School's out for tot on the tee

By Martin Johnson

PINEHURST, MAY 31. Preparation is crucial at a major golf championship, and as the U.S. women's Open got underway at Southern Pines on Thursday, one caddie in particular may have been in for a grilling from the boss as they headed for the first tee.

``Now then, have you got everything? Balls, tees, glove, spare glove, towel, skipping rope, tooth-brace, Westlife CD, Barbie doll, homework?''

Just over a week after she was blowing out 13 candles on her birthday cake, Morgan Pressel finds herself rubbing shoulders (or at least as far as she can reach at 5`` 3') with the likes of Annika Sorenstam, Karrie Webb and Laura Davies in the biggest tournament in women's golf.

She has, inevitably, been bombarded with the kind of schmaltz that goes hand in hand with `child prodigy' syndrome in America, where, if the media had its wish, she would arrive on the first tee in a frilly frock singing: On The Good Ship Lollipop.

It is not often that golfers attempting to qualify for major championships have had the additional incentive of missing science lessons (which is where she would have been had she not been in the interview room here on Tuesday) nor, indeed, have a caddie who is 55 years her senior.

Willie McRae is wizened enough to have carried a bag for Gene Sarazen, and was a long-time employee of the American with the shortest fuse in professional golf, Tommy Bolt. Pressel, despite being barely 8 stone wet through, hits a driver 230 yards, which is roughly the same distance - as Willie will doubtless be reflecting - that Bolt used to throw one.

However, whether Pressel will still be the youngest person to complete the first round rather depends on whether the 36-year- old American Brenda Corrie Kuehn gets any nervous contractions while standing over a slippery downhill putt. Kuehn is eight months' pregnant, and was probably in two minds about whether to hire a caddie for the week or a midwife.

Kuehn, understandably, has attracted almost as big a media circus as Pressel this week, not to mention almost as a big a shirt as John Daly. Even with the shirt untucked, the bulge is still pretty prominent, and her swing has had to undergo a series of alterations in order to get around it.

Curious spectators have been seeking her out on the practice ground - a not entirely straightforward task given the number of competitors on the LPGA tour who also look as though a birth might be imminent.

The remarkable thing about Pressel is that she was, in child prodigy terms, very nearly in her dotage when she first took up the game - and has gone from having never gripped a club to US Open competitor in 4-1/2 years. Pressel's endearingly normal demeanour for a 13-year-old is probably the result of having parents who introduced her to teddy bears before the Vardon grip, which is, sadly, not the case with a girl who once played in this tournament - believe it or not - at the age of 10.

Every time Beverly Klass drives to work as a club teaching pro at the Turtle Bay GC in West Palm Beach, Florida, she can't miss a giant advertising hoarding 100 yards from the entrance, promoting a typical firm of ambulance-chasing American lawyers. ``Injured On The Job? Call Alotenftis, Catren, Goldberg & Harding, Attorneys at Law''.

Klass was injured on the job all right, her father eschewing the Harmon/Leadbetter methods of tuition in favour of beating her with a belt until her back bled.

Klass had a club put into her hands at the age of three, and, in the days before the LGPA imposed an age limit, her father turned her professional at the age of nine. She was so good that she once won a junior tournament for seven to eight- year-olds by 65 strokes, and specialised in winning long-driving contests, and the 293 yards she recorded in the 1970s with old equipment still stands as an official record.

It was, however, the hardest hitter in her house that drove her away from golf and, for a time, into a mental home. ``My father would shout and yell at me if I missed practice, and once, at a tournament, he yelled the worst word you could think of. He cornered me in the bathroom one day, and after he'd finished hitting me my back was bleeding. When he kicked me out of the house, I was so relieved that I refused to go back again even when a judge ordered me to, so they put me into a mental institution for a time.''

Klass said that her childhood led to years of emotional problems, which, at 43, she has not long overcome. ``I was always Beverly the golfer. I didn't even know I was a person until I was 30. A lot of the things I'm into now - like fly fishing - is an attempt to relive the childhood I missed. I'm looking for someone to help me write a book, just so people can see what can happen when parents lose sight of the difference between guiding and pushing.

``I lost interest in tournament golf in 1988, but I'm thinking I might try and go back. I'm just barely getting by at teaching and I've tried telephone selling and cleaning houses for $ 8 an hour, which is not much fun. Golf should be about fun. I never had it, but I sent a message to Morgan this week just telling her to just have fun.'' Pressel certainly appears to be staying amused, not least by the way the American golf journalists have declined to change their usual custom of turning a sports interview into a deep debate on the meaning of life - even with an interviewee still eight years short of the legal age for drinking here in North Carolina.

``Outside of golf, what would be the most remarkable thing in your life?'' she was asked. The pause, not surprisingly, ran to a good half a minute, before she gave the kind of answer you'd expect of a 13-year-old: ``Well,'' she said finally, ``I play the clarinet''. Copyright, Telegraph Group Ltd., London, 2001.

Morgan Pressel, who at the age of 13 has become the second- youngest golfer to qualify for the U.S. Open for women, exchanging pleasantries with the first winner of the Open, 83- year old Patty Berg.

- Reuters

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