Bernadette Luse remembers it as if it were yester … well, at least as if it were last year.
Last June, as a 22-year-old former University of Mississippi golfer who wasn’t yet a regular on the LPGA Tour, Luse walked up to the first tee in South Hadley, Mass., heard her name announced to the crowd and stepped up to hit her first shot in her first U.S. Women’s Open.
“I was scared to death,” she said with a laugh Wednesday at Cherry Hills Country Club. “I thought I might top it off the first tee. I hit it in the right rough. I thought I hit it good, but it didn’t quite catch the fairway.
“For about the next five holes, I told my dad, ‘I’m going to throw up!’ He was like, ‘Uh, you really need to calm down, it’s not that big of a deal.’ I said, ‘That’s easy for you to say, Dad, you’re not playing in the U.S. Open.”‘
The first tee, of course, can be intimidating, for a public course hacker hoping nobody in the clubhouse witnesses a whiff, or an elite player about to begin her first U.S. Open round.
Luse shot 159 for 36 holes last year and missed the cut. This year, the former ballet dancer who didn’t take up golf until she was 15 has been on the tour full-time, making four cuts and earning $15,120 as a struggling rookie.
“I’m not quite as intimidated by the competition as I was last year,” she said on the eve of the 2005 Open. “I’m much more confident.”
But that doesn’t mean she has shed the nervousness.
“Today on the putting green I was having trouble making 3-footers,” she said, “And I looked at my caddie and I was like, ‘What’s my problem?’ He said, ‘Will you calm down?’ Hopefully, the nerves will subside after one or two holes this time, and not five or six like last year.”
Kristen Samp, at long last, will be in that rookie position today. She is 31 and jokes that she has been “trying to quit golf for four years.” She finally qualified for LPGA Tour exempt status for this season on her seventh try and has made three cuts, with a top finish of 61st in the Chick-fil-A Charity Championship.
“I’ve been trying to get in the Open since the last part of college,” the former University of Missouri golfer said. “So I’ve been trying for the better part of a decade. I’d finally become OK about it, saying, ‘If I get in, I get in, and if I don’t, I don’t.’ So this will be great, and I’m looking forward to it.”
And the experience of hearing her name announced on the first tee? Was she nervous?
“Not yet,” she said with a laugh. “I think anytime you get the opportunity to do something important and exciting, you should be nervous”
Former Ohio State golfer Allison Hanna, 23, is playing on the Futures Tour this year, and the U.S. Open will be only her second event against LPGA Tour players. But the Portland, Ore., native has been at the past two Opens – 2003 as the first alternate and 2004 as the 32nd-place finisher, with a 291.
Showing up but not playing as the first alternate two years ago “kind of got the ‘wow’ factor out of it.”
“I was able to go, ‘OK, there’s so and so, this and that, and if I had teed it up that year, it probably would have been a lot different,” Hanna said. “That really helped ease me into the tournament last year. After the first tee, I felt pretty confident.”
That first shot, she said, “would have been easier if I’d hit a driver, but it was a 5-wood and it was, ‘Just make contact with this one.”‘
Staff writer Terry Frei can be reached at 303-820-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
