RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. — With the Chevron Championship quietly packing its bags and renting trucks to move everything it can to its new home in Houston for 2023, it’s a natural time to think about the history of the LPGA event in the desert.
That doesn’t mean just thinking about the tournament’s longevity, being played in the desert each year since the inaugural event of 1972. It also means thinking about the vital role the tournament played in the growth and stability of the women’s tour.
Women’s golf wasn’t dying in 1972, but it was hardly robust. It’s important to remember the jolt the desert tournament gave the tour in 1972 and what winning the tournament meant for individual players.
Since 1983, those victories have come with the distinction of being a major championship. It’s easy to think the tournament was always a major, but in fact the first 11 tournaments were played without the official designation of being a major.
But the tournament was so important in those early days that the winners often felt they had won a major. Certainly Amy Alcott was delighted to win a major with her Mission Hills victory in 1983, but was she any more delighted than Nancy Lopez when she won the title two years earlier?
So, the big question is, does it make sense for the LPGA, in honoring the history of the tournament and the great roster of players who have won the event in the desert, to retroactively designate the tournament from 1972 to 1982 as a major championship?
A nod to the great past
Such a move would certainly acknowledge the importance of the tournament in those early days, what David Foster of Colgate-Palmolive and Dinah Shore did for women’s golf. And it would acknowledge that some of the LPGA’s best players won the tournament when it was as important as any event on the tour.
In truth, it would be mostly a symbolic gesture, because 11 more major championships on the LPGA wouldn’t really change that much. Players like Mickey Wright, Kathy Whitworth, Sandra Palmer, Donna Caponi and Lopez would just have one more major to count among their achievements. And Sally Little and Sandra Post would get credit for a major (or two, in Post’s case), but they aren’t heading to the Hall of Fame even with their extra achievements.
Foster, the man who founded the tournament as president and later chairman of Colgate-Palmolive, said the LPGA always wanted the desert tournament to be a major, even though it was Foster who turned the offer down originally.
“When Ray Volpe, LPGA Commissioner, approached me with the proposal that the Colgate-Dinah Shore Winners Circle be designated a “Major”, he made one stipulation, we would have to give up our qualifications for entry in the field and make it the same format as the USGA Women’s Open at that time,” Foster said in a letter he wrote to me in 1998. “I refused, because I wanted to keep our entry rules.
“The qualifications we set up in 1971, winners of an LPGA tournament in the last ten years, runner-up or third-place position in the last three years, and Hall of Famers made the Winners Circle special,” Foster added. “We did it at the inception because we wanted the best women professionals and got them in the forty that played in 1972.”
Of course, there are arguments against designating those first 11 events as major championships.
The first tournament, for instance, was 54 holes, not 72 holes like each of the other events. And the early years of the tournament featured limited fields, with just 40 players qualifying for the first event. Yes, other majors, including the Masters, have limited fields, but far more than 40 players.
And it is true that for many of the players in the 1970s, the Colgate-Dinah Shore Winner’s Circle was about the huge $110,000 purse as much as anything. Money can do a lot of things for a golf tournament, but it can’t buy major championships status.
Volpe, commissioner from 1975 to 1982, and the LPGA recognized the major status of the tournament in the 1970s and into the 1980s. Every commissioner since has known the desert’s major, now the Chevron Championship, has meant a little bit more than most majors.
So here’s a way to recognize what this tournament was from 1972 to 1982: Make those 11 events major championships. It would be a grand way to send the tournament off to Houston with some special recognition.
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