Joe LaCava shares the emotional text Tiger sent him following Masters victory

It’s likely nary a living soul would know what it meant that Marion Hollins was considered a masterful competitor in gymkhana equestrian races or appreciate how flawlessly she could handle a four-in-hand knot while wearing a corset and Edwardian hat or comprehend her national women’s amateur championship despite scores in the 90s. Which is part of the problem with being in a world that goes so frightfully fast; you’re not afforded the opportunity to study and fathom what happened behind us. That, of course, is no fault of Hollins, who remains a fascinating study in character and achievement even now, three-quarters of a century since her death. She was of another era, one that included the horse and buggy, so, yes, feeling a connection to Hollins is virtually impossible. But while we are so miserable at appreciating what came before us, savor this majesty about Hollins – she had an uncanny vision for the brilliance ahead of her. Before our world was sent reeling and forced into isolation to fight the coronavirus pandemic, there was the sweet smell of spring that came floating in with the early days of March. For many, those are days to rekindle a love of golf and for a small, but passionate corner of the golf world that cherishes the memory of Hollins, there was a brilliant symmetry to how March 3 and March 8 arrived in short proximity. The former was the day finalists were announced for the World Golf Hall of Fame Class of 2021. The latter is designated annually as International Women’s Day, billed as a focal point in the movement for women’s rights. On both fronts, Hollins’ name generated conversation, and now she becomes the second member scheduled for induction, the news being announced Friday by the World Golf Hall of Fame after she received a favorable vote by the 20-member Selection Committee. Tiger Woods, arguably the most heralded golfer ever, was previously announced and was an easy selection, but just as special was the induction of Hollins as a contributor. While far less heralded a golfer, it can be argued that Hollins authored as compelling and rich a life in the game as any member before her. Which is where the tie-in to International Women’s Day comes in, because Hollins blazed a trail against longer odds and far more societal biases. It was nearly 100 years ago – Jan. 20, 1922, to be exact – when a headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer appeared on Page 20: “Plan Golf Club For Women Only.� Mind you, the 19th amendment allowing women the right to vote had been passed just a few years earlier, if that gives you a sense of the landscape that shaped this nation. Yet, a women’s group in the New York area was lobbying for a change. “It has long been the custom on golf courses throughout the country for women golfers to give men players full sway and right of way on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays,� the story reported. Notable was the chairman of the committee who was in front of the movement – Hollins. Just three months earlier, Hollins had defeated Alexa Stirling to win the U.S. Women’s Amateur at Hollywood Golf Club in Deal, New Jersey, and here she was, fronting a cause that transcended the game. Passionate about the fight, Hollins had a bigger prize in mind than simply getting clubs to relax their rules. She had visions of a club on Long Island being strictly for women golfers and tennis players. Fred Perry, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, marveled at the character that was at the root of Hollins’ cause. “She would rather be right than champion,� he wrote. “Right in the matter of form and style.� That form and style was central to Hollins’ life, too short that it may have been. She was just 51 years old when she died of cancer on Aug. 27, 1944, but oh, the substantial impacts Hollins made in such a relatively brief life were riveting. That golf club, for instance, became a reality. The Women’s National Golf and Tennis Club opened in the 1920s, Hollins’ vision carried through by her hand-picked choices to design it: Devereux Emmet and Seth Raynor as a consultant. The project ignited a fire within Hollins and on Jan. 27, 1922, the New York Daily News reported that “Miss Marion Hollins, national golf champion, is on the broad Atlantic today bound for England to study golf architecture.� She was 29 years old and had already scripted a most marvelous life. The national amateur championship in 1921 had come eight years after Hollins, at 20, had lost to Gladys Ravenscroft in the finals. In between, she managed to win a few women’s titles in the Met Section and become the center of much publicity for her all-around athletic ability. “America’s Leading Out-of-Doors Girl� exclaimed a full-page story in the Chicago Tribune in 1914 and the copy gushed accordingly in the aftermath of the news that Hollins had been declared a plus-one handicap: “Marion Hollins is in a class by herself in everything. She rides (equestrian) as well as she golfs. She’s the best woman driver in the east (maneuvering horse-drawn carriages along Fifth Avenue). She’s the star of the Long Island polo team. She swims like a reincarnated mermaid. She plays tennis like a whirlwind. I’d trust myself with her in motor climbing the Jungfrau if she took it into her head to drive to the top.