Intimidator

PULLMAN – It’s four minutes past 8 a.m. on a Saturday and a group of three men standing on the first tee turn to see who’s coming.

Kim Welch stands 5-foot-6, but there’s no doubt the threesome already teeing off knows enough about her game to realize there’s little chance of playing fast enough to stay ahead of her 280-yard drives.

Immediately, one of them offers her the opportunity to play through, even though their round has just begun.

“The girls that I play with, they always tell me that I’m intimidating,” says Welch, a two-time All-American at Washington State. “Because I step up to the first tee and I’m not bouncing around being all happy and smiley. I don’t know if it’s a game face, but I think it helps if people are a little bit scared of me at first. I’d rather have it that way than have people look at me like I’m nothing and thinking they’re going to walk all over me.”

She arrived at WSU a free-spirited, barely recruited player from Sacramento, Calif., and few could have guessed her career would ever materialize into much of anything. But now she’s on the verge of claiming a third All-America honor and in the process has, as her coach says, helped make a program where once there was little room to boast.

Welch and her Cougars teammates are leaving Pullman today for the NCAA West Regional in Las Cruces, N.M., as the senior draws nearer to the end of a collegiate career as improbable as it has been impressive.

“Obviously I’m biased, but I would venture to say she’s the best female athlete to have ever gone to Washington State University,” golf coach Walt Williams says. “She’s represented us and put us on the map in women’s golf. Now when we go to tournaments, other teams look at us and go, ‘Ooh, Washington State. That’s one of the teams we’re going to have to beat.’

“She came and has basically rewritten every single record in the book over and over again.”

That may be appropriate, given Welch’s propensity to work from a book no one else is reading. A self-described rebel in her teen-age years, Welch often threatened to give up the game as a youth and played some prestigious junior tournaments through high school in flip-flops.

That all drove her parents – and some college coaches on the recruiting trail – crazy, but Welch says she needed to do things her own way.

“I gave up trying to give her advice because she always proved me wrong,” recalls her father, Peter Welch, who enrolled Kim and her older siblings in a junior golf program when they were 7. “So what are you going to do? And she’s been beating me since she was 13.”

For her part, Welch slyly says she has to give her father a few shots on the golf course now. And as much give-and-take as there may have been with her parents, things were just as rocky at first with Williams. The WSU coach is a Texas native and Welch’s West Coast ways didn’t match up.

Both admit they didn’t care for each other at first, and Williams even says he didn’t bother talking to Welch that much on her recruiting visit to Pullman – which she says she took just for the free vacation, having already verbally committed to San Jose State.

“I really thought she’s just a little too far out there to suit me,” Williams says. “She was a little big-city brat, that’s what I call her. I thought, ‘Well, I’ve got no time for this.’ “

But Welch fell in love with the town and then the two quickly drew close once she arrived on campus for good. Now the coach goes so far as to call the player a surrogate daughter, and Williams’ concern isn’t dealing with Welch but replacing her.

“I think about that a lot,” he says. “I might never have another Kim Welch. But then I always think that some coaches never get a Kim Welch. Most of them never get someone that good. So the fact that I’ve had her for three years or four years is quite a blessing for me. There just aren’t that many three-time All-Americans out there looking for a place to play.”

Even now, however, Welch does things a little bit differently. Unlike many collegiate golfers, she’s been known to put the clubs away for months at a time.

That might be considered heresy in the golf community, but this spring Welch has continued the sizzling pace. She shot a school-record 66 in back-to-back tournaments, and more recently finished third at the Pac-10 Championships, also the best finish in school history.

But as much as her golf game has improved the last four years – she has plans to play on the Futures Tour with an eye toward an eventual LPGA career – Welch says it’s her demeanor that has changed more than anything else, even if the edge hasn’t completely worn off.

“I thought I was really cool and now I kind of realize that I have it really good and try not to take things for granted. I’m nicer to everybody because I was a real pain,” she says, then thinking back to those who may have passed on her because of her attitude in high school. “I’m kind of glad they turned away because I don’t think I’d be happy at those schools that saw that and automatically said, ‘She’s out.’ That’s who I was at that time. If they couldn’t see that, if they couldn’t see the golf that I’m playing even though I’m in flip-flops, then screw them. They’re probably going to hate me and I’m going to hate them.

“I don’t like following the crowd. I think maybe I’ve carried that with me all the way through.”

On that weekend morning, standing 147 yards away on the third fairway, the sound of a Titleist ProV1x golf ball clanging against the flagstick shatters the calm of a near-empty golf course. Welch offers a sheepish smile and giggles, and the veil of intimidation is gone.

“Wow. Sweet,” she says.

And in an instant any thought she may have once had of quitting the game seems absurd. It’s clear: Welch is right at home.