Golf Women

A new $650,000 LPGA event will be played in February at Oakmont Country Club in Glendale. The Los Angeles Women's Championship has a three-year agreement to stage the event at Oakmont, which hosted an LPGA tournament from 1985-87. The new tournament fills a void in the early-season LPGA schedule Feb. 13-16 and becomes the first LPGA event in Los Angeles since 1989, the last year of a tournament at Rancho Park. Other women's events failed in Buena Park, Santa Barbara and San Diego.

Two women who want to play golf alongside men during the coveted early morning hours on Saturdays have challenged what they say is a discriminatory practice at the local country club that restricts women from teeing off at certain times. Linda S. Gordon and Elaine Nevin allege in an Orange County Superior Court lawsuit filed this week that the Old Ranch Country Club limits women from the golf course during some weekend hours, resulting in sexual discrimination.

The University of Miami, which had urged that a decision on possible sanctions against it be rendered before Sunday's bowl invitations were handed out, got its wish Friday when the NCAA stripped the Hurricane football program of 24 scholarships and banned it from playing in a bowl game for one season. The penalties handed down by the NCAA infractions committee were for rules violated under former coaches Dennis Erickson and Jimmy Johnson.

At times in her golf career, Cathy Mockett has come up agonizingly short. Twice she missed winning her LPGA Tour card by one stroke. A year ago, Mockett's anguish was more intense. Tendinitis in her shoulder made it impossible to swing a club without pain, bringing up a frightening thought. "It got so bad it was unbearable," said Mockett, a 1986 graduate of Newport Harbor High.

Catrin Nilsmark is defending champion. But of what? The 23-year-old native of Goteborg, Sweden, won the Valley of the Stars tournament at Oakmont Country Club in Glendale last February. Nilsmark begins play today in the tournament's new incarnation, the Los Angeles Women's Championship at Wood Ranch Golf Club. As defending champion. "I liked [Oakmont] and I would have liked to go back there," she said. "But it's not a big deal. You go wherever the tour takes you."

As LPGA tournaments go, the $750,000 L.A. Women's Championship at Wood Ranch Golf Club in Simi Valley promises to be both less and more than advertised. Forget the billboards featuring Annika Sorenstam. She didn't turn in her application in time. Don't look for last year's top two money-winners, Karrie Webb and Juli Inkster. They are absent too.

My first golf lesson, from a macho pro at a Caribbean resort, was so miserable that I didn't play again for five years. I wilted under the broiling sun and the scornful gaze of my instructor, who ordered me to do this, do that--rarely disguising his disgust at having to teach a nervous neophyte instead of a real golfer who could appreciate his pithy pointers. I ditched the sport faster than I could yell "Fore!"

Looks like the good old boys network is getting a woman's touch. At least, the Executive Women's Golf Assn. hopes it is. The Florida-based national organization with Orange, Los Angeles and San Diego County chapters, encourages professional women to learn golf as a tool for enhancing business relationships and creating personal friendships. Through it, businesswomen once left out of the loop because they never made it to corporate outings on the links now make deals and break 80.

Leisl Hasbrouck has not yet hit a shot for the Aliso Niguel girls' golf team, but she has already become the talk of the Sea View League. A freshman who moved to Orange County from Louisiana over the summer, Hasbrouck brings to the Wolverines a resume loaded with impressive accomplishments, a solid golf swing and a level of maturity far beyond her 14 years.