The 59th U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur Championship begins on Friday at the Lakewood Club in Point Clear, Ala., on the shores of Mobile Bay. The USGA has altered the traditional Saturday start of the championship to accommodate a Wednesday finish, because of the Yom Kippur holiday that begins on Wednesday evening. A total of 439 entries were accepted by the USGA for the championship, with 38 players in the field earning their spots through one or more exemption categories. After Saturday’s second round of stroke play, the field will be cut from 132 players to 64 for six rounds of match play that will culminate in an 18-hole final on Wednesday morning.
Here are 3 Things to Know as the championship gets underway:
Triple Threat
In 2019, Lara Tennant defeated Sue Wooster, 3 and 2, in the championship match at Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Country Club. If that sounds familiar, it should. Tennant, of Portland, Ore., defeated Wooster by the same margin in the 2018 title match, the first time that the same two players reached consecutive Senior Women’s Amateur finals, although it was the fourth such occurrence of repeat finalists in USGA history.
This week, with her 82-year-old father, George Mack Sr., again serving as her caddie, Tennant, 54, will try to join Carolyn Cudone (five straight, all at stroke play) and Carol Semple Thompson (four straight, all at match play) as players to win this championship more than twice in a row. Other back-to-back winners include Alice Dye, Dorothy Porter, Anne Sander, Diane Lang and Ellen Port. Porter and Sander each won four titles in a span of seven years, while Lang won three out of four and Port won three times in five years.
In a feat that might be harder to pull off than three straight, Marlene Stewart Streit captured her three titles in 1985, 1995 and 2003 – her last victory coming 18 years after her first, making her the oldest winner of any USGA championship at age 69. Along with Tennant, Wooster, of Australia, is seeking to become just the second player (after Thompson) to make it to three straight finals since the championship adopted its current match-play format in 1997, albeit with a different outcome.
Making Headlines
Ellen Port is no stranger to lifting championship trophies, having captured seven USGA titles and numerous other events since first taking up the game in earnest at age 24. Port, of St. Louis, Mo., earned newfound notoriety two weeks ago at age 59, when she won the Met Senior Amateur, the Metropolitan Amateur Golf Association’s senior championship, a 36-hole event in which she prevailed against an all-male field in a four-hole playoff with Joseph Malench. Port rallied to force the playoff with a 5-under-par 67 in the second round at Sunset Country Club, her home course, and won with a 20-foot birdie putt after she and Malench both parred the first three playoff holes.
“We went quite a few holes and I knew one of us was going to make a putt,” said Port, who previously enjoyed the national spotlight in her hometown when she captained the winning USA Curtis Cup Team at St. Louis Country Club in 2014. It has been a very successful summer for Port, who also shared low-amateur honors with Martha Leach in the 3rd U.S. Senior Women’s Open at Brooklawn Country Club in Fairfield, Conn. Leach, the 2009 U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur champion, is also in the field this week, along with five other players who earned exemptions by completing 72 holes in the U.S. Senior Women’s Open.
Dogwood Dilemma
The Dogwood Course at the Lakewood Club bears the stamp of famed designer Perry Maxwell, who designed the back nine of the current layout, which will play at 5,846 yards to a par of 72 this week. Each player will start a stroke-play round on No. 1 and on No. 10, and the nines present a contrast, according to Daniel Alldredge, assistant professional at the Lakewood Club.
“The first hole (a 476-yard par 5) lulls you into a false sense of security, and then [Nos.] 2, 3 and 4 can kind of punch you in the mouth,” said Alldredge. “I tell people, if you can get through them in 1 over par or better, you have a chance to post a good score. Those holes can really set the tone for your round.”
The trio includes the 137-yard par-3 third, bookended by a pair of daunting par 4s, with water lurking on both the drive and the approach shot on No. 4. The biggest challenge on the back nine, according to Alldredge, is the 356-yard, par-4 15th, which features an uphill approach shot. “I would be shocked if the back nine doesn’t play one or even two shots easier on average,” he said. “You have more hazards coming into play on the front, and a little more forgiveness on the back.”
Ron Driscoll is the senior manager of content for the USGA. Email him at rdriscoll@usga.org.
