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By Chris Cox
Embarking on the challenge of writing this year’s Women in Golf feature started where most things do—Google. To be fair, the search engine is generally a reliable outlet for sparking creativity. Only this time, the results were a little unnerving.
Those first few pages featured no tales of inspiration, barrier-breaking females turning the game on its head, or crusading women kicking butt and taking names. Instead, it was merely list after list of “the world’s hottest golfers!” A handful tactfully used “beautiful” instead, for whatever that’s worth.
Only after diving down the Google rabbit hole were some of golf’s female innovators profiled for their accomplishments on and around the course. Let’s hope no young girl looking up future role models has to dig so deeply.
There are countless women out there impacting golf in a myriad of ways, and you’ll see just a sampling of those on the following pages. There are those rising to prominence in key positions, others building golf empires, and some working at the local level to build the game from the ground up.
This month, Golf Business highlights just a few of those women and the clout they carry in the game. They are knocking down the walls of golf’s boys’ club and putting their own fingerprints on the game, carefully shaping its future in the process.
Opening Doors
The ink was barely dry on the deal that delivered Innisbrook Resort and Golf Club to Sheila Johnson’s burgeoning Salamander Hotels empire. But that didn’t slow the flood of phone calls and emails the businesswoman and entrepreneur would receive in the weeks that followed.
“I started getting inquiries from many golfers from all over the country…wanting to know if they were welcome,” she says. “This is something the golf industry has been very guilty of, the exclusion.”
It was an exclusion Johnson, America’s first African-American female billionaire, understood all too well. And it was one she was more than happy to squash at first chance.
“I wanted to make sure our gates were open for everyone to come to not only stay, but also experience our fine golf courses,” she explains. “That’s what was really important to me.”
Johnson, the co-founder of BET and co-owner of three D.C. professional sports franchises, believes her foray into the golf industry has come full-circle. As an African-American female, the sport wasn’t a viable outlet to her as a child. But now she’s leading the charge, opening the gates for everyone regardless of race, gender or social status.
“I’m very proud of the fact that I have been given the opportunity, by whatever doors that have opened, to be able to offer golf to everyone,” Johnson says. “Diversity is a huge issue not just in sports, but across corporate America. I think if we’re able to level the playing field for everyone, then I think I’ve helped to change the game, so to speak.”
The philanthropist has her own ambitions for leveling the playing field beyond merely inclusion at Salamander’s six locations, which include Reunion, Hammock Beach and Innisbrook, home of the PGA Tour’s Valspar Championship. A hotel in Destin, Florida, is scheduled to open later this summer.
The 50 students in her Sheila C. Johnson Leadership Fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School will all receive a set of golf clubs and lessons upon graduation, so they can close deals on the course. Additionally, her hotels host executive women’s retreats where Innisbrook’s golf director explains the sport’s business benefits.
“Everyone needs to do this. Everyone,” she maintains. “This cannot continue to be the best-kept secret of corporate America or of golf clubs.”
Count Johnson in that group, too. She has built a drive, chip and putt area at her home and plans to learn right alongside her peers. “I want people to start playing the game of golf again,” she says. “And I’ll be out there with them.”
A Family All Her Own
Though she grew up tangled deep within the fabric of the golf community, Ann MacDonald never quite took to the sport as a child. Her father, Frank Simoni, constructed Brookmeadow Country Club in 1966 after falling in love with the sport near the end of a successful career as a developer. And now her mother Betty owns the course, which sits just a stone’s throw from downtown Boston in Canton, Massachusetts. But it wasn’t until MacDonald had a family of her own that she’d finally come to embrace the sport’s pageantry.
“I really developed a love for golf later in life,” she explains. “I’m pretty athletic, so I was doing other things like skiing and snowboarding. But now I have four sons, and they all play golf, so we do it as a family.”
It’s still in the family. After retiring from her first career as a Delta Airlines flight attendant, MacDonald joined Brookmeadow in 2001 as its function coordinator. She’s been in her current role as the club’s general manager since 2005, making the course one of the few to be both owned and operated by females. That leadership comes through in how Brookmeadow operates, and more so, how it stands out above the competition.
“The attention to detail here to make women feel very comfortable is important, in my mind,” MacDonald says. “I was at a course with a couple of guys last season, where I made the tee time. We went into the shop and they did not even address me, though I made the reservation. I brought that back to my shop [employees] and said, ‘This is what we are never going to do.’ It’s still a struggle for us women.”
Make no mistake, MacDonald’s passion for enriching the sport for her gender was crafted in large part by Betty. Her mother, no stranger to the game herself, is “a force” at the club, she says, talking to each and every member she sees. What’s more, Simoni is also part of two lady leagues, one of seven Brookmeadow offers.
“She golfs with them, and she listens to them,” MacDonald says. “The women are very comfortable here. And it’s important for us that they are.”
It must run in the family.
A Steady Ascension
It was the early 1990s, and Pam Swensen was in an advertising role with NYNEX, a company that through a series of mergers is today part of Verizon.
“We looked at our business customers and realized, ‘Hey, we need to cultivate these relationships and do a much better job than what we’ve been doing,’” she remembers.
Her CEO, an avid golfer by all accounts, suggested a corporate golf program for salespeople. Swensen, not overly familiar with the game, was tasked with implementing the program.
