Making a change in course

Peggy Conley has returned – on a part-time basis, at least.

And she’s brought a wealth of golf knowledge and a wondrous collection of life experiences, not all of them positive, with her as she attempts to “transition” back to her hometown.

The 57-year-old Conley, who thoroughly dominated the local amateur golf scene in the 1960s and early ‘70s, has started commuting cross state from her home in Redmond to Spokane, where she teaches golf several days a week at Liberty Lake Golf Course.

Conley is attempting to juggle her new teaching duties here with those at The Golf Club at Newcastle, where she has worked for the last year.

“I’ve got a really good position over there,” Conley explained, “but I’m trying to move back to this part of the state. This is home.”

Actually, “home” for Conley has been difficult to define since she left Spokane in 1965 as the first woman to receive a golf scholarship at the University of Washington.

Since then, the free-spirited Conley has been expelled from the UW for throwing beer bottles from the seventh floor of her dormitory, represented the United States for a second time in the Curtis Cup Matches, played professionally on the LPGA and European tours and spent two years “having the most fun of my life” motorcycling along the coasts of England and Scotland after recovering from a car wreck that ended her competitive golf career.

In addition, she has taught school in Seattle and golf in Arizona, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington.

It has, indeed, been one crazy ride, complete with unforgettable highs and life-changing lows that Conley keeps nicely in perspective.

“The only downfall to living the life I’ve lived is that I’ve paid for storage for 25 years,” she said. “I’ve spent a down payment on a house for storage units. I mean, what do you do with your silver and your trophies when you’re traveling all the time?”

Especially when you have amassed as much hardware as Conley, who was inducted into the Pacific Northwest Golf Association Hall of Fame in 2001.

As a teenager at Lewis and Clark High School, Conley won an unprecedented three PNGA Junior Girls’ championships and twice captured the Oregon Junior Girls’ title. In 1963, at age 16, she was a finalist in both the U.S. Women’s Amateur and U.S. Girls’ Junior.

A year later, she won the U.S. Girls’ Junior and was named to her first Curtis Cup team, even though she admits to not knowing what the Curtis Cup matches were at that time.

Conley’s interest in golf first surfaced while shadowing her father Glen, a dentist, around the course at Spokane Country Club. She started playing at age 11 and eventually built a remarkable amateur resume that also included a PNGA Women’s Amateur title and two trips to the finals of the Western Junior Girls’ Championship, and earned her a college scholarship.

Conley sheepishly recalls the beer bottle fling that led to her temporary suspension from UW as “one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.”

The incident, she said, started with her and several other girls pouring water out of beer bottles from the seventh floor of the dorm “just to watch it cascade down on the sidewalk.” It quickly escalated, however, into a bottle-tossing affair unknowingly witnessed from below by a campus security guard.

“It was just of those stupid things,” Conley said. “I was the only one who wasn’t drinking at the time, and I’m the one who got in trouble.”

How much became apparent a short time later while she was with the Husky golf team at a tournament in Minnesota. Her mother, Barbara, a concert violinist, called and told her she had received a letter from the university stating she was no longer a student there.

“She said it had something to do with a ‘drunken brawl,’ ” said Conley, “and I thought, ‘Oh, no.’ “

When the golf team returned to campus, Conley proceeded directly to office of the women’s athletic director to express her remorse.

“I went in with tail tucked and pleaded insanity,” she said.

Her contriteness paid off in reinstatement.

Despite the sobering experience, Conley claims she “absolutely loved” college, where she majored in ceramic sculpture and earned degrees in art and education. But it was during her stay at UW that she admittedly burned out on competitive golf and opted to pursue a teaching job rather than her LPGA playing card following graduation.

The teaching gig was nice and lasted four years before Conley soured on the economics of her initial career choice.

“I was teaching at a private school, and my salary was about $7,000 a year,” she recalled. “And here I had two degrees from the U. The garbage men in Seattle were on strike at the time for higher wages, and they were making $12,000 a year. It didn’t seem quite right.”

