Tale Of Two Golfers Leaves One With Scars

The golf world watches this week to see if Tiger Woods - who took his first swing, with his father’s encouragement, at the age of 11 months - can conquer the Masters.

Meanwhile, giving $50-an-hour lessons to Century Village residents at Turtle Bay Golf Club is a 40-year-old woman who once earned money on the LPGA Tour at age 8.

“I see his mom and dad on TV, they show him nothing but love, whether he plays good or whether he plays bad,” said Beverly Klass, who has lived in Boynton Beach for about eight years. “My father used to say cuss words at me from the sidelines when I hit a bad shot. He used to beat me with a belt till I was bloody on my back if I didn’t practice.

“I guarantee you Tiger Woods’ father never did that. You have two people, child prodigies, with two different kinds of parents.”

Growing up in the Los Angeles area, Klass got her first set of sawed-off clubs at age 4. When she earned a little red jacket by winning the National PeeWee Championship by 65 strokes, the tournament organizers told her half-jokingly not to come back because she was spoiling the tournament for the other kids.

Jack Klass, a building contractor who died in 1981, took them seriously and took his 8-year-old daughter pro in 1965. Triple-normal galleries turned out to see her first tournament, the Dallas Civitan Open. She made TV appearances opposite Johnny Carson, Mike Douglas and Bozo.

In four pro tournaments that year, Beverly won $31 in prize money but not many friends.

She remembers seeing a group of pros putting on the hallway carpet in a hotel one night.

“Go get your putter and go out and join them,” Jack Klass said to Beverly.

As soon as she did, they scattered.

“I stood there, and I was really hurt,” Beverly said. “If I remember it to this day, I must have been hurt.”

Klass said some of the pros were supportive - Judy Rankin, Marlene Hagge - but others just wanted to get rid of her. They did, using child-labor laws as an argument.

Jack Klass sued, and Beverly could play neither pro nor amateur tournaments for a couple of years until the suit was settled. In the end, the LPGA adopted the Klass clause, limiting pros to 18 or older, and Klass had her amateur status restored. But not a normal life.

She won 25 area and state amateur tournaments, powering 260-yard drives as a 15-year-old, but endured a terrifying relationship with her father.

“During that time my father was pushing me more and more and more to practice after school where I’d rather go out with my friends to play,” Klass said. “So my family became very tense to the point of it being a dysfunctional family. By the age of 13 my father had kicked me out of the house. He got violent, and you get tired of that stuff.”

She estimates she left home 300 times growing up. One time she slept under the Santa Monica Pier for a couple of weeks. She started counseling at 13 and made trips to court, a psychiatric hospital and a foster home.

“The judge said to me, ‘Do you want to go home with your parents?”’ Klass recalls. “I said, ‘No, I don’t want to get beat up any more for not practicing golf.’ He said, ‘I don’t blame you. We’ve got to send you somewhere temporarily, so we’ll send you to a psychiatric hospital.”’

Klass played on the men’s golf teams in high school and at Pierce College and turned pro again at 18. But she never won a tournament and only once finished in the top 40 in earnings (39th in 1982 with $37,534).

Beverly says that when Jack Klass died, her mom altered his will, took the inheritance, remarried and left. Beverly and her two sisters haven’t talked to their mother since and don’t know if she is alive.

With the passing of her father, Klass found her emotions on edge, sleep hard to come by and her desire fading. Her LPGA career ended at the McDonald’s Classic in June 1988, when she just walked away in the middle of the second round.

Then came a series of jobs: cleaning houses, telemarketing.

“I learned a lot about life that I never learned growing up, because I went straight from a kid, right into the limelight,” she said.

Within two years after his death, Klass found her way back to golf and the lessons at Turtle Bay.

All this, but Klass is not an unhappy woman. She has a hearty laugh that comes easily and often. She loves the teaching, her living for the past eight years.

Klass’ story resurfaced when 14-year-old Natalie Gulbis played in the Longs Drug Challenge in Lincoln, Calif., last week. Interview requests have come from The Golf Channel and Extra, and Turtle Bay has answered calls about book and movie deals.

Still, the thought of playing for money gnaws at her. She still has a Tour card and a desire to compete.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “I haven’t decided.”