“So I joined this group called the Executive Women’s Golf Association that had just gotten started a few years earlier, to try and give me some insights and knowledge because I didn’t want to embarrass myself,” she says.
Swensen’s almost fortuitous entry into the fledgling organization would eventually culminate in her leading the nonprofit. Since 1991, the EWGA has become the largest women-focused national amateur golf association, with chapters in more than 100 communities across the United States. The EWGA—celebrating its 25th anniversary this year—has impacted and connected more than 125,000 women with golf for business and fun, and its members contribute over $63 million in golf spending annually.
Swensen’s ascension to its top chair began with that membership, an introduction to a sport that would next lead her to the vice president position of the Jane Blalock Company. The sports management agency, which produces innovative golf programs, brought her on after Swensen connected with the former LPGA Tour player through the NYNEX golf program she jump-started. The company would go on to create the LPGA Golf Clinic for Women, an event still going strong today.
In 2002, Swensen moved over to the EWGA as the vice president of sales and marketing before taking over her current position in 2006. Though her role has changed over the years, she continues the crusade of acquainting women to a game that can pay dividends in the business aspect of their lives. Their latest program, Grads to Golf, introduces female graduate students to the sport at universities with golf teams.
“There really isn’t a week that goes by that someone doesn’t share a story about interviewing for a job and the HR person said, ‘You play golf? Tell me about it,’” Swensen says. “It really opens the doors to get conversations started. It just changes the direction of the conversation because of all the values golf espouses. I think that’s so important and missing today.”
A Willingness To Listen
The PGA professional looked out onto his latest set of pupils, each eager to master the sport of golf. With ears at attention, the instructor wasted little time with his latest lesson, instructing everyone to pull out his or her five-irons.
Donna Horvath wasn’t sure where to begin. “I looked at him and said, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’” she recalls, laughing at the memory now.
Horvath’s journey to golf began at ground zero that afternoon, though it didn’t stay there for long. She is now the managing partner at Honeybrook Golf Club in southeast Pennsylvania, about an hour outside of Philadelphia, a facility she continues to guide into its most successful period to date.
The property Honeybrook sits on has been in Horvath’s family since the 1930s, but it wasn’t for another 50 years until she and brothers Tom and Ted Piersol decided to craft the farming land into a golf course. The family, with little to no familiarity with the sport or its industry, turned to Horvath to lead the business end of the project.
“I think what initially could have been a liability—the fact that we knew nothing about golf—ended up being a real positive aspect for us,” she explains. “Because we were open to ideas. We clearly understood the intimidation factor and all the obstacles to golf.”
Honeybrook’s success, Horvath believes, was born in part out of the family’s willingness to hire and listen to good, knowledgeable golf experts. In addition, they opted to focus solely on golf rather than build a large facility with too many ancillary pieces to worry about. “We didn’t need to have the biggest and baddest golf course around,” she says.
The course just had its best year ever, with green fees and cart revenue both up, and a newly constructed pub now tapping into a market Honeybrook couldn’t reach before. All that success has no doubt come in part because the club treats membership well. It pulls people with little familiarity to the sport back for more, not unlike Horvath and her five-iron all those years ago.
“That is our call to action,” she proclaims. “What can we do to remove obstacles, to get people to come out and try it not just once, but to create a habit? You want them to come back and back again so they get comfortable with it and have levels of success.”
No Golf Barriers, Just Golf Balls
Mary Ann McGuire needed a golfing partner. Her husband, Mick, wasn’t an avid player, and Tracy—one of two McGuire daughters—wouldn’t take the sport up for many years. She was almost out of options. Until, as fate would have it, a complaint came in from the family’s country club.
Mary Ann’s other daughter, little nine-year-old Suzy, was on the driving range in her swimsuit, hitting golf balls with boys she had been playing with in the pool earlier that day. As she approached the range, McGuire opted for an approach other than the scolding Suzy might have otherwise been anticipating.
“Instead of yelling at me for being there in the improper attire, she instead asked me if I liked it,” Whaley recalls. “I said I loved it. That was the beginning.”
Suzy lost Mary Ann about eight years ago, but her legacy still resides within her daughter today. Once her mother’s golf partner, Suzy is now the PGA director of instruction at Suzy Whaley Golf in Cromwell, Connecticut, and the secretary of the PGA of America, the first female officer in the association’s history. She is on track to become its president in 2018.
Now, Whaley is in a position to draw more golfers into the game, no different than what her mother did with her. Mary Ann was always supportive of Suzy’s golf endeavors, like when she forewent law school for Tour school, or when she sought out PGA professional Joe Tesori—who sculpted Whaley into the fellow pro she is today—when she could no longer teach her.
“There’s nothing that said 25 years ago that I knew where I’d be sitting in the industry today,” she says. “But I think it was little tiny steps and people I had the fortune of having as mentors who pushed me to get better.”
An LPGA Tour Player who most notably became the first woman in nearly 60 years to qualify for a PGA event, Whaley has spent her career breaking down the barriers to golf’s boys’ club. Not that she views it that way, though. To her, she’s still in that bathing suit, getting nudged toward the game by Mary Ann.
“I always just did what I thought I wanted to be a part of. But I was also raised in a family that didn’t have any barriers,” she says. “So it wasn’t something I thought about, it wasn’t something where I didn’t think I belonged. I just wanted to go hit golf balls.”