A Wonderful Career for our 1960 WEGA Amateur Champion!
(article reprinted from the October 2002 Golf Journal)

THE FIVE USGA SENIOR WOMEN'S AMATEURS Carolyn Cudone won are not etched in her mind in precise detail. They are, instead, stunningly devoid of detail.. Though she surely knew it at the time, for instance, the fact that Cudone won her first title, in 1968, by double digits comes as a surprise to her.
   "I did?" Cudone responds upon hearing that fact and drawing back in a gesture of amazement. "By 10 shots?" There's a moment of reflection before she snaps back to reality and admits cheerfully, "Wow, that's pretty good."
   The 1971 victory that made Cudone the only person to win the same USGA championship four years running doesn't stick out, either. It's the one for good measure she took the following year at Manufacturers' Golf & Country Club in Fort Washington, Pa., that jogs her memory. "The last one was the big surprise," she says. "Helen Sigel Wilson was eligible and it was her neck of the woods. It was a foregone conclusion in my mind that she was going to win. So I was out there beating it around." Cudone beat it to a six-stroke win, matching the 54-hole championship scoring record she'd set in 1969. 
   Cudone, now 84, didn't win every Senior Women's Amateur; it just seems that way. But she claimed half of the 10 she entered and never finished worse than fourth. "Not bad," she muses.    So, why didn't she win on her home course, Dunes Golf & Beach Club in Myrtle Beach, S.C., in 1977? "I don't know why, but 1 didn't play particularly well," she says. "Whether it was because all my friends were out watching me, 1 don't know, but 1 really hacked it. ... That's the only way 1 can describe it."

CUDONE WAS RAISED ON STATEN ISLAND, N.Y., in a family whose dinner conversations usually included golf. She and her mother won a few Women's Metropolitan Golf Association (WMGA) mother- daughter titles and her father was a professional at two New England clubs during the summer. Carolyn became an absolute terror in New York metropolitan area events. Before her husband, Philip, sold his business and they retired to Myrtle Beach, she'd collared five New Jersey State Women's Amateur, 11 New Jersey stroke-play and five WMGA match-play titles. She went deep into match play at the U.S. Women's Amateur a few times, but never included herself among the game's premier players.
     "It's that top echelon that you always hope for," she says, "but it never occurred to me that I would be good enough."   Cudone's inability to win the U.S. Women's Amateur can be summarized in two words: Polly Riley. In a five-year span, Riley eliminated her three times: in the 1953 semifinals, when Riley won the first extra hole for her only lead of the match; the third round in 1955 and the fourth round in 1958. "That's sickening," says Cudone.  "I kept trying. That's all I could do."
    Ironically, while Cudone remembers little of her Senior Women's Amateur triumphs, nearly half a century later, the details of that 1953 match, played at Rhode Island Country Club, are clearer. "I was 2 up with four to play, or something like that," she recalls, "and I ended up going to 19 with Polly. I hit a super tee shot. She hit one that was almost out of bounds on the right. I don't remember her second shot; I know she scrounged it up on the green, somehow. But my second shot was so well hit, and whatever it hit short of the green, it flew and went into the bunker at the back of the green. Of course I didn't take two to get down; I took three. So that ended that."
    The most memorable year of Cudone's career was 1956, when she was unexpectedly added to the Curtis Cup team.
    "[Then USGA executive director] Joe Dey called me up," she remembered. "Betty Probasco was named to the team, but she was pregnant and she couldn't play. So he called to ask me if I would substitute for her. That was the first time, I think, that an alternate was named to the team."
    That was the last Curtis Cup team to travel to Britain by ocean liner. "It was great fun," she says. "I remember Wiffy Smith and Barbara Romack ordering steak for lunch and steak for dinner. We dressed for dinner; it was really fancy. You almost forgot you were a golfer. We hit balls off the back of the ship, but for seven days you were away from it."
    The weather was gorgeous for the first few days in Kent, England, but it turned. "The day we played the wind was coming from this angle," Cudone says, extending an arm to a near-horizontal position. "It was stinging. My caddie said to me, 'I'll give you four practice balls.' [At the time, players hit range balls, then caddies collected them so they could continue.]
    "I said, 'Four balls? I can't go out there in just four balls.'
    "He said, 'You hit those four and maybe I'll let you hit them again.' So he brought them in and let me hit them again. I hit one that hit Polly Riley's caddie right on the top of the head. His knees buckled and he went down. And of course I'm dyin'!  I'm going 'My God, I've killed a caddie!' 
    "In the meantime, they're calling us to the tee. ... Here I've just clobbered this kid in the head, but my caddie said, 'Pay it no mind. He'll be out drinkin' beer tonight.' You couldn't convince me.  I said, 'Please take care of him. Give him anything he wants.' I was a wreck We lost the first two or three holes before I came to my senses."
    The U.S. lost the match, 5-4, but the fact that she had been picked for the team did wonders for Cudone's confidence. That year's U.S. Women's Amateur, strictly a match-play event at the time, was played at Meridian Hills Country Club in Indianapolis, Ind.  Cudone's first-round opponent was Ann Gregory, the  first African-American to play in the championship.
    "We had a 10 a.m. starting time, or something like that, on Monday," she says. "You never see anyone there then, right?
    Well, you couldn't fight your way to that tee. She drove, polite round of applause. I hit one, big round of applause. We get out there and she's 20 yards ahead of me! We're walking off the first tee and she says, 'Carol, if I don't count right, it's not on purpose.' ... All I could say was, 'I'm sure you will.' " After Cudone won at the 17th, Gregory "shook my hand and said, 'My husband told me that I didn't have a chance that a snowball had in hell, but I fooled' em for a little while.' "     One part of Cudone's game that let her down was her putting. At her first Women's Amateur, in 1939, she missed qualifying for match play by a single stroke because she four-putted the last green. "Oh, it was a tricky green, and it had a big roll in it," she says. "I was up beyond the hole and, whooo, it was a doozy."                                                            
    Now there's a moment she'd like to forget.

