Natalie Gulbis In Esquire Magazine

Natalie Gulbis In Esquire Magazine

The Change

The women's golf tour is starting to look a lot less- and a lot more like the men's

By Chris Jones
July 2006, Volume 146, Issue 1

FIRST THERE WERE THE GARDENS OF AUGUSTA, and then there was Las Vegas.

A week after the men had golfed in golden light at the Masters, surrounded by azaleas, jasmine, and cherry blossoms, the women gathered behind the strip's casinos, back where they hide their ugly things, their parking garages and cooling plants. The women teed off from the tips of the beat-down Las Vegas Country Club, divided from the fast-food joints and condominium dip pools by a low stone wall and stretches of wire fence. The fairways burst into clouds of dust rather than divots; the greens were scarred by scorch marks, like airport runways. In Augusta, everything looked as though it had been trimmed with tiny scissors. In Las Vegas, everything felt as though it had been cooked under heat lamps.

Only the finishing hole had been halfheartedly dressed up, with a few rows of wilting flowers planted beyond the murky pond that protects the green. That was the sum of what the women were afforded as back- drop. They didn't have the luxury of tradition to fall back on, or the drama of built-in legend. (The nearest named bridge was in Lake Havasu.) They didn't have an orchestra to carry them into the next commercial break, and no roaring galleries were there to spur them on. Hell, on the first day of the Takefuji Classic, the Neil Diamond tribute at the Riviera drew better. The women were almost entirely on their own, left to generate their own electricity and provide their own scenery. Good thing for the LPGA, then, that it now boasts the likes of Natalie Gulbis and Paula Creamer and Morgan Pressel and a few dozen other cute young things waiting in the pipeline—young women with a gift for holding your eyes, first when they pull on their smoking kilts and kneesocks, and next when they laser their opening drives 280 yards straight down your throat.

LINING UP HER FINAL approach at eighteen, Juli Inkster, the forty-five-year-old Hall of Famer, tried to ignore time and the giant sign that loomed behind her, erected beside the towering Las Vegas Hilton. MENOPAUSE, it proclaimed in great red block letters, THE MUSICAL.

The proximity of this salute to "the hilarious celebration of women and the Change" is the sort of easy rim shot that has plagued the Lesbians Playing Golf Association since its birth in 1950. In the sometimes unkind years since, the jokes and stereotypes have stacked up plenty high: Why do women golfers wear so much makeup and perfume? Because they're ugly and they stink. But now, for every woman out here wearing cargo shorts and black socks, there is another wearing a tennis skirt. For every set of Eastern Bloc shoul¬ders, there is a pair of West Coast legs.

For any number of reasons beyond the obvious, that's the change worth celebrating.

"If you haven't seen the LPGA in the last couple of years, then you haven't seen the LPGA," says Carolyn Bivens, the tour's image-savvy new commissioner—and, remarkably, its first female commis¬sioner since its inception. "It's just such an exciting time, like we're finally at the start of something big."

As if to drive home the point, Las Vegas golf fans woke up Thursday to boundless blue skies and a dream threesome. First, there was the twenty-three-year-old Gulbis, a part-time bikini model from nearby Henderson, Nevada. Joining her was Creamer, the perky, fashion-forward nineteen-year-old who was named the tour's top rookie last year and might as well permanently affix "teen sensation" to the front of her name. And rounding out the group was Brittany Lincicome, a tanned twenty-year-old Floridian and the owner of the aforementioned kilt.

The three of them gathered at the opening tee, each in her short skirt and tight top, each with straight white teeth, each with long hair in braids and ribbons, each waving politely when her name was called out by the starter and followed by cheers. And then, just to make sure that we knew they were more than pretty faces, each fired her drive straight down the left-hand side of the narrow fairway as though from a cannon. They made the long walk to their balls like roosters, with almost ridiculous, preening postures. Sun-drunk spectators—most of them middle-aged men sipping from cans of Miller Lite—collapsed in their wake. Here, on the other side of the ropes, were their wildest fantasies come to life: three attractive women with legs as long as flagsticks, and Creamer's drive the shortest among them at a picture-perfect 277 yards.

From Title IX to Tiger Woods, the ex¬planations for the LPGA's youth move¬ment are nearly as legion as the bad jokes used to be. Annika Sorenstam's pitting herself against the boys at the Colonial in 2003 raised the women's stature, and so have sixteen-year-old Michelle Wie's man-sized drives. But perhaps most im¬portant, the women of the LPGA, almost en masse, have suddenly embraced a more real feminism: They have decided that they don't need to look like men to compete alongside them.

Gulbis is the most famous ambassador of the new breed because she's the most centerfold daring. For each of her rounds in Las Vegas, she showed up wearing the sporting equivalent of a Catholic schoolgirl's uniform, with charm bracelets on her thin ankles and wrists. Happily, she can also play the game—she earned more than $1 million last year to finish sixth on the money list—meaning that the young girls tripping up behind their drooling fathers could see plenty to admire in her, too.

A first-round double bogey on eighteen hurt her chances for her first tour victory, but a second-round 69 saw her easily make the cut. (Creamer did, too, after following up her opening-round 70 with a 64, leaving her a stroke behind Lincicome, who shot 68 and 65—numbers that most golfers can only dream of.)

"I definitely got some flak when I was just a top-forty player," Gulbis says—after sitting down for a satellite feed with Best Damn Sports Show Period—alluding to her early notoriety for putting out her own swimsuit line and calendar, as well as for dating Ben Roethlisberger, the quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers. "After last year, I think my game has started to receive as much attention as anything else." She looks sideways into the sun and smiles: "Maybe I'm getting ugly."

Um, no.

