And he said why don’t you relax, and I said I don’t want to step on your toes. And I said I’m out of my comfort zone, and he said now you know how I felt.”Įqually a star in the early days of the event was the golf course at Mission Hills, designed by Desmond Muirhead. “That evening or the next evening, I can’t remember which, we had a cocktail party we had to go to and Lawrence Welk asked me to dance,” Berning said. At the time, a majority of the 30 other events on the LPGA had purses around $25,000 or $30,000. The Colgate-Dinah Shore Winner’s Circle, as it was first known, also brought the largest purse in women’s golf at $110,000. Berning was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame earlier this month.
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Open, that was the first time we had been on television, and it was just the final three holes,” said Susie Maxwell Berning, a three-time winner of the Open and now a teaching pro at The Reserve Club in Indian Wells.
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“The only time we had tournaments that were on TV were the major events, so all of a sudden David Foster (president and later chairman of Colgate-Palmolive) putting this event on TV, the way he did, made us all somebody,” Caponi-Byrnes said. High-profile names like Mickey Wright and Kathy Whitworth also were in the field. The limited field included three of the LPGA founders from 1950 with Louise Suggs, Marilynn Smith and desert resident Marlene Hagge. View Gallery: PHOTOS: Memorable leaps into Poppie's Pond by ANA Inspiration winners The desert now had two nationally televised tournaments, each important to their respective tours, beaming green fairways, blue skies and snowcapped mountains to millions of viewers who might still be digging out from snowstorms. In addition, each tournament had a famous host, Bob Hope on the PGA Tour and Dinah Shore on the women's tour. The new LPGA tournament also helped the Coachella Valley cement its place as one of the world's great golf destinations. I mean, you hated that it was only once a year.” “It was so well-publicized and put on TV and the entertainment that was there,” said Donna Caponi-Byrnes, a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame and the 1980 winner of the desert's LPGA event. “It was just the best event. That’s what made the inaugural 1972 Colgate-Dinah Shore Winner’s Circle so important for women’s golf.Īs the tournament now known as the Chevron Championship is played in the desert for the 51st and final time next week, LPGA pros from the desert who played in the event’s first decade are recalling how transformational the Colgate-Dinah Shore was for the LPGA that was just 22 years old and still struggling for recognition and sponsorship. That same fight 50 years ago was exponentially more difficult, with television and most of the male-dominated corporate world simply ignoring women’s sports. With varying degrees of success, women’s sports from basketball to soccer to golf have fought the difficult battle in recent years for equal media coverage, equal attention from sponsors and even equal pay with men’s sports.