� Oh, and there was this thousand-pound cherry on top: Hollins was an heiress to millions of dollars, the only daughter and youngest of five children born to H.B. Hollins, a Wall Street brokerage tycoon, and his wife, Evelina Meserole Knapp Hollins, whose father, William Kumbel Knapp is captured for eternity as one of the subjects in the painting, “The Knapp Children,� by Samuel Lovett Waldo and William Jewell, that hangs in The Metropolitan Museum of Art on 5th Avenue in New York City. Yes, we’re talking high society during in the Gatsby Era or the Gilded Age, take your pick. The Hollins family was related by blood to the Vanderbilts, and H.B. was best friends with J.P. Morgan and there was great comfort on that 600-acre estate in East Islip on Long Island called Meadow Farm. But while blanketed in all that excess, Marion Hollins was as advertised; she was saturated in “form and style.� Her push to build The Women’s National Golf and Tennis Club validated her mission, but the study of architecture in the U.K. was taken seriously, too. What’s more, Hollins put it to great use when she returned and settled in the area that she would embrace as her new home – the Monterey Peninsula area in California. It was there, starting in the late 1920s that Hollins forged the final chapters of her incredible life – the visionary behind iconic Cypress Point and Pasatiempo; the impetus to introducing Dr. Alister MacKenzie to Bobby Jones, which directly led to Augusta National; champion golfer at Pebble Beach; U.S. captain for the first Curtis Cup in 1932 – that make her a worthy World Golf Hall of Fame inductee, especially when you consider her push years earlier for women’s rights, long before it became vogue. With her father having gone bankrupt, Hollins proved she didn’t need to be an heiress. She opened a real estate company in Santa Cruz, California, and began combining her true loves – golf, property, vision, and business. In MacKenzie, who had designed Meadow Club in Fairfax, 40 miles north of San Francisco, Hollins had befriended the perfect set of eyes and mind to develop a golf course that would be called the Cypress Point Club on Monterey Peninsula. Wrote Grantland Rice: “And at Cypress Point, Del Monte, Miss Marion Hollins (and her group) is planning one of the most spectacular links in the world, with Dr. MacKenzie for the architect. With the Pacific Ocean, the vast white sand dunes, and the cypress groves, there are possibilities here no other course can quite equal.� Opened in August 1928, Cypress Point has lived up to Rice’s billing and it surely proved Hollins had impeccable golf and business savvy. But she wasn’t done. She had fallen in love with hundreds of acres in Santa Cruz, 48 miles north of Pebble Beach, as you meandered around Monterey Bay. There, she presented MacKenzie with his next opportunity and when Pasatiempo opened on Sept. 8, 1929, Hollins’ star power was confirmed – none other than Bobby Jones agreed to be in her foursome to christen the new course. Let the record show that Jones, who shot 75, and Hollins were beaten by Cyril Tolley, two-time British Amateur champion, and Glenna Collett, six-time U.S. Women’s Amateur champ, but you could use some literal license and suggest golf was truly the winner because what developed out of the Jones and Hollins teamwork went far beyond the lost game on this day. The late Dave Anderson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist for The New York Times, writing 17 years ago, quoted Sidney L. Matthew, the Jones historian, to put an exclamation point on the Jones-Hollins friendship. “If the women members’ issue (which came to the forefront at Augusta National in 2003) had been raised (back in the 1930s), I think it’s fair to say that Bob would have invited his friends Marion (Hollins) and Alexa (Stirling) to be members.� Jones thought so much of Cypress Point, which he had also played in 1929, and his two rounds at Pasatiempo that it cemented his choice of MacKenzie to design Augusta National. But the Hollins connection wasn’t done, Anderson wrote. He cited Geoff Shackelford’s book, “Alister MacKenzie’s Cypress Point Club,� and a quote from MacKenzie on Hollins: “She has been associated with me in three golf courses and not only are her own ideas valuable, but she is thoroughly conversant in regard to the character of the work I like.� Then Shackleford included the quote that has cemented Hollins’ stature in the minds of her many supporters: “I do not know of any man who has sounder ideas,� MacKenzie wrote in a letter to Jones, insisting that Hollins do the on-site inspection at Augusta National in lieu of him. That MacKenzie died in 1934 and never watched the Masters be competed on his golf course has always been a bittersweet entry to his legacy. That Hollins – who restored her financial fortune with a $2.5 million windfall from an investment in a speculative oil deal in 1930, only to pretty much spend all of that on her beloved Pasatiempo – died long before her legend behind Cypress Point, Pasatiempo and Augusta National was given proper credit has always been a disappointing omission. Maybe that will be righted forever with her induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame, an entrance that should be saluted by those who love their champions to have “form and style,� and that most admirable of all human traits, a social conscience.

