Dateline July 31, 2019, Janice Qualifies
On to Pete and Bunny's. We spent a night at the Indiana Dunes State Park, right on the shore of Lake Michigan, and then drove the few hours up to Libertyville, Illinois, and the home of Pete and Bunny.
We met Pete and Bunny on that same Alaska trip where we met Ari and Hedi, and we have got together with them many times since, playing the Alabama golf trail out of our RVs and traveling clear to New Zealand and Australia for golf and the sights. Bunny even made a hole in one at the Cape Kidnappers course in New Zealand.
We wanted a few days with them, and so Janice had picked Chicago, of all the qualifying sites, to take her run at the USGA Senior Women's Amateur, at the Glenview Golf Club. We caught up over good wine and good food and family stories, and at one point went down to help Pete get a computer onto the internet, only to find at the foot of the stairs a hundred model airplanes, which Pete flies for a hobby. What a sight.
Gracious hosts, the both of them.
The qualifier. Janice played a practice round on the thirtieth, to get a good look at the course and to plan her way around each hole for the real thing the next day. The Glenview is a municipal course, and a hidden gem at that, in fine condition and a real test, a happy surprise all around.
Janice teed off at twenty to nine with two other qualifiers. We sat near the first tee and watched a few of the kids go off ahead, the fifty-year-olds, snapping their clubs onto their backs and marching down the fairway as if they were thirty. At seventy, Janice only laughed and said, what happens, happens.
She opened with a double bogey, then bogeys on each of the next two, and figured it could only get better from there. She reckoned a round of 80 would be enough to qualify. The front nine kept after her, and she made the turn at 43.
We had a good laugh over it, just glad to be out there trading shots with the kids at seventy, and Janice said she was simply going to enjoy the back nine. Well, enjoy it she did. A bogey at the tenth, and then her game came together, another bogey, a handful of birdies, the rest pars, and she came home in 37, which gave her the 80 she thought she needed.
The playoff, and the putt. It came down to a playoff, back out on the sixteenth, a 504-yard par five. Janice hit a fine drive, just into the rough off the fairway, then a good second that left her about 110 yards in, and from there she put her ball on the green, some 8 feet from the cup. One of the others struck a beauty to about 12 feet and rolled it in for a birdie, while the other two missed. Then it was Janice's turn, with a putt that, if it fell, would send her to Cedar Rapids. Just a little pressure. She sank it.
The old lady, she laughed, had beaten the kids, the oldest qualifier in all of Chicago. Janice could hardly believe she was bound for the USGA Senior Women's Amateur in Iowa at the end of August.
One last evening. We went back to Pete and Bunny's for a fine dinner and a few more drinks, and the next morning Janice asked Pete how on earth his internet was crawling along at barely four megabits. Out he came with a Netgear Orbi router that had sat in its box more than a year; his son-in-law had promised it would fix things but never put it in. We had the same ones at home, and about thirty minutes later Pete was humming along at seventy. Then it was time to roll, bound for Cedar Rapids and a look at the country club that would host the championship at summer's end.
