Although she considers her play during the 1986 U.S. Women’s Amateur the finest golf of her life, Kay Cockerill can tell you champions need to find a way to win.
As a UCLA senior, she evaluated the situation before the championship at Pasatiempo Golf Club in Santa Cruz, California, and “talked herself” into winning the first of her two consecutive Women’s Amateur titles that come along with the custody of the Robert Cox Trophy, arguably golf’s most beautiful prize.
“I consciously remember that I started to verbalize to myself: I am going to win the U.S. Women’s Amateur,” said Cockerill, a Golf Channel and NBC Sports on-course reporter/commentator, in advance of the 124th Women’s Amateur at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on August 5-11. “I laughed the first few times I said it. I made myself verbalize it multiple times every day.”
Cockerill, a member of the UCLA and Northern California Golf Association halls of fame, grew up playing public golf at DeLaveaga Golf Course in Santa Cruz, not far from the Alister MacKenzie-designed Pasatiempo. In her final two years of high school, she worked at a private course, La Rinconada in Los Gatos, receiving a junior membership.
Honing her plan, she took full advantage of her proximity to the national-championship site and played it as much as she could, to gain an “understanding of the strategy of where to place the ball and to try to get total command of putting on those greens.”
Cockerill, who now lives in San Francisco, defeated her NorCal friend Kathleen McCarthy of Stanford, 9 and 7, in the 1986 final and remembers not three-putting all week. She followed up with a 3-and-2 win over Tracy Kerdyk at Rhode Island Country Club in 1987.
Recalling her 1986 victory, Cockerill said: “When I look back on that week, it encapsulated what I imagine as a perfect week, both mentally and physically. I just love that golf course. The weather was so good. Being so close to home, it felt so familiar.”
Even with her daily “I will win mantra” Cockerill was focused on advancing to the match-play portion of the championship that had eluded her in her first two attempts.
“I was looking forward to the opportunity,” she said. “There was no pressure. No huge intensity put on myself.”
“If we could all bottle how I approached the tournament, I wish I could have carried that on to my pro career.” — Kay Cockerill
The night before the scheduled 36-hole final match, Cockerill battled with herself about having to face such a familiar and likable opponent.
“I had to think of Kathleen as the enemy,” said Cockerill, who will celebrate her upcoming 60th birthday in Italy with her husband, Danny Dann. “I couldn’t think of her as my friend. I had to think of her as my opponent, a sort of non-entity. I couldn’t put a personality with her because I liked her so much.”
In the final, Cockerill took a 6-up advantage through the first 18 holes based on McCarthy’s struggles and her own good golf.
Finding that path to victory guided her to grabbing an intermission sandwich away from the well-wishers who were already handing her the trophy.
“I had some tough matches,” Cockerill said of her play in 1986. “There were challenges. I welcomed all those challenges. If we could all bottle how I approached the tournament, I wish I could have carried that on to my pro career.”
The list of her golf achievements is topped by winning the Women’s Amateur, followed by (in no particular order) walking on and making the UCLA women’s golf team, entrance in the UCLA Hall of Fame and qualifying for the LPGA Tour, where she played for nine years.
Her victory at Pasatiempo altered her golf life.
“It wasn’t until I won the Women’s Am at Pasatiempo that my profile and my game and my exposure went to another level,” Cockerill said. “That goes hand in hand with winning the national championship, the U.S. Women’s Amateur.”
At the Women’s Amateur in 1987 at Rhode Island Country Club, which had a coastal feeling that appealed to the coastal Californian, Cockerill brought a more seasoned approach to the championship.
“I didn’t have pressure on me,” she said. “I welcomed the situation because I already had a U.S. Women’s Amateur championship win. I didn’t feel pressure to win. I just wanted to see how deep I could go.”
In the quarterfinals, she faced Carol Semple, the 1973 champion who was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2008 as Carol Semple Thompson. It was an afternoon match, and Cockerill took a power nap after her round-of-32 victory in the morning.
“I felt I had to play out of my mind to beat her, and I was 6-under,” Cockerill said. Upon dispatching Semple, 6 and 5, Cockerill grew confident of making it back-to-back victories.
Cockerill’s victory against Kerdyk gave Northern California five Women’s Amateur titles in eight years as Juli Simpson Inkster won three straight, in 1980-82.
Cockerill, who work the U.S. Senior Women’s Open last week for Golf Channel before flying to Tulsa, has not seen Southern Hills but knows of its history, which includes three U.S. Opens and five PGAs, most recently in 2022 when Justin Thomas won.
While the 156 competitors will be planning their winning strategies as Cockerill did in 1986 and 1987, the two-time champion offered these words of advice.
“Trust what you brought this week,” she said. “Know your strengths and weaknesses and play the golf course accordingly and come up with a game plan and stick to it, but work a little extra hard on your chipping and your putting. No matter what the tournament is, you’ve got to have supreme confidence around the greens.”
Sounds like a winning plan.