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2019 WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational, End of Round 2. Top 10 win probabilities: Matthew Fitzpatrick (1, -9, 17.6%) Patrick Cantlay (T2, -7, 16.2%) Jon Rahm (T2, -7, 15.6%) Billy Horschel (T2, -7, 6.9%) Justin Rose (T7, -5, 5.3%) Brooks Koepka (T7, -5, 4.9%) Rory McIlroy (T13, -4, 4.5%) Webb Simpson (T7, -5, 4.2%) Cameron Smith (T2, -7, 4.1%) Hideki Matsuyama (T13, -4, 2.9%) Top strokes-gained performances: Putting: Matthew Fitzpatrick +3.2 Around-the-green: Bubba Watson +2.2 Approach: Jim Furyk +3.6 Off-the-tee: Rory McIlroy +1.8 Total: Matthew Fitzpatrick +6.1 NOTE: These reports are based off the live predictive model run by @DataGolf. The model provides live “Make Cut�, “Top 20�, “Top 5�, and “Win� probabilities every 5 minutes from the opening tee shot to the final putt of every PGA TOUR event. Briefly, the model takes account of the current form of each golfer as well as the difficulty of their remaining holes, and probabilities are calculated from 20K simulations. To follow live finish probabilities throughout the remainder of WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational, or to see how each golfer’s probabilities have evolved from the start of the event to the current time, click here for the model’s home page.

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As we hit the last event of the regular season and get ready to ride the rollercoaster of the FedExCup Playoffs, it seems an apropos time to check in on our bold predictions that came way back from last October. It has been another brilliant season full of highlight moments. We’ve seen the resurgence of some stars like THE PLAYERS champion Webb Simpson. We’ve seen Brooks Koepka become a major force. We’ve seen some newcomers emerge with the likes of Austin Cook, Aaron Wise and Satoshi Kodaira leading the rookie race. We’ve seen T.J. Vogel become a Monday king – getting through qualifying an incredible eight times. And we’ve seen some bigger names slide. But they’ve still got time to round back into form. Were we able to predict it all? Let’s see. 18. THE PLAYERS champion Si Woo Kim finds his consistency and becomes a regular threat on the PGA TOUR. Last season Kim shocked the world with his dominant PLAYERS win because for the remainder of the season he was virtually irrelevant. He made 14 cuts in 30 starts with six WDs. While he has certainly been much better this season with 20 made cuts and five top-10s from 27 starts it would be a stretch to claim he’s been a regular threat. We’ll be generous and give ourselves half a point here. 0.5/1 17. Phil Mickelson breaks his win drought. Mickelson arrived at the World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship having not tasted victory since 2013. But he was able to hold off a red-hot Justin Thomas to finally return to the winner’s circle. Thomas holed out for a dramatic eagle in regulation play to be part of a playoff but Mickelson held his nerve. 1.5/2 16. Three players will have a taste at World No. 1. Oh we were so close. And it could still come true during the last five weeks of the season. Dustin Johnson has continued to be a pretty good mainstay at the top, holding court for all but four weeks of 2018 so far. Justin Thomas was given his first view from the top in May. Justin Rose had a handful of chances to get to the top and still might, and Brooks Koepka is now breathing down Johnson’s neck. 1.5/3 15. Rose will bloom, and win, among the azaleas. As mentioned above Justin Rose has had a couple of chances to climb to No.1 in the world in what has been a pretty decent season. Wins at the World Golf Championships–HSBC Champions and the Fort Worth Invitational. He also won the Turkish Airlines Open and Indonesian Masters and was inside the top 25 of all four majors and THE PLAYERS. But he did not go one better than his 2017 runner-up at the Masters, finishing T12. Half a point. 2/4 14. Hideki Matsuyama wins a major. Can’t hide behind it. This one was wrong. After winning plenty of tournaments in 2016-17 it seemed a decent gamble on Japan finally getting a major champion. But instead, Matsuyama has seen a significant drop in form. He has just two top-10 results on the PGA TOUR this season. His best major result was T16 at the U.S. Open. Perhaps we should have seen it coming. Most players have a small dip in results after the birth of a first child. But they also bounce back the season after so let’s watch this space. 