JoAnne Carner at the U.S. Senior Women’s Open earlier this week.
Jeff Haynes/USGA
“Big Mama” isn’t a nickname that may fly in 2024. But when JoAnne Carner was zooming up the LPGA ranks in the Seventies, the moniker caught to her like a wedge shot to a rain-soaked inexperienced. It completely captured her construct, her colourful persona, her booming tee photographs. Everything about the Marlboro-loving Carner loomed bigger than life, together with her achievements. They’re all there on her head-spinning Wikipedia page, however listed here are some highlights:
—1956 U.S. Girls’ Junior champion
—5 U.S Women’s Amateur titles (1957, ’60, ’62, ’66, ’68)
—two U.S. Women’s Open titles (1971, ’76)
—Only participant to have received the U.S. Girls’ Junior, U.S. Women’s Amateur and U.S. Women’s Open
—43 LPGA wins, together with one as an newbie (in 1961)
—32 top-10s in the majors
—World Golf Hall of Fame inductee (1982)
—oldest participant to make the reduce in an LPGA main (63) and LPGA occasion (64)
—second-oldest competitor in U.S. Senior Women’s Open historical past (85 years, 3 months, 28 days)
OK, that final bullet isn’t on Carner’s Wiki web page (but), however it is well timed given she achieved the feat simply this week in the sixth enjoying of the USGA championship designated for feminine gamers 50 years and older. Eight entrants in the 156-player discipline at Fox Chapel Golf Club in Pittsburgh turned 50 inside the final 12 months, and the common age of the discipline is 57.23, that means Carner is basically competing towards opponents three many years her junior. (Annika Sorenstam, a former winner of the occasion, is also in the discipline. As are a handful of different former main champions, together with Julie Inkster and Catriona Matthew.)
The U.S. Senior Women’s Open isn’t a brand new take a look at for Carner; she’s been a daily. At the inaugural version, at Chicago Golf Club, Carner, then 79, matched her age in the opening spherical. In 2021, she shot 82 at 82. Last 12 months, at 84, she shot 80.
And at 85?! This week, we came upon.
But first a phrase about greatness. Once you’ve achieved it, you don’t simply crave extra of it, you anticipate extra of it. At 50. At 60. At 70. And…sure, even at 85. After just about all of Carner’s age-beating rounds in prior Senior Women’s Opens, she was unmoved. Coulda, shoulda carried out higher, she’d say. Birth date be damned. “In a sport that gradually but inexorably grinds to the psychic nub those who play it for a living,” golf author Jaime Diaz once typed for the New York Times, “no champion has proven more resistant to erosion than JoAnne Carner.”
Diaz wrote that…in 1993.
More than three many years later, Carner is still going sturdy, turning into a fixture at a big-time occasion stacked with the greatest feminine seniors in the land. Can she win it? She can not. (Kaori Yamamoto of Japan is eight beneath by two rounds at Fox Chapel, 4 away from the chase pack.) Can she still play? Can she ever, partly aided by a cart she’s permitted to make use of on account of her power obstructive pulmonary illness. Can she and will she offer you an trustworthy evaluation of your efficiency? That reply arrived Thursday quickly after Carner had signed for a gap 14-over 85 that included 4 double-bogeys.
“It was terrible,” Carner mentioned when requested if she was blissful to have shot her age, an accomplishment that was heralded in headlines in the golf media and past. “I played really bad on the back. I didn’t putt well. Then I lost my swing temporarily. I hit a couple shots that I thought were good, but not having played the course but one time, I ended up in trouble, in one of those bunkers, and you just have to hit it out.”
Here, we must always point out Carner’s common driving distance is someplace in the 170-yard vary, or at the least it was this week at Fox Chapel, which in the first spherical performed practically 5,700 yards. Shooting 85 at 85 is one factor. Shooting 85 at 85 whenever you’re left with 160 or 170 yards into most of the par-4s is sort of one other. And capturing 85 at 85 whenever you’re left with 160 or 170 yards into most of the par-4s on a Seth Raynor design with fire-breathing, rollercoaster greens? That may put Carner in a category of 1.
Jeff Haynes/USGA
“The greens I just was having trouble,” Carner mentioned Thursday, her voice graveled from many years of smoking. “I’ve been putting well but down in Florida where they’re flat greens. You’re not playing the rolls here. Totally different. I’d under-read and then over-read. One I had about a 20-foot downhill side hill on a par-3 and hit it — barely touched it and it went off the green.”
In quick, you may been impressed by Carner’s spherical however she was not.
Before shutting her eyes in her Pittsburgh motel room Thursday evening, Carner set her alarm for six:15 a.m., leaving her loads of time to prep for her 8:54 tee time. But her wakeup name got here even earlier, by the use of a textual content from event organizers that arrived simply after 5:15. The message: beginning instances had been delayed on account of inclement climate.
With time to kill, Carner eased over to the course later in the morning, had some breakfast and acquired free. “I did some stretching with the therapist up there and those boots they put on your legs,” she mentioned. “That’s the first time I’ve done that. Felt great. They massage your blood flow back up your legs.”
Carner opened with a par at the par-4 ninth (teams went off 1 and 9 in the first two rounds), then performed the subsequent 4 holes in a single over. It was an outstanding begin however it wouldn’t final. Bogeys adopted at 14 and 15. Then a double at 16 and one other double at 18. Opening 42. Carner’s spherical may have simply skidded off the rails if she wasn’t…nicely, JoAnne Carner. After a par at the 350-yard par-4 1st, Carner caught a wedge at the par-5 2nd to six ft and holed the putt for her first birdie of the spherical.
Then got here the third, a par-3 that was enjoying 165.
“I hit my 5-wood two inches from the hole,” Carner mentioned. “It was going right at it. If it had had one more turn, I’d have had a hole-in-one. But I was very happy because the day before I hit the green and four-putted. It was revenge.”
Golf has a method of biting again, although, and chunk again it did. Carner bogeyed 4 and 5 earlier than closing with a double at the par-4 eighth.
But her 18-hole tally still was exceptional: a nine-over 80.
“A lot better,” she mentioned of her play after the spherical. “I played a lot of very good shots, and then I played some just atrocious shots. But overall, it wasn’t too bad.”
The damper, slower greens had tripped her up — “If I were putting halfway decent, I’d have made three, maybe four more birdies,” she mentioned — and so had her inconsistent ball-striking. “I tried to stay with my routine, to hit the ball better, and then I’d go haywire and take it straight up and then drop-kick it,” she mentioned. “The love-hate with that 5-wood: I either hit it very good, up for birdies, or I chunked it 30 yards, 50 yards, whatever.”
Carner’s not one to pat herself on the again so we’ll do it for her. Of the gamers who completed their rounds Friday, Carner tied or beat 13 of them. And regardless of her gripes about her placing, she averaged simply 1.75 strokes per inexperienced, which ranked tenth in the discipline. And, sure, she beat her age by a whopping 5 photographs.
How’d that make her really feel?
“I’d have been happier with a round in the 70s,” she mentioned. “Could have done it easy.”
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