Congratulations to our Eastern Participants!

Courtney Swaim (2001 Amateur Champion) and Carole Semple Thompson (right) 
members of the victorious 2002 U.S. Curtis Cup Team

   The One to Beat

    Hall of Famer Greene Isn't Done Yet

       By Tim Geary 

 I was surprised because I was going in with the likes of Joanne Carner and Glena Collette Vare and I know I'm definitely on a level below them. "I think a lot of it was because I've lived here so long and am so old, but it meant so much to me. It was kind of a culmination of everything that I've done in golf.

"It was overwhelming." 
Greene may have been shocked at last year's selection, but it would have been more shocking if she hadn't been.

For the committee that was entrusted with electing the first class of enshrinees, Julie Greene's selection was a no-brainer.  Her body of work glitters with achievement: 11 RIWGA state titles, the most by anyone, two Eastern Amateur titles, two Tri- State (Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts) crowns, a pair of New England championships (one junior and one senior) and two appearances in the U.S. Women's Amateur quarterfinals where she was twice eliminated by future LPGA Hall of Famer, Beth Daniel.

Greene won her first state title in 1963, at age 27, and her most recent in 1998, when she was 62, and that was her third in succession. While she cut back dramatically on her competitive golf the last few years, she sent a message to all the youngsters during her induction speech, announcing that she was making a comeback this year.  "I think I have at least one more in me," she told the huge gathering at Lincoln's Kirkbrae Country Club.  When reminded of that statement a few months later, Rhode Island's first lady of golf shook her head. "I think that was a false sense of bravado, brought about by the excitement of the night. But I do think I still have the game to compete, thanks largely to the technology. I have an attitude that I honestly know I can do it. I just have to put it together."

Greene says that she has a better approach to the game than she did when she could overpower the rest of the field.

"As a kid I was typical. I tended to fly off the handle a little too much expected too much out of myself and I was impatient.

"Since I've grown older, I've learned that I'm going to hit bad shots and when I do I just forget about them and go on to the next shot."

Julie Greene grew up in Barrington, across the street from the fourth hole at RICC, the youngest of three children. She and her brother and sister, Marshall and Marilyn, learned the game from their father, Raymond.

"I grew up in an athletic family," she says. "My father was a fine golfer and a very patient man and he took all three of us over on the 4th hole and we worked on our games. 1 was lucky enough to be blessed with his genes."  Brother Marshall would caddy for his father, but he turned to sailing and became very accomplished, as did sister Marilyn in tennis and golf.  Julie did everything. She skied, played tennis, field hockey and lacrosse and today, at age 66, still runs up and down the lacrosse and field hockey fields as a high school official.

She graduated from the Lincoln School in Providence, matriculated to Skidmore College, where she earned a B.S. in Physical Education and then earned a Masters in student personnel at Syracuse University.  

She taught collegiate phys-ed at Colby Sawyer, Colorado, Colorado State, Cortland State and finally Sarah Lawrence before devoting the final 11 years of her career in education as the Director of Physical Education at Lincoln School, retiring from teaching in 1995.

And during the summers she dominated Rhode Island women's amateur golf like nobody since Vare.  Of all the sports in which she has competed, Greene says that golf is both the most challenging and unique.  "I played just about every sport and nothing can compare to golf. It's a leveler. One day you can go out and score in the 80s and the next in the low 70s and you don't know what the difference was. You just have to live with it. It's so unpredictable. You don't know from one day to the next what's going to come out of your game. It's a very humbling sport."

Greene may be retired, but only from making money. She's still very involved in a variety of volunteer projects, which include teaching the fundamentals of golf to young ladies at The Buttonhole Youth Learning Center, officiating lacrosse and field hockey and administrating a golf elderhostel program at her winter home of Palm Coast, Fla. She loves working with kids and is amazed at the talent they possess. "It's incredible how well coached and disciplined these kids are," she said. "It's scary. I work on the USGA Junior Girls Committee and each year I go to the national tournament and I'm seeing 12-year-old girls who can hit the ball further than I can - and I'm not a short hitter. Golf has taken such a huge step forward for girls in recent years and I think it's fantastic."

