Pat O'Sullivan Lucey
Connecticut State Women's Amateur champion 1966-68; CWGA Match-Play champion 1947, 1949, 1950-53, 1959-60, 1963, 1968; CWGA Senior champion 1977, 1980-82; New England Women's Amateur champion 1963-65; three-time North & South Women's Amateur champion; five-time Endicott Cup champion; U.S. Curtis Cup Team 1952; Member Ladies Professional Golf Association; LPGA Women's Titleholders champion 1951; CT Golf Hall of Fame 1967
Proud
though she surely is, and should be, of her outstanding amateur record in Connecticut and
Greater New England, Patricia O'Sullivan Lucey undoubtedly cherishes, as she surely
should, her still-standing major distinction from all other state women golfers after more
than a century of formal women's golf competition: victory in an LPGA championship.
In the 1951 Titleholders, against a field that included the best American women players of the day -- Patty Berg, Louise Suggs and defending champion Babe Zaharias -- Pat made 301 over the Augusta Country Club in Augusta, Ga., to win. With other former winners, she was recently invited back during the 1996 playing of that championship, now the Sprint Titleholders, to receive commemoration of her victory.
Originally and still of Race Brook Country Club in Orange -- also the early playing place of such distinguished Connecticut golfers as professional Eddie Burke, state Open (1938) and PGA (1940, 1947) champion; Charlie Clare, three- time Connecticut Amateur champion (1931, 1933, 1935); Jim Healey, twice-Connecticut Amateur champion (1951, 1958); outstanding amateurs Burt Resnik and Herb Emanuelson, and site of Ben Hogan's only 18-hole Connecticut appearance, in a 1942 Red Cross exhibition when he and Bob Grant opposed Byron Nelson and Clare -- Pat O'Sullivan began to bring glory to her home club in 1947 when she won her first of a record 10 CWGA match-play championships, handily defeating the Hartford Golf Club's Mrs. Charles Brainard, 7 and 5. Though Pat failed to defend successfully, losing to the redoubtable Mrs. Raymond Patton, 6 and 5, in the 1948 final, she dominated this championship over the next five years, winning every time.
Pat's emergence on the Connecticut women's golf scene coincided with that of Grace Lenczyk Cronin, by most proper standards this state's all-time best woman player. And though the rivalry seemed a natural, each possessing a power game rather rare among women in those days, a consistent one-on-one confrontation became far more speculative than actual. Several outside agencies contributed to this, which left the competitive-minded Connecticut golf community, men and women, regrettably deprived of some surely first-rank head-to-head play.
From 1946 through about 1950, Grace was more occupied at loftier golf levels, competing with some success in the U.S. Women's Amateur as a losing semifinalist in 1947 and champion in 1948, and the Canadian Women's Amateur, which she won in 1947 and 1948. And Pat took an abbreviated turn at women's professional golf. They did meet in the 1959 CWGA extra hole final, won by Pat.
A brief but attentive and apt pupil of Tommy Armour when he was at Rockledge in West Hartford, as was Grace, Pat in those formative days concentrated on "whipping the hands through" the impact area, a basic and indispensable tenet of Armour's to produce the tiger-like ferocity that brought real distance. Some years back, both Eddie Burke and his successor as Race Brook's head professional, Joe Sullivan, recalled her as someone willing to devote herself relentlessly to practice. Her three-quarter swing, as sound and as strong as, but more graceful than that of Joanne Gunderson Carner, served her well in amassing a remarkable record, and state golf history will remember her as a resolute yet congenial competitor capable of her best when it mattered most.
-- Jack Burrill