Grace Lenczyk Cronin
U.S. Women's Amateur champion 1948; Canadian Ladies Open Amateur champion 1947-48, runner-up 1951; Connecticut Women's Golf Association champion 1946, 1957, 1961-62; National Intercollegiate Women's champion 1948; Endicott Cup individual champion 1946; U.S. Curtis Cup team 1948, 1950; Connecticut Golf Hall of Fame 1969; Connecticut Sports Writers Alliance Gold Key Award
"Grace
Lenczyk Aiming For British Golf Title." With that boldface headline in 18-point type,
Skip Henderson, golf writer of the dear- departed Hartford Times, began his weekly
"Tee to Green" column April 2, 1949. At that time, Grace, of Newington and the
Indian Hill Country Club, was defending U.S. Women's Amateur champion, Canadian Women's
Amateur champion and National Intercollegiate Women's champion, a rare trifecta anywhere,
but especially in Connecticut, which had to reach back to 1904 and Georgiana Bishop's U.S.
Women's championship win for anything even remotely close by a Connecticut woman player.
In the near-half-century between Ms. Bishop's victory at Merion and the emergence of Grace Lenczyk right after World War II, Connecticut women's golf had some reasonably good regional-level players, including Ms. Bishop, who won the state women's match-play title four times from 1920 through 1927, but none approaching the big-time athletic-like capability of Miss Lenczyk when, at 19 in 1946, she had provided the first indication of her very different game by decisively beating Mrs. Raymond Patton, until then Connecticut's best woman player of the time, for the CWGA match-play title, then considered the state championship.
Gracie's game was a power game, her hands-high, big arc'd swing consistently sending tee shots off right to left in a flat, boring trajectory for better than 240 yards on average. Her irons were crisply struck, her short, scoring shots deft, and her putting stroke the classic shoulder- piston kind that rewarded her regularly. It was a strong, total game that at the 1948 Women's North & South Amateur earned the grudging, growling admiration of then-still-amateur Babe Didrikson, who was also competing. Grace was the only woman player of that time who could get it out there with golf's Babe. In the North & South final that year, Grace lost to Louise Suggs, who won the U.S. Women's Amateur, the British Ladies Amateur, three North&South Amateurs, and the Western Open before turning professional in 1949.
Even before Grace's biggest victory, the 1948 U.S. Women's Amateur when she beat Helen Sigel at Pebble Beach, she had been selected for the 1948 U.S. Curtis Cup team that defeated the British ladies 6-1/2 to 2-1/2 at Royal Birkdale. Grace partnered Ms. Suggs as the number one U.S. pair in a losing effort, but in the singles she beat the fine English player of the day, Jacqueline Gordon, a losing finalist to Ms. Didrikson in the 1947 British Ladies' Championship. Although during her peak playing years she was busy competing on fields often far distant from those in her home state, Grace didn't necessarily neglect Connecticut competition, as she won three more CWGA championships, one of which was in 1957 when, with evident reluctance, she crushed her younger sister Lorraine, 12-and-10, in the scheduled 36-hole final.
As this sister's name might suggest, Grace isn't the only Lenczyk to appear in Connecticut golf annals. Besides Lorraine, runner-up in the 1948 state women's amateur, Grace's eldest brother Fred lost in a playoff for the 1937 CSGA Junior championship, older brother Rudy won the 1940 state Caddie championship, and older brother Ted won the 1954 Connecticut Open at Shuttle Meadow and the 1961 state Amateur at Race Brook. Ted also brought national- level glory to Connecticut and Indian Hill in 1954 when he was a losing semifinalist to Bob Sweeny in the U.S. Amateur at the CC of Detroit. Someone named Arnold Palmer beat Sweeny in the final. Additionally, older sister Genevieve teamed with Wethersfield's irrepressible John Pracon to win the state Mixed Foursomes championship in 1951 at Shuttle Meadow.
Ironically, just when Grace might have gone on to greater golfing glory, the hard spirit to compete seemed to drift away, never completely to be recovered. But by proper standards, she remains Connecticut golf's all-time leading lady.
-- Jack Burrill