Ochoa edges out Shin for Vare Trophy. Just who was Vare?

Ochoa edges out Shin for Vare Trophy. Just who was Vare?

Going into the final LPGA Tour event of the year, there was more at stake than winning the LPGA Tour Championship Presented by Rolex and the Rolex Player of the Year. The prized Vare Trophy was also on the line.

Neck-and-neck at the top of the Vare Trophy standings were Lorena Ochoa, Ai Miyazato, Jiyai Shin and Cristie Kerr.

So what is it? Named for Glenna Collett Vare, one of the finest and classiest players of the 20th century, yet one of the least-known, this trophy is awarded to the LPGA player with the lowest scoring average for the season, an ironic twist as Vare’s strong suit was in match play. To be successful in match play Vare said you must have, “A love of combat, serenity of mind and fearlessness.”

Ultimately Ochoa averaging 70.1566 would edge out Shin (70.26) taking home the honors for the 4th consecutive year.

So often when an award is named after a highly talented person, as the years pass, that person and what he or she accomplished is lost. In the case of the Vare Trophy which was launced in 1953, this is a pity.

Blessed with superb athleticism and excelling in every sport she tried including swimming and diving, Glenna Collett Vare played at a time when women golfers were struggling, when there was no LPGA. .Gene Sarazen called Vare (born in 1903), “the greatest woman golfer of all time.”

In 1924, she dominated women’s golf winning all but one of her 60 matches. In the 30s she continued racking up victories in big time events like the North and South Women’s Amateur Golf Championships, Women’s Eastern Amateur Golf Championships and French Women’s Amateur Championship.

She won the Women’s Amateur six times including at age 32 defeating 17 year-old Patty Berg. She helped organize the Curtis Cup pitting U.S. women golfers against Britain’s best and by the time she was 56, had won 49 championships, blazing a wide path for legendary women golfers like Berg, Babe Zaharias, and Louise Suggs.

When they called her the ‘’girl who can drive like a man,'’ they weren’t talking about cars. Walking to the first tee, she took little time to line up her target and typically ripped it about 240 to 260 yards to the center cut of the fairway. One documented drive carried more than 300 yards.

It was an extraordinary feat at the time considering the equipment she was using, likely hickory-shafted clubs manufactured by Burke or Spaulding with names like mashee and niblick and a miss-matched set of around 20 clubs – the restriction to 14 clubs would come later.

In the 1929 British Ladies Amateur Golf Championship, she came close to upsetting the favorite, Joyce Wethered, in a hard-fought match that sent the 10,000-strong crowd ballistic as the American threatened to deliver a blow to their national pride.

At 81 years of age she was shooting her age and carried a 15 handicap and in 1984, five years before she died, she competed in her 61st consecutive Invitational event at the Point Judith Country Club in Rhode Island.

Vare, who was known throughout her early golfing days as “Glenna Collett” was as famous and as well known in her time as Babe Ruth and Bill Tilden, yet for some reason, she seems to have drifted into obscurity. That should not be.

So it is a fitting tribute to this great golfer that winning the Vare Trophy is one of a key qualifiers for admission to the World Golf Hall of Fame.