From a stirring early-morning ceremony at the first tee featuring several Hall of Famers including Nancy Lopez and Annika Sorenstam, to the supremely confident strides of this next generation of Title IX products, to the skilled, crisp play they exhibited on a difficult golf course they hardly know, it was most definitely happening. Augusta National members looked on with awe. When Kupcho drained a 20-foot birdie putt on 18 to finish at a scintillating 10-under for the three-day tournament, four strokes ahead of Fassi, the fans roared and rushed to get near her. Once the migraine passed, she boldly eagled the famous par-5 13th on her way to shooting 5-under-par in her last six holes, just like Nicklaus did when he won in 1986. “Just tell me where to hit it.”Īt the time, Kupcho was engaged in a back-and-forth duel with her rival and good friend Maria Fassi, an Arkansas senior. “I can’t see anything,” she told her caddie. She battled a migraine headache that blurred her vision so badly she couldn’t make out the line on her golf ball from the 8th green to the 11th tee. Tournament champion Jennifer Kupcho, a Wake Forest senior who is the world’s top-ranked amateur, was every bit the sports hero on this course that Tiger and Phil and Jack have been. women’s national soccer team or countless female Olympians, this event confirmed one of the great truths of current-day sports: give female athletes a grand international stage and they will shine. If sports fans didn’t already know what to expect from watching the Williams sisters over two decades or the U.S. HISTORY: Jennifer Kupcho outlasts Maria Fassi to win at Augusta Nationalįor the first time in history, a women’s tournament was held at Augusta National. Just seven years after finally bringing in its first two women members, Augusta National flung open its doors to women who were not the club members’ wives or daughters. Those days seemed like centuries ago on Saturday during the final round of the tournament current club chairman Fred Ridley, the father of three daughters, invented to usher Augusta National into the 20th century before too much more of the 21st went by. It didn’t matter that the game was losing participants and in fact desperately needed girls and women, who happen to make up 51 percent of the population and have always been the very definition of an untapped market for golf.Īugusta National stood its ground, and the powers that be in golf nodded their heads and rallied around the club, defending the indefensible, including the time nearly 17 years ago when then-club chairman Hootie Johnson issued the infamous, immortal and utterly preposterous line that the club would not be pressured into inviting women members “at the point of a bayonet.” For generations, their exclusive and revered club, the home of the Masters, sent a blunt five-word message to girls and women around the world: We do not want you. There are no more unlikely feminists on earth than the green-jacketed members cloistered within the gates of Augusta National Golf Club. If this is what hell looks like when it freezes over, I think we need to see more of it. No, Saturday afternoon at the Augusta National Women’s Amateur. The final two golfers had staged a masterful duel down the stretch and now were making their walk up the most famous fairway in their sport. The shadows were starting to lengthen around the 18th green, where the crowds were so deep and full to the brim that people were leaving because they simply couldn’t see. – The scene looked so familiar, except that it came eight days too early. Watch Video: Kupcho wins the Augusta National Women's AmateurĪUGUSTA, Ga.
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