“Big Mama” isn’t a nickname that would fly in 2024. But when JoAnne Carner was zooming up the LPGA ranks in the 1970s, the moniker stuck to her like a wedge shot to a rain-soaked green. It perfectly captured her build, her colorful personality, her booming tee shots. Everything about the Marlboro-loving Carner loomed larger than life, including her achievements. They’re all there on her head-spinning Wikipedia page, but here are some highlights:
—1956 U.S. Girls’ Junior champion
—five U.S Women’s Amateur titles (1957, ’60, ’62, ’66, ’68)
—two U.S. Women’s Open titles (1971, ’76)
—Only player to have won the U.S. Girls’ Junior, U.S. Women’s Amateur and U.S. Women’s Open
—43 LPGA wins, including one as an amateur (in 1961)
—32 top-10s in the majors
—World Golf Hall of Fame inductee (1982)
—oldest player to make the cut in an LPGA major (63) and LPGA event (64)
—second-oldest competitor in U.S. Senior Women’s Open history (85 years, 3 months, 28 days)
OK, that last bullet isn’t on Carner’s Wiki page (yet), but it is timely given she achieved the feat just this week in the sixth playing of the USGA championship designated for female players 50 years and older. Eight entrants in the 156-player field at Fox Chapel Golf Club in Pittsburgh turned 50 within the last year, and the average age of the field is 57.23, meaning Carner is largely competing against opponents three decades her junior. (Annika Sorenstam, a former winner of the event, also is in the field. As are a handful of other former major champions, including Julie Inkster and Catriona Matthew.)
The U.S. Senior Women’s Open isn’t a new test for Carner; she’s been a regular. At the inaugural edition, at Chicago Golf Club, Carner, then 79, matched her age in the opening round. In 2021, she shot 82 at 82. Last year, at 84, she shot 80.
And at 85?! This week, we found out.
But first a word about greatness. Once you’ve achieved it, you don’t just crave more of it, you expect more of it. At 50. At 60. At 70. And…yes, even at 85. After virtually all of Carner’s age-beating rounds in prior Senior Women’s Opens, she was unmoved. Coulda, shoulda done better, she’d say. Birth date be damned. “In a sport that gradually but inexorably grinds to the psychic nub those who play it for a living,” golf writer Jaime Diaz once typed for the New York Times, “no champion has proven more resistant to erosion than JoAnne Carner.”
Diaz wrote that…in 1993.
More than three decades later, Carner is still going strong, becoming a fixture at a big-time event stacked with the best female seniors in the land. Can she win it? She cannot. (Kaori Yamamoto of Japan is eight under through two rounds at Fox Chapel, four clear of the chase pack.) Can she still play? Can she ever, in part aided by a cart she’s permitted to use on account of her chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Can she and will she give you an honest assessment of your performance? That answer arrived Thursday soon after Carner had signed for an opening 14-over 85 that included four double-bogeys.
“It was terrible,” Carner said when asked if she was happy to have shot her age, an accomplishment that was heralded in headlines in the golf media and beyond. “I played really bad on the back. I didn’t putt well. Then I lost my swing temporarily. I hit a couple shots that I thought were good, but not having played the course but one time, I ended up in trouble, in one of those bunkers, and you just have to hit it out.”
Here, we should mention Carner’s average driving distance is somewhere in the 170-yard range, or at least it was this week at Fox Chapel, which in the first round played nearly 5,700 yards. Shooting 85 at 85 is one thing. Shooting 85 at 85 when you’re left with 160 or 170 yards into most of the par-4s is quite another. And shooting 85 at 85 when you’re left with 160 or 170 yards into most of the par-4s on a Seth Raynor design with fire-breathing, rollercoaster greens? That might put Carner in a class of one.
“The greens I just was having trouble,” Carner said Thursday, her voice graveled from decades of smoking. “I’ve been putting well but down in Florida where they’re flat greens. You’re not playing the rolls here. Totally different. I’d under-read and then over-read. One I had about a 20-foot downhill side hill on a par-3 and hit it — barely touched it and it went off the green.”
In short, you might been impressed by Carner’s round but she was not.
Before shutting her eyes in her Pittsburgh motel room Thursday night, Carner set her alarm for 6:15 a.m., leaving her plenty of time to prep for her 8:54 tee time. But her wakeup call came even earlier, by way of a text from tournament organizers that arrived just after 5:15. The message: starting times had been delayed on account of inclement weather.
With time to kill, Carner eased over to the course later in the morning, had some breakfast and got loose. “I did some stretching with the therapist up there and those boots they put on your legs,” she said. “That’s the first time I’ve done that. Felt great. They massage your blood flow back up your legs.”
Carner opened with a par at the par-4 9th (groups went off 1 and 9 in the first two rounds), then played the next four holes in one over. It was a superb start but it wouldn’t last. Bogeys followed at 14 and 15. Then a double at 16 and another double at 18. Opening 42. Carner’s round could have easily skidded off the rails if she wasn’t…well, JoAnne Carner. After a par at the 350-yard par-4 1st, Carner stuck a wedge at the par-5 2nd to 6 feet and holed the putt for her first birdie of the round.
Then came the 3rd, a par-3 that was playing 165.
“I hit my 5-wood two inches from the hole,” Carner said. “It was going right at it. If it had had one more turn, I’d have had a hole-in-one. But I was very happy because the day before I hit the green and four-putted. It was revenge.”
Golf has a way of biting back, though, and bite back it did. Carner bogeyed 4 and 5 before closing with a double at the par-4 8th.
But her 18-hole tally still was remarkable: a nine-over 80.
“A lot better,” she said of her play after the round. “I played a lot of very good shots, and then I played some just atrocious shots. But overall, it wasn’t too bad.”
The damper, slower greens had tripped her up — “If I were putting halfway decent, I’d have made three, maybe four more birdies,” she said — and so had her inconsistent ball-striking. “I tried to stay with my routine, to hit the ball better, and then I’d go haywire and take it straight up and then drop-kick it,” she said. “The love-hate with that 5-wood: I either hit it very good, up for birdies, or I chunked it 30 yards, 50 yards, whatever.”
Carner’s not one to pat herself on the back so we’ll do it for her. Of the players who finished their rounds Friday, Carner tied or beat 13 of them. And despite her gripes about her putting, she averaged just 1.75 strokes per green, which ranked 10th in the field. And, yes, she beat her age by a whopping five shots.
How’d that make her feel?
“I’d have been happier with a round in the 70s,” she said. “Could have done it easy.”