Alexa Stirling

A L E X A S T I R L I NG | I I I

In 1919, she picked up where she left off on the course. A mature 21-year-old, Alexa won the U.S. Women’s Amateur for a second straight time. She became known as the pound-for-pound longest hitter in the game. At 110 pounds, her drives bounded well past the 250-yard mark with hickory-shafted clubs and out-of- round rubber balls many modern players couldn’t get off the ground. Noted write O.B. Keeler wrote of her, “It has been the comment through the galleries, which have included many professionals and veteran golfers, that no such prodigious hitting ever has been done by a woman golfer in America.”

Then, in 1920, at Mayfield Country Club outside Cleveland, Ohio, Alexa defeated 113 other competitors to win her third consecutive U.S. Women’s Amateur title, the first woman to do so since Beatrix Hoyt won the first three championships ever played from 1896 through 1898. One month later, Alexa solidified herself as the greatest golfer in the world by winning the Canadian Women’s Amateur. At the time, she was the most famous female athlete and one of the most recognized celebrities in the world. In 1921, she made it to the finals of the U.S. Women’s Amateur again, losing to Marion Hollins, the creator of Pasatiempo and Cypress Point Club and a 2020 inductee into the World Golf Hall of Fame. Hollins had lost to Alexa in the second round of the 1919 Amateur. Alexa won the Met Women’s Amateur in 1922 and 1923. Later that summer, she advanced to the finals of the U.S. Women’s Amateur again, this time losing to Edith Cummings, who was famously known as the “Fairway Flapper” and was the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character, Jordan Baker, in The Great Gatsby. In the process, Alexa defeated championship favorite Glenna Collett, who would later become Glenna Collett Vare, the namesake of the Vare Trophy. After that 1923 Amateur, Alexa traveled to Ottawa for the Canadian Women’s Open. There she met Dr. Wilbert Grieve Fraser. The two hit it off immediately. He fished and hunted and loved the outdoors. The two were married in a spectacular ceremony hosted by Atlanta Athletic Club in 1925. Alexa was 28. They sailed to Europe on a month-long honeymoon, then returned to Ottawa where Alexa gave birth to a daughter, Sandra, in 1928. A son, Glen, came in 1933. Their third child, Richard, was born in 1939. While not reclusive, the Frasers didn’t travel much. Alexa was a member at the Royal Ottawa Golf Club where she won the ladies’ club championship 13 straight times as well as being a shooting and archery champion. She also belonged to the Ottawa Hunt Club where she hunted pheasants more often than she played golf. Then, in 1950, a letter arrived at the Fraser residence. The handwriting was gnarled and halting. But the language was unmistakable. As Alexa would later say, Bob Jones had written, “The United States Golf Association was going to have a celebration of the golden anniversary of the Women’s Amateur Golf Championship, and he very much wanted me to come to Atlanta to participate.” She was stunned by what she found. The effects of syringomyelia, a debilitating and degenerative spinal disease, had crippled her childhood friend.

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