2/5 13. Rookie of the Year Xander Schauffele will keep on going. This kid is the real deal, so we were right about that. But we also said he’d win again this season, and so far, the trophies have eluded him. Two runner-up finishers. A third. A total of five top-10s and just four missed cuts from 23 starts. Who knows, he may just defend his TOUR Championship title and prove us fully right yet. 2.5/6 12. Tiger Woods plays again on TOUR. What a difference a year makes. This was considered a BOLD prediction last October. We had no idea if Woods would ever return to competitive golf as he recovered from a fourth back surgery, this time a fusion. Of course he has and he’s been amazing. His recent runner-up finish at the PGA Championship was his second of the season. Five top-10s in just 12 starts. Not only has Woods played, he could win this season. If he doesn’t get a trophy, you can be sure the prediction next season will be about claiming an 80th title. And some. 3.5/7 11. Someone will play late Sunday with the career Grand Slam on the line. This was true at the first major of the season as Rory McIlroy moved into the final group behind Patrick Reed at Augusta National. The problem for Rory was he never really threatened from there with a final-round 74 dropping him into a tie for fifth. Phil Mickelson was never a threat at the U.S. Open, and Jordan Spieth needed a late Sunday charge at the PGA Championship to finish T12. 4.5/8 10. Sangmoon Bae makes the FedExCup Playoffs – and so does a Chinese player. Well, we were off the mark with Bae as he returned to the TOUR from his Korean military duty. In 16 starts he has just one top-25 finish and ranks 201st in the FedExCup. And our history-making Chinese players haven’t fared much better. Zinjun Zhang sits 165th in the standings and Marty Dou is way back in 227th. 4.5/9 9. Justin Thomas will keep narrowing the gap between himself and Jordan Spieth. This has certainly happened, but just as much for Thomas’ great play as Spieth’s lack of it. The FedExCup champion has a huge chance to the be the first player to go back-to-back and win the FedExCup again after three wins already. His career win total sits at nine, while Spieth has stalled on 11 after a winless season to this point. Spieth has five top 10s – it certainly has not been a terrible season – but by his own standards he has dipped. The good news? There is still time to turn it around in the Playoffs. 5.5/10 8. Expect two or three wins from among this quartet: Maverick McNealy, Beau Hossler, Aaron Wise and Cameron Champ. Well, Wise held up his end of the bargain with an impressive win at the AT&T Byron Nelson, showing great poise down the stretch on Sunday. He’d been runner-up his previous start. Hossler has threatened often, twice a runner-up including a playoff loss at the Houston Open are part of five top 10s. Champ and McNealy have spent the majority of their time on the Web.com Tour where Champ has a win and a locked-up TOUR card for next season. McNealy has been fair without being great but will have a chance to advance from the Web.com Tour Finals. 5.5/11 7. Anirban Lahiri will use the Presidents Cup as a springboard to win on TOUR. Not yet he hasn’t. The Indian national has four top-10 finishes this season without being a serious threat. Still has the potential to be a superstar. 5.5/12 6. Jason Day and Adam Scott return to winning form. This one is already half true and might become full reality. Both players had been winless last season but Day certainly has returned as a TOUR threat. Wins at the Farmers Insurance Open and Wells Fargo Championship proved it. Scott, however, appeared to be heading for a long-term funk until lately. Scott led the PGA Championship with four holes to play before Brooks Koepka stepped up. His third-place finish was just his second top-10 of the season. Maybe he can push through the FedExCup Playoffs with a win. 6/13 5. U.S. Team will win the Ryder Cup in France. This seemed an obvious statement after their demolition of the International Team in the 2017 Presidents Cup, but as we head toward the contest, the European Team looks very strong. Players like Francesco Molinari and Tommy Fleetwood bring fresh form and Ian Poulter has his fire back. It should be an epic contest. 4. We will have a three-peat winner. Nope. Justin Thomas missed his chance at the CIMB Classic (T17). Hideki Matsuyama was a WD in his dual title defense in Phoenix, and Daniel Berger couldn’t keep pace with a dominant Dustin Johnson at the FedEx St. Jude Classic. 6/14 3. Justin Thomas will win THE PLAYERS Championship. Not this time. Instead he settled for T11. No one really competed with the resurgent Webb Simpson, who lapped the field with an incredible putting performance over four rounds. 6/15 2. There will be another first-time major winner along with Matsuyama. We did get two first-timers at the majors with Patrick Reed winning the Masters and Francesco Molinari taking Italy’s first major title at The Open Championship. But as Matsuyama was not one of them, we can only claim a half point. 6.5/16 1. The 25-and-under brigade will equal if not better their numbers from 2017. While Justin Thomas has kept winning and others like Aaron Wise and Jon Rahm have helped him out, reaching the incredible 18-win total from last season has remained out of reach. 6.5/17. Final Verdict: Currently 6.5/17. Bold predictions are meant to be just that. But we were still hoping for a better than 50 percent record! With that in mind…we’re hoping to earn more points with win from the U.S. Team at the Ryder Cup, and wish Scott, Hossler, Schauffele, Lahiri and Koepka the best in coming weeks.

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