Canadian gals coming up short

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This article was published 21/08/2011 (5389 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Lorie Kane says there’s nothing wrong with women’s golf in Canada, but there’s also no hiding the fact it’s been 38 years since a Canadian won an LPGA Tour event on home turf and a full decade since a Canadian won any LPGA Tour title anywhere.

That was Kane, whose fourth tour victory came in the LPGA Takefuji Classic in Hawaii in February, 2001. Since then, the 46-year-old from Charlottetown has 38 Top 10 finishes — six seconds and two thirds among them — but none since 2007.

Moreover, the best finish by any other Canadian in LPGA Tour competition since 2001 was a tie for seventh by Hamilton’s Alena Sharp in 2007 in Thailand.

So who will it be? Which Canadian has the best shot of becoming an LPGA Tour champion, thus earning arguable distinction as the world’s top female professional golfer for at least one week — and, particularly if they become the first winner of a tour stop north of the U.S. border since Jocelyne Bourassa in La Canadienne in 1973, national celebrity status?

The question is timely with the CN Canadian Women’s Open set to start this week in Montreal.

“I think I should win again very soon,” says Kane, who has made the cut in six of seven LPGA Tour starts this season. Even so, her best result was a tie for 23rd and earnings of $39,473 US (raising her career total to more than $6.8 million).

“But there’s a lot of things that have to happen in order to win. I think there’s a handful of Canadians with the skill to win, but it’s all about getting yourself in position to win.”

Part 1 of getting into position to win is earning an opportunity to play on the world’s leading female professional golf circuit, and the LPGA Tour lists just nine Canadians as active members.

But that’s overselling things a bit. Those nine Canadians include British Columbia products Dawn Coe-Jones, who has retired, and A.J. Eathorne, who’s caddying these days. As well, Oshawa, Ont.’s Angela Buzminski and Red Deer, Alta.’s Adrienne White have lower-level status and have yet to play in an LPGA Tour event this year.

That leaves Kane, Sharp (a tie for ninth is her best result in 12 tournaments), Montreal’s Lisa Meldrum (a tie for 53rd, six events), Samantha Richdale (a tie for 19th, six events) of Kelowna, B.C., and Oakville, Ont.’s Jessica Shepley (tie for 59th, five events).

Richdale and Meldrum deny feeling any outside pressure to win. Any pressure they do feel is self-imposed.

“I’m not out here playing for everybody else,” Richdale says. “I have my own goals and my own view of what I can do. I’m just trying my best and, whatever that is, we’ll find out.”

Meldrum, in her second LPGA season, says one factor is the number of opportunities to win. This year’s schedule has roughly two dozen official-money tournaments. When Kane was a rookie in 1996 and Coe-Jones in 1984, there were between 30 and 40 such events.

“We have a lot to learn once we get out here,” Meldrum says. “Like a lot of things in life, a lot of it is getting comfortable out here.”

Some portion of that learning occurs before the LPGA Tour, during amateur and collegiate golf competition or on the affiliated LPGA Futures Tour, a developmental circuit whose 2011 roster lists Buzminski, Richdale, Shepley, White and 12 other Canadians. Another handful advanced through the first stage of qualifying in July, with Stage 2 in Florida in September and the final stage also in Florida in December.

Among those five qualifiers were Canadian women’s amateur champion Rebecca Lee-Bentham of Richmond Hill, Ont., and fellow national team member Nicole Vandermade of Brantford, Ont.

“I’ve been able to play in the Canadian Open once, I played in the U.S. Open last year — and just being able to play in those tournaments and be exposed to the best players in the world, it’s kind of nice to be able to see just how far off your game is to theirs,” Vandermade says.

“Really, when you think about it, it’s not really that much. It’s just a bunch of hours of practising. It’s kind of nice to know that, but you also know you still have a long way to go.”

Asked what it would take to get more Canadians to the top level of women’s golf, Vandermade starts by referring to Tiger Woods’ impact on the sport after turning pro in 1996.

“Everybody wanted to be Tiger,” Vandermade says. “I think that definitely helped golf in general, but mostly the men’s game. If there comes a female golfer who kind of has the same draw that Tiger did, it might get more girls out playing golf.”

Would she have to be Canadian?

“I think it’s just (about) seeing success,” says Vandermade. “Lorie Kane has been very successful, but she hasn’t really won that many times. I think if you see a consistent Canadian always at the top of the leaderboard, it kind of proves to other female golfers that, hey… this can be done.”

Winnipeg’s Derek Ingram, who is leaving the national women’s amateur team after two years as head coach to take the same post with the Canadian men’s squad, says grinding is a tried and true way of getting to the top. Sadly, he says, female pros have less grind time than men do.

“On the LPGA Tour, there are 70-80 seats on the bus with a chance at earning a living,” Ingram says. “You don’t have, like in the men’s game, five or eight years of slugging away on mini-tours in development to become a PGA Tour player … the women really don’t have that because on the mini-tours there’s no money, and (on) the LPGA Tour, unless you’re a superstar, there’s no money.”

Ingram says female Canadian golfers must speed up the learning curve because the LPGA Tour’s best players are between ages 18 and 25, 30 at most.

“We have to graduate (college) players who are ready to play on the LPGA Tour or have a lot of success on the Futures Tour,” he says. “We can’t be graduating players that need a significant amount of time to develop.”

— Postmedia News

Best of the best

A list of some of the top Canadian female golfers of all time.

Gayle Hitchens Borthwick: won eight Canadian women’s amateur titles and three U.S. senior titles.

Jocelyne Bourassa: won two Canadian women’s amateur titles; only Canadian to win an LPGA Tour event on home soil, La Canadienne in 1973.

Dorothy Campbell Hurd Howe: Scottish-born winner of three Canadian women’s amateur titles, two British women’s amateur titles, three U.S. women’s amateur titles; member of the World Golf Hall of Fame.

Dawn Coe-Jones: won one Canadian women’s amateur title and three LPGA Tour events.

Mary Ann (Hayward) Lapointe: won four Canadian women’s amateur titles, one Canadian senior women’s title and one U.S. women’s mid-amateur title.

Ada Mackenzie: won five Canadian Ladies’ Open titles, five Canadian Ladies’ Closed titles and four Canadian senior women’s amateur titles.

Gail Harvey Moore: won three Canadian junior girls’ titles, one Canadian women’s amateur title, two Canadian Ladies’ Closed titles.

Sandra Post: won three Canadian junior girls’ titles; first Canadian to play on LPGA Tour, winning the 1968 LPGA Championship and seven other events.

Cathy Sherk: won two Canadian women’s amateur titles, one U.S. women’s amateur title and three Canadian PGA Women’s titles, also a former LPGA Tour competitor.

Marlene Stewart Streit: only golfer to win all of the Canadian, U.S. British and Australian Amateur titles, ; also a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame.

Lisa (Young) Walters: won three LPGA Tour titles.