By Mark Schmetzer
Winning a Crystal Bowl Low Net championship is nothing new for the team of Lori Roberts and Tina Davis.
Experience didn’t make the outcome any less enjoyable for the Hamilton Elks Golf Club tandem.
Roberts and Davis finished ahead of the team of Triple Crown Country Club’s Ruth Ann Weiss and Kendall Reynolds in the annual Greater Cincinnati Women’s Golf Association event, played this year on July 29 at Triple Crown.
“Actually, we have won before,” Roberts said. “We won five years ago, so this is our second time winning Low Net.
“I went in with no expectations. I was just looking forward to a fun day with friends.”
The duo of Jodi Rusche and Cathy Almquist outlasted the Marie Decker-Judy Persherm team to capture the Low Gross championship.
The Crystal Bowl tournament was the conception of one of Cincinnati’s pioneers in women’s golf. Martha Parker Wilson came from a golfing family, won the Camargo Club Championship in 1951 and 1952, and played in the city championship from 1937 to 1957. She was a devoted member of the GCWGA, serving on the Board from 1949 through 1951 and again in 1956 and 1957. At the fall meeting of the GCWGA in 1951 she suggested that a two-golfer team from each club playing in a best ball tournament would be “interesting for the 1952 season.” The tournament was a success, was named the Crystal Bowl in 1957 and has grown into one of the GCWGA’s more popular events.
The Roberts-Davis team had to recover from a challenging start to pull out a second win, Roberts said.
“The first hole was a disaster,” she said. “It was a really bad hole, but we were able to come back. When we had two holes left to play, I looked on my phone at Golf Genius and I happened to notice that we were tied with another team. I thought, ‘If we can par the last two holes, we have a chance.’ Tina parred the second-last hole and I parred the last hole, and we won it.
“Fortunately, Tina and I both played well that day. We had some ebbs and flows. We just kind of ham-and-egged it.”
