That Palmer Is A Player

Success has snuck up on Sandra Palmer. It has arrived so unobtrusively that even now when someone asks her, "What next?" she will say, "I want to be No. 1," overlooking the fact that finally she is No. 1.

With a single tournament to go on the LPGA tour, Sandra has $75,885 in official earnings, and her place at the top of the 1975 money list is secure. JoAnne Carner, last year's leader, is in second place with $64,353 and could not overtake her, even if she were to win the Bill Branch Classic this week.

In her 12th year of professional golf, Palmer not only collected the richest purse on the tour, $32,000, at the Colgate-Dinah Shore event in Palm Springs in April, but she also finished in the top ten 18 times, or in 70% of the tournaments she entered.

In September, Seagram's gave her a check for $10,000 and "a beyootiful trophy this high" for being the best female professional in golf. She sat on a dais at the Waldorf-Astoria among her peers—Joe Morgan, Chris Evert, Mean Joe Greene and others—and chattered over the tournedos with Bernie Parent. "He spoke French and I spoke Texan," she says. "You can imagine what we did to those people."

But most significant of all, in July, 34-year-old Sandra Palmer won the U.S. Women's Open and thereby entered golf history alongside Babe Zaharias, Betsy Rawls, Mickey Wright and the rest. When the Open was finally hers and she came off the long, wind-whipped Atlantic City Country Club course, the winner by four strokes over Carner, Sandra Post and amateur Nancy Lopez, one of the very first things she said was, "Now that I've won the Open I want to do it again, just to prove to myself it was no fluke."

Palmer has spent a good part of her life proving, first to herself and then to the rest of the world, that she is no fluke. She discovered golf through a school-bus window when she was 13 and she was determined to play it. But first she had to overcome a few obstacles. One of them was her height—a 5'1�" golfer has problems. It means that just about everybody else is going to be longer off the tee. It also means that hitting a fairway wood, for instance, is going to be a riskier proposition than it is for a taller player.

"The longer a club is, the harder it is to get back to the ball after you've taken the clubhead away," she says. "And the more upright you are, the less chance there is of error. Carol Mann and JoAnne Carner and Kathy Whitworth, if they are on their games, should beat me every time. They should be able to repeat the swing more consistently than I do, but because I work harder I think I'm more consistent. There are people better coordinated than I am and with more ability, but if I had to choose, I'd take somebody with confidence over somebody with natural talent."

Palmer has always had determination enough for 10 golfers, but her confidence was many years in catching up. "I can't tell you why I wanted to play pro golf," she says. "I wasn't any good. But it was a challenge. It's so much harder to hit a golf ball than a tennis ball. It is an art and you can never perfect it."

Although she had won the West Texas Amateur five times and the Texas Amateur once, it was seven years before Sandra won her first professional tournament, an unofficial event in Japan toward the end of the 1970 season. It was the next spring before she won a tour tournament, the Sealy Classic in Las Vegas.

All those years she had been working on her game without letup. Even while she was still teaching high school in Arlington, Texas near her Fort Worth home and saving money for her assault on the tour, she was driving 200 miles each weekend to Austin for lessons with teaching pro Harvey Penick. Every Friday evening for a year she spent the night with friends or with Penick's family. She would practice all day Saturday and Sunday and then head back to Fort Worth in time for school Monday morning. "Harvey taught me the uses of practice and concentration," she says. Nobody on the tour has learned those lessons better. For a month before this year's Open, for instance, she practiced hitting wedge shots out of high grass in preparation for the USG A rough. And she played at least 18 holes every day for two weeks at the site of the Dinah Shore, studying the tricky ways of Mission Hill's tortuous greens.