Alexa Stirling

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

Our heroine started well. She won the first two holes but was 3 down with 8 to play at the crucial point in the match. In his biography of Marion Hollins, author David Outerbridge wrote that the 11th hole produced a stroke which “sapped the spirit” of Alexa. She mishit her second stroke and found the bunker on her third. With her opponent in deep trouble, Hollins courageously gambled for the green with a hooking shot around a row of trees and safely reached the green. Even a brave recovery wouldn’t matter. Marion won on the fourteenth hole, 5 and 4. Oh well, it’s only a game. In 1922, Alexa moved to New York with her securities job. Her arrival to New York was fodder for the society pages. In her Links Magazine article about Alexa, author Pam Emory quoted the New York Illustrated News of December 1, 1921:

[Alexa is] the twenty-eighth woman to take up this line of work in this city. Women in the business have formed a club which is to hold regular sessions, just as the masculine bank folk do. ... She has auburn hair, snappy brown eyes, and is full to the limit of pep. She can qualify readily as one of the liveliest recent additions to New York’s colony of bachelor girls. It wasn’t long before she established her “territorial supremacy” by winning the local Metropolitan championship title twice in a row in 1922 and 1923. But the major championships became much more elusive. As time marched on in her career, a combination of factors conspired to thwart Alexa in collecting a fourth national title. One of these factors was within her control, but the other clearly wasn’t. The latter is the arrival on the women’s golfing scene of wonderful players including Glenna Collett, who held the championship on six occasions from 1922 to 1935; Virginia Van Wie, who won it on three consecutive occasions from 1932 to 1934, and many others. It reminds one of the repartee between historian Herbert Warren Wind and Francis Ouimet. Wind asked Ouimet why he took so long to win a championship between the Open in 1913 and the Amateur in 1931. Ouimet simply replied, “Have you ever heard of a boy named Bobby Jones?” In Alexa’s case, she may have properly replied to the query why she never won a fourth championship, “Have you ever heard of a girl named Glenna Collett?” The second factor which prevented a fourth title was a change in Alexa’s style of play in her later years. She never altered the mechanics of her swing to any substantial degree. The “old and orthodox Stewart Maiden style stood out like the Washington Monument all over the field,” in Keeler’s opinion. She made little accommodations like spreading her stance a little wider and standing perhaps a little more closed. Even so, she could always golf the ball exquisitely. But she played much more deliberately after 1927. Gone was the glib and guileless style of her youth. Keeler observed this style differed from the swiftness with which Alexa played early in her career: She is far more deliberate than I ever saw her before. Her address of a shot is like a slow movie. She takes more than an occasional practice swing. She is playing slowly, very slowly. But the old concentration is there, and her new deliberation seems not to be shaking it, as too much deliberation sometimes does. Bob Jones himself wrote years later that undue deliberation invites tension to set in, and tension is the enemy

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