win 35 with one “major” or 40 tournaments of any variety.
Alcott has won 28, including four majors. She needs to win only the LPGA Championship to become the second player – Pat Bradley was the first – in the modern history of the game to win all four majors.
Although she is only 35, Alcott has been on the tour 17 years, which makes her one of the grandes dames, except she rejects the role. “When I was young, I was rebellious and hungry. I don’t consider myself rebellious, but I’m still hungry.”
She added: “I still play with the same set of clubs I played with 17 years ago. They’ve been rechromed and refaced and rewrapped. But they’re like a set of old friends. They don’t get old, they just get more character.”
Alcott was put on the tour by a congress of weekday players at Riviera who ponied up $2,000 apiece to start the little tomboy who used to sneak on the course at twilight by the fence at No. 6 on her way. Among the sponsors was Dean Martin and the spaghetti-maker, Bob William, who went to his friend, Jack Nicklaus, to ask his advice on what Amy should do. “Tell her to stay in school,” was Jack’s cryptic counsel.
Alcott, as usual, ignored advice, particularly from other golfers. “There weren’t any full scholarships around for girls in California,” she said with a shrug. She got an offer from Dartmouth to play on the men’s team there. “But I thought, ‘Why should I be sitting in a lab cutting up a frog when I wanted to be out on a fairway cutting a three-wood into a guarded green?’”
Alcott bypassed college. She is glad of it. So is golf, where she is one of the few marquee names in a sport barnacled with bit players of late.
There used to be a popular song, “Once in Love with Amy.” Golf has been in love with Amy since she came on the tour, freckles, grin and a set of clubs that included a putter she picked up at a restaurant where the owner had installed a miniature golf green for customers waiting for tables.
She is one of 123 golfers teeing it up in the Nabisco Dinah Shore, a major she has won twice, at Mission Hills this week. You’ll have no trouble recognizing Alcott. She’ll be the one smiling, chatting and acting as if the whole thing is a ride at Disneyland. If she’s throwing a club or kicking a ball-washer or yelling at her caddy, it’s not Amy. It’s somebody named Donna or Sandra or Debbie or Jan. If she looks as if she just made 2 on the 18th hole, that’ll be Amy. Even it she made 9.
What kind of kid — especially a girl in pre-title IV era –has the self confidence to pursue a dream like that? And what kind of mother would glory in her daughter’s delight, as Lea Alcott so clearly did in hers?
Listen to Katie and Amy of the podcast “Our Mothers Ourselves” chat about Lea’s own childhood, the idea of giving to your daughter what you didn’t have access to, and the evocative powers of a good glass of Scotch whiskey.
“On the Green” is a podcast series focused on the world of golf; features on local courses; and interviews with industry leaders. In this episode Tim and Amy discuss topics that span her career from her childhood beginnings until now.
You can listen to the podcast on the “On the Green” website.
Amy won the Legends Junior Inspiration at the ANA Championship. Back on number 18 at Mission Hills in Rancho Mirage, CA where I had so much success in my career, winning the 1983, 1988 and 1991 Kraft Nabisco Championship.
Hall of Famer Amy Alcott will not be competing in next month’s Senior LPGA Championship presented by Old National Bank at French Lick Resort, but she could not be more thrilled that more major tournaments are now taking place to entice the best senior players in the women’s game.
“Golf doesn’t stop at 50. I love to compete and just want to put the peg in the ground and go play against my friends that I have played with for so many years. I think it’s great to light the fire for women over 50.”
Read the whole article on LPGA.com.