Women’s golf group provides camaraderie, role models

Taryn Hutchins found out she had breast cancer less than a year ago.

Since then, the Spokane woman has undergone chemotherapy, two surgeries and radiation – which wrapped up just last month.

Through much of the ordeal, she found support from the Downriver 18-Holers, a women’s golf group that has been playing in the area for at least 60 years.

Many of the women in the group, some who are in their 80s and 90s, are cancer survivors themselves. So Hutchins, a 52-year-old instructor at Spokane Falls Community College, had plenty of role models.

“It’s one of the things that kept me going and so positive about things,” Hutchins says.

She told herself immediately after being diagnosed, “I know I can beat it and I can be golfing next year.”

And she has been.

Her fellow team members greeted her with applause when Hutchins showed up for her first meeting of the season last spring.

“If I was going to get back on my game, I had to make myself get out there and get golfing,” she says.

Don’t think of the Downriver 18-Holers as a gentle ladies’ club, where women lounge around sipping tea and discussing recipes. These women take their game seriously, competing amongst themselves and in tournaments around the area.

“When it’s good, it’s a lot of fun,” says member Ruth Hensley, 67.

And when the golfing isn’t going so well?

“Why did I take up this sport?” she says with a laugh.

Hensley joined the Downriver 18-Holers when her daughter was not yet in school. That daughter is now 42.

For the past 10 years, Hensley has run the group’s Rally for a Cure, a benefit tournament that raises about $1,000 a year for breast cancer research.

“There’s too many that have had this breast cancer,” she says.

There’s Shirley Moore. She’s 82, has had breast cancer twice and has been playing with the club since the 1960s.

“I sat down at a table one day and there were six of us,” Moore says. “And everybody had had a mastectomy.”

Moore says she was a good golfer 30 years ago. “But now I’m a terrible golfer,” she says. “When you’ve played 53 years, you have to get worse.”

She still golfs twice a week, though.

“That’s why they build carts,” she jokes.

And she still enjoys the companionship of the other women in the group.

“For a lot of us, it’s our primary social life,” she says. “Not only in the summer, when we play golf, but in the winter when we travel together and play bridge and poker. …

“Just the friendship of belonging and liking what we do and who we do it with.”