Last week I had the chance to play at the Wanderers Club in Wellington, Fla. with Marlene Streit. Let's see. Streit, who lives in Markham, Ont., is 76 and she rarely shoots above her age. She's won everything in golf, including 11 Canadian Ladies Amateurs, the British, Australian, U.S. and U.S. Senior Women's championships. And as I write, on Monday, she's teeing it up in the 18-hole qualifier for this week's Jones/Doherty Women's Amateur Championship at the Coral Ridge Country Club in Ft. Lauderdale.
Streit has won this important tournament a few times. Well, how many are a few? She won the overall tournament in 1959-60-61. She won the senior division in 1988-90-93-96-99-01-02. After our game at the Wanderers club, she spent the next day practicing with LPGA legend JoAnne Carner. Of course she would practice. The Doherty, as it's called, was coming up.
You could set a metronome to the time Streit takes over the ball. I've played with her many times over the years and I don't think her routine has ever changed. The ball goes straight down the middle just about every time. She missed one shot during our game last week. When she hits a putt, she keeps her head down for what seem like minutes. The ball is usually dropping or just grazing the cup when she looks up. And if it's grazing the cup, she's disappointed.
Marlene once said this to me: "I always played my own game. I was into my own game, not my opponent's. When I play alone, even today, I have a little game with myself against par. It makes me laugh when people say that the best champion is determined by medal play. I think it's the other way around."
The lady knows what she's talking about. No wonder she's the only Canadian inductee into the World Golf Hall of Fame in St. Augustine, Fla. Marlene Streit, after all, is a wonder herself.
ALSO FROM LORNE RUBENSTEIN:
Big Brother is watching... even if he is just sitting on the couch
All in the name of better golf
Rudge to be named Golf Canada director
The hard work begins for Canadian trio
---
Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and, most recently, he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 11 books, including The Natural Golf Swing, with George Knudson (1988); Links: An Insider's Tour Through the World of Golf (1990); The Swing, with Nick Price (1997); The Fundamentals of Hogan, with David Leadbetter (2000); A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands (2001); Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); and his latest, This Round's on Me (2009). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca .