By GARY VAN SICKLE | June 14, 2018

SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. – I met a couple of Open contestants here Wednesday morning who drive it 225 yards off the tee but think they can be competitive.

Amy Alcott and Hollis Stacy.

Oh, I meant U.S. Senior Women’s Open contestants. It’s a new tournament in the USGA corral, finally giving the, uh, mature women the same chance to compete that senior men were afforded when the USGA started its U.S. Senior Open in 1980. Thirty-eight years later? Yeah, that’s about how far behind women’s equality issues usually lag men’s in our great society.

“The event is a long time in coming,” said Alcott, a World Golf Hall of Famer whose 29 LPGA victories included five major championships. “I want to thank the USGA for stepping up to the plate way before the #MeToo comments were ever made and making this a reality.”

I was a little embarrassed when the USGA’s own news conference, featuring executive director Mike Davis and managing director Jeff Hall, paused briefly at its conclusion and Alcott, fellow Hall of Famer Stacy and Senior Women’s Open director Matt Sawicki stepped onto the podium for an additional session and three-fourths of the 75 or so media in the room got to their feet and exited.

Los Angeles loves its Dodgers but went without an NFL team for 20 years and responded with a collective whatevs.

The question is, based on past performance, whether the LPGA has no business returning to a region in which it has never been able to establish traction. We posed it to Los Angeles’ resident LPGA expert, World Golf Hall of Famer Amy Alcott, a native of Santa Monica.

“From my experience in close to 40 years of playing the tour,” she said Tuesday, “I always found that it was the small cities—Corning, N.Y., Rochester, N.Y., Birmingham, Ala., Dubuque, Iowa—those are the cities that have smaller populations where the LPGA becomes the biggest show in town.”

Read more of what Amy had to say at Golf Digest.

Amy Alcott invented the Poppie’s Pond leap.

Her name is all over everything about the most colorful victory celebration in women’s golf, except the pond itself, which is named after Terry Wilcox, the former tournament director affectionately known as “Poppie.”

While Alcott first made the leap 30 years ago, the plunge she took with Dinah Shore three years later ranks as her most memorable, and maybe the one that most cemented the leap’s tradition as something that would set the event apart as a new major championship.

“I didn’t have any clue what I was starting 30 years ago,” Alcott said. “It was just a moment where I embraced my happiness.”

Read the full story.

LPGA.com Managing Editor Amy Rogers reflects on the 30th anniversary of Amy Alcott’s leap into Poppie’s Pond.

Amy Alcott, Sandy LaBauve and Susie Maxwell Berning are being honored this week at the Bank of Hope Founders Cup as the LPGA’s ‘Pioneers’ of 2018, a tribute to their trailblazing spirit as well as their exemplary participation in the development and advancement of the LPGA Tour and women’s golf.

Read the full article.

Read the full article that featured this wonderful video.

The U.S. Golf Association is launching the inaugural U.S. Senior Women’s Open with flair.

“It’s a classy decision,” Amy Alcott said. “One that indicates how much things have changed in women’s sports.”

Alcott, who is automatically eligible to play in the U.S. Senior Women’s Open by virtue of her status as a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame and as a winner of the 1980 U.S. Women’s Open, said she’s really excited about playing. Fox Sports will televise the tournament.

“Golf doesn’t stop at 50,” she said. “We want an arena to showcase our talent and now we really have one.”

Read the full article.

This picture was taken this past Tuesday at the Cipriani Wall Street. It was the 2017 world golf Hall of Fame inductions. It is always an honor to put my blazer on and welcome in a new class of inductees. My induction came in 1999 at the WGHOF in St. Augustine, Florida with the late Seve Ballesteros and Lloyd Mangrum.