Alexa Stirling

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

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the middle of the fairways. Keeler paid the ultimate tribute: To me no woman golfer who ever lived can compare with the Alexa who won three championships in a row and whom I never saw beaten before the semifinal round. There was the finest iron player the feminine world of golf ever saw; there was the true replica of Stewart Maiden. ... To me nothing compares with Alexa, the feminine Bobby Jones of style, a golfer with a great heart, and a golfer with a record they all can shoot at from now on.

Keeler had good reason to nominate Alexa as the premier iron player in the world of women’s golf. For example, in the 1920 Women’s Amateur finals against Dorothy Campbell Hurd, Alexa was from 10 to 60 yards ahead on her tee shots. “It was the comment through the gallery which included many professionals and veteran golfers that no such prodigious hitting ever had been done by a woman golfer in America,” Keeler reported. Even against stronger and more powerful players, Alexa’s superior technique reigned supreme. French champion Mlle. Simone Thion De La Chaume was “young, magnificently constructed and powerful.” Alexa was able to frequently outdistance her from the tee with her more compact, crisp and accurate ball-striking capability. She was the only woman able to reach the 376-yard seventeenth hole in the 1927 Women’s National Amateur at Cherry Valley CC in Long Island with an iron club. Glenna Collett required a spoon, whereas Alexa’s iron second was closer to the hole. In the semifinals of the same championship, Alexa drove with an iron against a light breeze for the 207-yard eighteenth green and nearly reached the left corner. Her opponent took a wood and was an equal distance off the right-hand corner. This was not too bad considering the hickory-shafted equipment she employed. In another letter to O.B. Keeler, Alexa wrote about her clubs: As to the number of clubs I used to carry I think it was fifteen, but just what they were I can’t be quite certain. I have a vague recollection however that there were four woods and probably two or three mashies of varying degrees of loft. A run up club or jigger purchased at Turnbury – a niblick, a mashie niblick, mid-iron, two putters, possibly a driving iron and a mashie iron. I think that was the assortment, just as I have long since discarded a number of those clubs, and recently changed to steel shafts throughout. I’m a bit vague about the whole business. I do remember the number however was in the neighborhood of fifteen. Alexa’s favorite shot was the mashie pitch to the green. “There is more satisfaction to me in playing a well hit mashie shot fairly close to the par than any other part of golf,” she once said. Her powers of concentration were not easily broken by the galleries. She explained, “I should prefer that there be a mass, wherein there are no individuals who stand out, but where all blend into a whole – a wall of humanity, all silent, or all noisy at once. ... However, speaking from my own experience with outside noises, things entirely removed from the game of golf have but little effect on me.” Her philosophy is reminiscent of the unshakable Joyce Wethered. She was negotiating an 8-foot putt on the 17th hole at Sheringham to defeat Cecil Leitch when a train roared by on a track adjacent to the green. After Joyce bent over to pick up the ball, Cecil asked if Joyce was bothered at all by the train. “What train?” Joyce asked. In addition to her ironclad concentration, Alexa also was blessed with an even disposition that enabled her to forget about a disaster on a prior hole in playing the present one. This permitted her to maintain an even emotional keel in a game fraught with intermittent and varying episodes of triumph and disaster which can unnerve even the most stable individuals. It is best, Alexa believed, “to have but a single thought – the shot to be played at the present moment.”

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