THE POPULARITY of the LPGA has grown in fits and starts for the past decade. First would come a groundbreaker, and a legion of followers and new fans would be pulled along in her wake. Until now, most of the invaders have been foreign: The English arrived here, trailed by the Swedes. Se Ri Pak showed up, and now more than thirty Koreans play stateside. The Japanese are in hot pursuit with the arrival of Ai Miyazato and the approximately seventy-five reporters, photographers, and cameramen who record her every move. Perhaps the Mexicans are next, what with the success of delicate Lorena Ochoa, who tied the Las Vegas course record with a first-round 63, trailed by a pack of flag-waving supporters (and cheered long and loud by the men kept behind the fences at the country club, patching stucco and laying clay roof tiles).

But the majority of today's young raiders don't need a green card to play here. They come from California and Florida and Texas, light-kissed girls who have, quite literally, put down their pom-poms and picked up sticks. Creamer was twelve years old when her school told her she could either cheer from the sidelines of football games or play golf, one or the other, never both.

"It was a difficult decision," she says today. "My friends couldn't understand why I wanted to play golf when the popular girls were out cheerleading. But I thought there was more of a future in golf. I thought I was better at it. When I'm on the golf course, I'm so focused and so driven.... I'm like a dark, mean shade of pink."

Ah, pink. Apart from her first round in Las Vegas, when Creamer wore bad-ass black, she looked as though she were sponsored by pink. She wore pink skirts, pink shirts, and pink ribbons in her hair; the shaft of her driver was pink; the grip on her wedge was pink; her bag had pink trim; she and her (male) caddie wore pink caps; her sunglasses had pink frames; during her last round, she even played with a hot-pink ball.

Pink, in all of its shades, has become her signature, and in that, on this tour, Creamer is a revolutionary. Because she won four events during her rookie season, and because, in the admiring words of Inkster, "she wants to beat everybody's brains in," she has earned enough respect to get away with what was once a sin.

At last, pink has been reclaimed. It is no longer weak or soft, and it is no longer the exclusive dominion of Hustler. Out here, in freethinking Las Vegas, pink is the new color of money.

LATE ON FRIDAY NIGHT, after the women had headed to the range or back to their hotels to ready themselves for Saturday's final round, I made for my favorite drinking hole in Las Vegas: the threadbare lounge inside Westward Ho, at the old end of the strip, where I could put ten dollars down on the bar and pretty Manuela would bring me eight ice-cold Heinekens and keep two bucks for herself.

Unfortunately, when my cab dropped me off next door at Slots-A-Fun, as instructed, I discovered that Westward Ho had become a smoking hole in the ground, waiting to be filled in by whatever huge, polished casino will take its place.

There is something about change even for the better that can be heartbreaking, and Las Vegas is no place to fall in love. There was a kind of sadness in seeing Juli Inkster with MENOPAUSE breathing down her back and the LPGA's older, pleated-pants-wearing players losing the one place where they found self-redemption. They are on the cusp of losing the genuine warmth of their cozy tour; it has started to disappear around them, leveled to make room for something with a little more neon.

You could feel it crackling on Saturday morning. "It's in the air," said Christina Kim, one of the tour's spark plugs, a funny, profane Californian ("I prefer sausage to tacos," she says on the topic of sexual orientation) who holds the record for the lowest score at any United States Golf

Association event, a 62 back in 2001.Although only twenty-two, Kim was so struck by the pace of change around her that last summer she began to feel old somehow. Not quite menopausal, but a little as though she was being left behind. Unhip, maybe. Or, perhaps as a girl who has always taken pride in being the life of the party, Kim suddenly felt as though she was missing out on the fun.

It was time, she decided, for a personal makeover. She's lost thirty-three pounds over the past couple of months, ditched her plain-Jane duds, and even tossed away her trademark—a massive collection of Kangol hats.

This year, she strutted through Las Vegas in a short white skirt, a tight black top, and funky red shoes, with her eyes hidden behind wicked-cool shades and her long hair held back by a colorful silk scarf. Fact was, formerly chubby Christina Kim looked fabulous. And having paid heed to Paula Creamer's squeaky-voiced counsel ("If you look good, you'll play good"), she was also in contention on Saturday—like Creamer, like Gulbis, like Lincicome—ready to give Ochoa a run for her money.

"The men still wear their long pants," Kim says with the hint of a sneer. "We're different."

Better than the men, even, the women are closing in on the balance that makes for the most beautiful golf, that equipoise between power and finesse, aggression and ease, grit and art. Their short games still might need a little work, and nobody would complain about being able to play on courses that are more oases than salt flats. But perhaps the change should stop there, as though teetering on the edge of a red desert cliff, allowing those things that have always been good about the LPGA to survive alongside the new and improved. Then everything—birdies and good skin and warmth and sand saves and long hair—would hang there perfectly.

It was just that perfect when Ochoa set up her final approach in the footsteps of Inkster, under a dying sun. On the fairway of the par-5 eighteenth, and with a two-stroke lead in her back pocket, she decided not to play it safe. Rather than laying up before the pond, she tried to clear it.

It was a risky play undertaken by a slight whisper of a woman, which made it seem all the riskier. But Ochoa dropped her well-launched ball safely long, and she followed it proudly into the gallery's embrace. A chip and a putt and she had herself one last birdie and the win, and the Mexicans who had been following her stormed the green in a big screaming gang, dousing her in a fountain of beer and champagne.

Lincicome had already finished third, Creamer in a tie for sixth, Gulbis in a tie for seventeenth. Each had earned a check. Each would have better liked to have taken Ochoa's place in the middle of the celebration, but watching from the gallery, seeing the champagne soak into the grass, they knew that this was nearly as good a moment for them. It was one of those moments that made the past feel more distant than it is and the future more limitless—as though, after all these years, there might soon be no more shame in golfers being girls.

Reprinted from Esquire.com