Many of the ladies with whom she was scheduled to tee it up with in this year's RIWGA state amateur weren't born when Greene won her first state title. In fact some of their mothers had yet to come into the world, but when she steps onto the first tee at Potowomut Country Club this July and her name is announced, every member in the field understands that Julie Greene, age 66, is still the player to beat. 

This is what golf is all about....

By Al Gregson

YORK, PA. -- Last Wednesday was not a good day for Cynthia Bowser.

The Pleasant Valley regular from Stewartstown made three birdies, but didn’t break 80 in the second round of the 2002 Women’s Eastern Amateur Championship at the Country Club of York.

On the 17^th hole, a difficult par 3 of 158 yards tucked into the woods, Bowser hit a long, straight tee shot right at the green.  In one of those cruel breaks of golf, the ball was within two yards of the green, hidden by a dead branch, but it wasn’t discovered until too late.

“The ball went over the green but we couldn’t find it,” Bowser said.

Before the five-minute search period was over, Bowser told her fellow competitor, Cynthia Skilton of Penn State, to keep looking while she went back to the tee.

With play backing up behind the twosome, Bowser took a hurried swing at her third shot. It bounded down the hill to the right of the green, among the trees.  Thinking that ball, too, might be lost, she prepared to hit a provisional.  At that point, Skilton started waving her arms behind the green.

“The ball was just a couple of feet behind the green, covered by a branch,” Bowser related. “She (Skilton) must have thought, ‘Why is she hitting when I found her ball?’ Bowser said.  But once the second ball was hit from the tee, it became the ball in play and the first ball was officially lost, according to the Rules of Golf.

Bowser found her second ball, but had to take an unplayable lie. Her fourth stroke. She took two more to escape the woods, then chipped one long and finally chipped on.  She made the putt. Had the original ball been found in time, Bowser would have been chipping for a 2 and putting for a par.

But it gets worse.

The scene shifts to the practice putting green after the round. A reporter, trying to piece together overheard fragments of a story, asks, “When did you find your ball?”  “About 30 seconds after I hit the other one,” Bowser replies.  Bowser tells the reporter her story.

“. . . so I took the unplayable. Then it took me two more to get out of the woods. Then I chipped on and two-putted.”

A troubled look crosses Bowser’s face and she calls Skilton over from the putting green. Bowser had counted 8 strokes and Skilton had marked down that score.

Now they try to reconstruct the play of the hole.  “I forgot about the (penalty stroke for the) unplayable,” she bursts out. “How could you be so stupid?” she berates herself.  “I was so cranked at the time that it was hard to remember what I had done,” she tells the reporter.  “Well I’m just going to have to DQ. I’ve got to tell the officials.”

Putting on a brave face, Bowser says, “Oh well, I won’t have to take another day of vacation (to play the following day).”  The reporter looks over at Bowser. She looks back at him, in case there is any doubt.

“Golf is a game of honor,” she states emphatically. “We call penalties on ourselves.”

Just to make sure, the two players go over the play of No. 17 one more time. Bowser thinks she two-putted, but Skilton assures her she knocked in the first putt. At the time Bowser had raised her arms in mock triumph.  They count the strokes again. Tee shot, lost ball, hitting 3 from the tee, an unplayable. Two to get out of the woods, then a chip and a putt. That’s 8.

“There are golf gods,” Bowser exclaims.

She had forgotten the penalty stroke for the unplayable lie, but she had also forgotten about the one-putt. The two errors canceled and the score was correct.  Or so she thought at the time.

An 8 is an 8. If you hit the ball six times and take two penalties, it’s an 8. As the old golf axiom goes: It’s not how. It’s how many.  Later that day, the reporter checked the official tournament rundown and the next day’s tee times on his computer.  He was astonished to find DQ next to Cynthia Bowser’s name. So he called her up.  “Hi,” she said in apparent good spirits.

When asked how come she was disqualified after checking over her score and believing it to be correct, she explained it this way:  “I went over it in my mind again and realized that I had forgotten a chip shot when I recounted. My first chip ran over the green and I had to chip back before I made that putt. And that made it a 9, not an 8, so I went right over and told the committee.”

The committee had no choice. Had Bowser gotten an 8 but signed for a 9 on the scorecard, the 9 would count. But if a player signs for a lower score than she actually makes on a hole, the player is disqualified under Rule 6-6d.

“I can’t believe I was that stupid,” Bowser said. “Oh well, I’ve got to get some laundry done and some packing because I’m leaving in two days for the Publinx.” Her mood was upbeat and positive.  “There was no way I would do anything other than report the error to the committee,” Bowser reiterated.

Last Wednesday was not a good day for Cynthia Bowser.  But it was a good day for golf

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Today, Bowser is at the Meadows Course in Sunriver, Ore., for the 26^th U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links. On Tuesday, she’ll be one of 144 players to begin stroke play.  After 36 holes the field will be pared to the low 64 players, who will begin match play on Thursday with the finals on Sunday.

However far Cindy Bowser goes in the tournament or in her golfing life, a reporter is hoping the golf gods will smile warmly down upon her.

Her earlier words still echo in the reporter’s mind.  “Golf is a game of honor.”