She shot her age for the fourth time ever. Only five players – men and women – have ever shot their age multiple times in USGA championships and she’s the oldest.
“I’ve followed her for much of her career and now I just marvel at what she still can do,” said 74-year-old Linda Mauro from Kettering. “She’s just amazing.”
A day earlier, many of the other players in the field talked about Carner, their conversations filled with laughter, reverence and true amazement.
Carner is not just the oldest of the 120 players in the field, but she’s also the oldest person – man or woman – to ever play in a USGA Championship.
Her eight USGA championship victories – including two U.S Women’s Opens – are more than any woman in history and more than any man, except Bobby Jones and Tiger Woods, who each won nine. She has 43 LPGA victories and, as is noted on the side of her white golf bag, she’s in the World Golf and LPGA halls of fame.
But Carner is not just one of the greatest golfers the game has ever known, she’s now one of the most beloved. Known throughout her career as Big Mama – for her booming tee shots, her size and her larger-than-life presence – she’ also one of the most colorful.
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
Many of the golfers had Carner stories and I have one, too. It happened right here in the Miami Valley.
She first told me the story 25 years ago at Star Bank LPGA Classic at Country Cub of the North and she added to it Wednesday when we talked just off the ninth green at NCR.
The tale still makes her laugh.
It was the time Big Mama pretended to be “the little woman.”
Back in the day, she and her late husband Don used to travel the circuit pulling an Airstream trailer they’d pick up at the factory in Jackson Center. Every two years they’d get a new rendition, but one time their new trailer wasn’t ready and they had to wait around a couple of days.
“We asked about a good place to eat and they sent us to Piqua to great place called The Springs (Supper Club,)” she said. “Don and I were sitting at the bar having a drink and the owner was sitting next to us bagging about how good his golf game was.
“He played at Piqua Country Club and had a 3 or 4 handicap.
“We didn’t know him and he didn’t t know us. And Don said, ‘Well, I don’t think you’re that good. I bet even my wife here could beat you.’”
The owner – the late Jim Freeman – snickered and set up a match. The wager was dinner.
“On the first tee I tried to fake it and hit a bad shot, but I still hit it 270 yards right down the middle” the grinning Carner told me. “The poor guy fancied himself a big hitter, but he was about coming out of his shoes trying to get past me.
“After a few holes he knew he was in over his head.”
Carner said their on-the-house dinner was great and she and Don and Freeman became good friends.
That transition – competitor to friend – is something Laura Davies talked about.
The first time she met Carner was when she beat her and Ayako Okamota in a playoff at the 1987 U.S. Women’s Open.
“I’m not sure she was that keen on me initially, but we grew to become good friends.” Davies said.
“I remember the next year in Florida, my very first tournament when I got on the Tour. I was just in the bunker and JoAnne sidles over and gave made a few tips and, to me, that was the best thing ever. She had the time for me.
“So for me, JoAnne has always been one of my favorites because of her generosity.”
Jane Geddes – who won the U.S. Women’s Open when it was played at NCR in 1986 – does a great Big Mama impression, complete with the visor twisted askew on her head and the gravelly, Marlboro-cured voice.
She told of a tournament they once played in Ohio, Youngstown she believed, and how a rain delay brought them all off the course.
When they finally returned to the tee, she said Carner went to put her had in her pocket and got a surprise.
“She’d put her shorts on backwards and, you know JoAnne, she’s like ‘Wait a second’ and she goes in the Porta Potty, and then steps back out with her pants turned around,” Geddes laughed. “Nothing fazes her.”
Then again, Carner had practice with makeshift dressing rooms.
She talked about it once with me after a round at the Burdines Invitational in Miami in the early 1970s:
“When I started, women weren’t able to play courses on Wednesdays because it was men’s day at a lot of places. And we couldn’t use the men’s locker room at a tournament until late in the week, so we dressed in the parking lot, from the trunks of our cars.”
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
‘What you can do, I can do’
Carner started playing at a public course in Kirkland, Washington. Back then she was JoAnne Gunderson.
“My sister worked the lunch counter, my brother watered greens and I took care of the flowers,” she said. “When the paying customers were gone, we played golf.
“We used old hickory-shafted rental clubs that had been discarded, old gloves, whatever. Sometimes we played by moonlight.”
Her 91-year-old sister Helen Sherry – who walked the hilly course Thursday just as she did two practice rounds this week – remembered her sister’s competitive nature: “She and my brother were always competing. It was the old idea, what you can do, I can do.”
In 1961, when she was a senior at Arizona State, JoAnne met Don Carner, a successful Rhode Island businessman twice her age, when they were paired together in a tournament in Florida. They married two years later, but it wasn’t until 1970 that he convinced her to turn pro at age 30.
Eventually Don sold his businesses and managed JoAnne’s career.
Besides their Airstream trailer, they travelled with two Honda trail bikes and up to 30 fishing rods.
“Don brought a tux along and I had four evening dresses,” she said. “It was a great life.”
The Carner image that came to mind for some Wednesday did not entail an evening dress.
“When she was captain of the Solheim Cup, I can still see her on the pool table in her Bling Bling hat with the drink going,” Helen Alfredsson said. “I still have that very vivid in my mind. It was fun.”
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
‘She’s brilliant’
Annika Sorenstam’s memory may link to times like that.
“When I hear of JoAanne, it just makes me giggle,” she said. “She’s a character of her own.
“I was in the trailer once when I played on the LPGA and I was stretching and doing some weights and getting loose.”
“She comes in and just sits on a bench and is kind of observing everybody. The trainer comes up and says, ‘What can I do for you?’
“And she goes, “Do you have any Advil?’
“She got two or three and that was that. That was her trailer fitness moment.”
And yet it’s safe to say, she then stepped onto the tee and outdrove everyone.
In fact, she still did that Thursday when she regularly outdrove her two playing partners, 68-year-old Noreen Mohler and 67-year-old Cathy Panton-Lewis.
Carner didn’t seem to care she’s shot her age, she’s trying to get her game back into a groove and shoot two or three over par. Her goal when she plays now is to make the cut.
“It matters to her what she shoots, but to the rest of us, it doesn’t matter,” said Davies. “But I know her fighting spirit. She’s going to want to put the best run on it she possibly can and make the cut.
“And that would be as big as an achievement as whoever hoists the trophy in my opinion. I mean, 83! She’s brilliant.”
Everyone here was pulling for her to make the cut – which isn’t that likely now.
“She does so much for the game,” said Sorenstam, who praised Carner’s longevity, passion and grit.
Many of the other players here flocked to her the past couple of days to get a photo or, in the case of Canton amateur Suzi Spotleson, just to absorb anything she can, which is why she hung out in the back of the interview tent the other day:
“I wanted to see JoAnne Carner…There’s just nobody around like her. That’s an absolute legend of the game.”
And no one knows that better than another legend – Arnold Palmer – who played an exhibition with Carner in the late 1970s.
After they teed off on the par 5, first hole, Palmer marched down the fairway and automatically headed to the longest drive.
After a few seconds of staring at the ball, he bent down for a closer look, then sheepishly backtracked. Carner had outdriven him.
Although Palmer birdied the hole, he still couldn’t brag. Carner eagled.
That day Palmer learned the lesson of Piqua:
When you’re thinking “little woman,” you’re apt to meet Big Mama.
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