BOOKS

Out of the Rough

Laura Baugh (Rutledge Hill Press)

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by Teri Bostian

Laura Baugh never much liked feminism. As an adolescent golf prodigy, Baugh decided it was feminism that had so confused her mother into leaving her father. By embracing what Baugh, in her recently released memoir Out of the Rough, calls "the California feminist movement," her mother had abandoned a traditional family life for a Spartan existence in which her ambitious daughter had to sneak onto public golf courses to get practice time.

Laura Baugh rejected that feminism and lifestyle to the extreme. At 18, she turned pro in one of the only professional sports open to women. She quickly injected into the LPGA, the members of which columnist Jim Murray called a "chorus of prison matrons and tugboat captains," a little "something out of a chorus line." But more than a gorgeous golfer, she saw herself as a woman – and her dream was to show her mother just how satisfied a woman could be in her role as wife and mother.

If we vaguely remember Laura Baugh, it was for her California blonde good looks and coy sexuality as a guest on Johnny Carson, whacking ball after ball into a bull's eye, or in her 1974 Ultra Brite commercial: "Hey, Laura Baugh, how's your love life?" to which she cutely answered, "What's a love life?"

Before Gabby Reece, Mia Hamm, and Lisa Leslie, our postmodern postergirls of the Athletic Aesthetic, we had Laura Baugh, the first to cash in on her sex appeal. In 1971, being voted "Most Beautiful Golfer" in Golf Digest meant off-the-course earnings for Baugh nearly tripling what top golfers then made on the LPGA tour.

Baugh's colleagues on tour were cold and aloof – resentful, she thought, because she had capitalized on her good looks. By the time she turned twenty, with few friends on tour, what Baugh wanted desperately was to find a man:

"I was ready for an old-fashioned, traditional marriage where my husband was the primary breadwinner, and I'd support him by being a homemaker, a mother, and a good wife. I would work part-time, at least for a while, but once the babies came – and I wanted them to come by the bushel – I would stay home."

This desperation married her first to a man who, in drunken jealous rages, beat her savagely. Though she divorced him within a year, she left already tied to his peculiar legacy: by then she had taken up drinking with a vengeance.

Her drinking escalated into her next marriage, to PGA hanger-on Bobby Cole, who could no longer make tournament cuts, and who quickly established himself as king of the couch in their new condo. Though she bore him a daughter, she soon found their roles reversed – she became the breadwinner, and he waited for her at home. Baugh found the situation untenable, but she continued her pro career, still making far more from her endorsements than from her game. (In her 25 years as a pro, Baugh has never won an LPGA tournament.)

The pressures of running a household, being a new mother, working a double career (in golf and endorsements), and the added disappointments of her frustrating losses and of not having an "old-fashioned" gender arrangement at home proved too much for Baugh. She retreated into what she calls "Laura's World," where, she writes, she "could cook, clean, fold laundry, play golf, work out, and entertain the babies with a blood-alcohol level so high I was probably flammable." She discovered she was even prettier, sexier when she drank; wherever else she failed, in the bedroom with her husband she was a success.

Later, Baugh divorced Cole, then remarried him, and in the years that followed had six more children by him before leaving him for good (once she was sober) in 1998. He had never lived up to her expectations as a husband and father, no matter how many babies she made for him. The failure of their marriage hardly mattered by then. She'd stopped caring about him, about the children, about her shrinking endorsement deals, and about the game that had given her the only independent identity she'd ever had.

She hid mini-bottles of champagne in her golf bag, her clothes, everywhere she knew she'd be. She showed up drunk for tournaments, and often went into detox near the fifteenth or sixteenth hole. In 1994, Baugh missed the cut in nine of the first ten tournaments. Wine had replaced golf as what defined her: "That's just who I am," she told a friend. "I like to drink." It took three more years of self-destruction and several gruesome brushes with death before Baugh finally found herself ensconced in the Betty Ford Center.

Her story's present is bittersweet, as is every tale of continuing on as a recovering alcoholic. Interestingly, Baugh still searches for the impetus to her condition – her family has no history of alcoholism or addiction. She believes it was a habit instilled by her first husband, fed by the indulgences of her age and time, and further complicated by her second husband's refusal to fulfill his husbandly duties. After awhile, of course, reason stopped and the booze began to justify itself.

There's no doubt that Baugh is a beauty, and the book is packed with photos that testify to what the reader understands is her one big truth: when her husbands failed her, when the money was gone, when her golf game fled, Baugh always had her looks.

But the beauty Baugh so extravagantly depended on in her early years no longer attracts the likes of Rolex, Colgate, and Wilson. And now, as a 44-year old recovering alcoholic, she finds her looks an empty entitlement. She's trying again to cut it in the LPGA, a sport now filled with young and media-savvy athletes.

Laura Baugh knows she must live now by her game, her wits, and a pared down version of her feminine charm. For a woman who never much liked feminism, it's a big first step.

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