Ready To Rock

By Ron Sirak
Photo: Getty Images September 7, 2007

Time is not so much measured in minutes and hours as it is events. Ten minutes of root canal can seem like all day while an hour with your favorite book passes in a blink. And few things make time move more agonizingly slow than waiting to hit a golf shot, especially if that shot happens to be the opening salvo of the initial Solheim Cup. "We got to the first tee about eight minutes before they were due to tee off, judging by the clubhouse clock," says Mickey Walker, who was captain of the first four European teams in the biennial competition against the United States. "The clubhouse clock was actually fast so we had 12 minutes, and those 12 minutes seemed like an hour. I can remember that being an eternity."

As metaphors go, an untimely timepiece is rather appropriate for the debut Solheim Cup at Lake Nona in 1990. When Laura Davies hit that first drive in her alternate-shot match with Alison Nicholas against Pat Bradley and Nancy Lopez, there was no TV coverage, virtually no spectators, not even an LPGA commissioner. Ultimately, the competition was also absent of drama as the Americans easily dismissed the Europeans. Only one of the 16 matches made it to the 18th hole. None of that will be true when the 10th edition of the most intense three days in women's golf is played next week at Halmstad, Sweden.

While fewer than 3,000 people were on hand that week before Thanksgiving in Orlando, where the most spectacular occurrence was a shuttle launch at nearby Cape Canaveral on the eve of the competition, the turnout at Halmstad will likely challenge the record 103,000 flag-waving fans who created a college-football-like atmosphere at Crooked Stick CC near Indianapolis two years ago. Golf Channel will provide first-shot-to-deciding-putt coverage, and Carolyn Bivens, the first female to run the LPGA, will be passing a milestone of sorts since she officially took over as commissioner at the end of the 2005 Solheim Cup.

While the outcomes in 1990 and 2005 were similar in that the U.S. team won both, the road to the result was much different. An eight-woman U.S. team that included five future Hall of Famers destroyed Europe 11½-4½ at Lake Nona. At Crooked Stick the Americans sweated out a 15½-12½ victory to take a 6-3 lead in the series. In an astonishingly short period of time the Solheim Cup has become very intense.

All it took was some good old-fashioned competition -- with a few Dottie Pepper outbursts, some Catrin Nilsmark name-calling, a Pepper punching bag in the European team room and U.S. captain Pat Bradley making Annika Sorenstam re-chip after she holed a birdie but had hit out of turn. History happened in a hurry at the Solheim Cup. Then again, the entire Solheim Cup happened in a hurry.

Joe Flanagan, executive director of what was then the Women Professional Golfers' European Tour, pitched the idea of a team competition to then LPGA commissioner John Laupheimer in 1988, but Laupheimer said it would be too one-sided in favor of the Americans. When Laupheimer resigned and Bill Blue took over Dec. 1, 1988, Flanagan revisited the idea, and it was presented to Karsten and Louise Solheim, whose family makes Ping golf equipment, at the PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando in January 1990.

The players were brought into the loop at a meeting that March, and on June 7, the Solheims and their PR director Bob Cantin, who would become Solheim Cup project director, met with Blue in the Delta Crown Room at Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport to sign the initial papers. John Solheim, Karsten's son, worked with LPGA business manager Greg Shimanski to tie down the final wording. All parties met at the JAL Big Apple Classic outside New York City in August and final papers were signed Sept. 19, less than a month after Blue was fired and less than two months before the event was to be played. Acting executive director Jim Webb signed for the LPGA. "We basically staged the event with 60 days of planning," says Cantin, who is now retired in Texas.