In addition, several of the women Conley had regularly beaten on the golf course as a teenager were making big money on the LPGA Tour.

“Which made me think, ‘Maybe I should look at doing that,’ ” Conley said.

In 1976 she qualified for the Tour and pocketed more that $1,200 in her professional debut at the U.S. Women’s Open at Rolling Green Golf Club in Springfield, Pa. She spent six years on tour before losing her card and deciding to take a short vacation trip to Europe.

“I went over there for two months and stayed nine years,” she said.

She played regularly on the European Tour during that time and was in the process of retooling her swing when she was involved in an ugly accident on her way to a tournament.

The wreck occurred when Conley came around a hairpin curve and smashed head on into a car traveling in the wrong lane. The woman driving the other car was a golf journalist Conley knew. She was returning from the tournament venue after having interviewed an Italian competitor.

“It was bad,” Conley said of the collision. “There were golf clubs scattered all over the road.”

Miraculously, the injuries Conley sustained were not serious.

“Soft tissue injuries, mainly,” she explained. “I didn’t break a bone.”

But the residual problems she encountered with her back, shoulders and hands effectively ended her days as a competitive golfer.

“All of sudden, I can’t work,” recalled Conley, whose biggest moment as a professional came overseas at Royal Birkdale, where she finished second in the 1986 British Women’s Open. “It was one of those things like if someone said you can’t work anymore, what would you want to do?”

In Conley’s case the answer was simple: Buy a motorcycle and travel the rugged, but scenic, coastal regions of Europe.

Which is what she did for the better part of the next two years – but not until after she had spent three months recovering from the wreck and sitting if front of a computer writing a journal about her experiences on the LPGA and European tours.

“I still have it all on disk,” she said, “but I’d probably get sued if I ever published it.”

After concluding her motorcycle odyssey, Conley decided to look into becoming a teaching professional.

“I had dabbled with it while I was on tour,” she said. “It’s funny, but when you’re on tour, people just assume you can teach. Not true. Just because you can play, doesn’t mean you can teach, and I knew I was sincerely lacking.”

Conley points to former LPGA star Nancy Lopez as the poster child for her belief that good players don’t necessarily make good teachers.

“In 1979, she was getting $10,000 an hour to do clinics, and she was fantastic,” Conley explained. “But when somebody in the crowd asked her once what she does to cut a ball she said, ‘I just cut it.’ And when the person asked how she hooks a ball, she said, ‘I just hook it.’

“I was the same way. I couldn’t tell you either. I just knew if I felt a certain way the ball was going to go to the left, and if I felt another way, it was going to go to the right. That’s fine as a player, but as a teacher, you’d better be able to explain why it happens, and you’d better be able to explain it in a bunch of different ways.”

At the insistence of a friend, Conley met with world-renowned golf school guru John Jacobs at his home in Lindhurst, England.

Jacobs ended up hiring Conley, who eventually returned to the States to work at one of his schools in Arizona.

Her two weeks of training to become an instructor consisted of giving demonstrations in front of some of Jacobs’ best and most experienced teachers.

“They were people who had never been on tour, but who had studied and understood the golf swing much better than I did,” Conley recalled. “And I’ve never been so nervous in my life – not in the finals of the U.S. Juniors or the British Open. Never.”

Conley stayed with the Jacobs Golf School in Arizona for five years before moving back to the Pacific Northwest to accept a job as a teaching professional at Sehalee Country Club in Redmond.

She moved to The Club at Newcastle last July and plans to split time between there and Liberty Lake for the time being.

“I’m my own boss now,” said Conley, who can be reached at (509) 844-8522, “so it’s a real treat to be back here. Spokane has always been home to me. Over there in Seattle you’ve got all of those trees, and unless you live on the water, you’re in a tunnel.

“To me, there’s just something about the dry air and big sky over here. There’s something about Spokane that gets into your skin and stays there.”