Published last Wednesday, in Eugene's RegisterGuard newspaper...
Winning doesn’t get old for
Brie Stone, and yet as she gets older, she finds that she sees winning
from a different perspective, cherishing the journey around the golf
course rather than simply focusing on the trophy at the end.
You might remember her as Brie Del
Bone, a juniors golf sensation who had won more than 50 tournament
trophies by the time she got to high school, and who won four straight
Midwestern League golf titles for Sheldon from 1995 through 1998.
Then, she practiced every day; now,
living in Veneta, she plays perhaps once a week, with her husband,
Jason, manager at Fiddler’s Green Golf Shop, and spends her days caring
for their 4-year-old son, Spencer.
And yet she’s still gathering trophies.
Earlier this month, Stone won her third
Oregon Golf Association amateur event of the year, the OGA Mid-Amateur,
for golfers 25-and-older, at Glaze Meadow Golf Course at Black Butte
Ranch. It was her third straight OGA Mid-Amateur title, unprecedented
since the event was introduced for women in 1998. Earlier this year, she
won the OGA Stroke Play title for the third time in her career, and won
her second straight OGA Tournament of Champions title.
“When I was young, I won a lot, and I
expected to, so I didn’t appreciate it quite as much as I do now,” said
Stone, who turns 32 early next month.
“I definitely want to win, and I go out to win, but I guess I’m focused more on the journey than I am the result.”
In a way, this is the golf career that
Stone envisioned for herself since she became inspired by the great
career of Mary Budke, who dominated the Oregon amateur ranks in the
1970s. However, the road to this point was unpredictable.
After graduating from Sheldon, Stone
played a season at Nevada, and in 1999 won her first OGA Stroke Play
title. She transferred to Oregon State for the spring season in 2000,
but withdrew from school after that quarter and never went back.
“It’s a long story,” she said, and one
that she won’t discuss publicly. “There were a lot of things going on in
my personal life right after I transferred. ... It was a tough time in
my life.”
She won a second Oregon Stroke Play
title in 2001, and in 2002 took a job as an assistant pro at Emerald
Valley Golf Course, giving lessons, a job she held for about a year. In
2005, she was selected to join a group of golfers for a series of
tournaments in China; she was then exploring playing on a West Coast
satellite professional tour, but that folded, and she was talking of
going to LPGA Q school but never got there.
The China trip wound up convincing her, finally, that she didn’t want a pro career.
“When I came back, I realized (the
validity of) the initial feeling I had — that I wanted to be an amateur,
and that I wanted to carry on women’s amateur golf in Oregon, and have a
child, and have a family, and not be stuck on the road by myself,” she
said. “I couldn’t imagine myself being that far away from family, and
friends, and life, and what I was really looking for.”
She and Jason were married in 2006, and
Spencer was born in 2007. Even through pregnancy, Stone said, she never
really put her clubs away, and having regained her amateur status, she
returned to competition in 2008. A year later, she won the OGA Public
Links title and was second in the Mid-Am and Stroke Play tournaments.
In 2010, she won the first of her three straight OGA Mid-Amateur titles.
A plus-2 handicap, Stone said her
strength is her ball-striking. She’s not a big hitter — she drives the
ball about 230 yards — but accurate, both with the driver and irons, and
as confident with a 7-iron as she is with a wedge. She said she might
practice a bit more now that she and Jason have joined Shadow Hills
Country Club, with its excellent new short-game area, but so far her
weekly rounds with her husband have been preparation enough for winning
tournaments.
“That has worked for me, in a weird sort
of way, because it’s lowered my expectations, and I think that’s what
got me a lot of times (in the past), because I expected to go out and
win, or I expected to play my best, and I expected everything to go my
way, and that’s just not the way things are going to go,” she said.
“And when you aren’t out there every
day, and you’re not playing all the time, and you have other things
you’re focused on in your life, you don’t necessarily expect to go out
and play your best every time. Instead you just let it happen.”
After a bad round, Stone doesn’t find it
necessary to “pound a million balls” on the range, figuring that she’ll
figure it out by the next round, and she’s had just one coaching lesson
in recent years, a helpful session on putting last year with Doug
DuChateau of Precision Golf School at Fiddler’s Green.
The change in mental attitude is probably the biggest change in her golf game from when she was younger.
“I had the killer instinct when I was
out there, but I didn’t have all the tools — that golf isn’t everything,
and that a bad shot is just one bad shot, and it happens to everyone,
and a bad round happens to everyone,” she said. “When I was in the hunt
when I was younger, I could finish. But the problem was if I was not
hitting the ball as well as I should, or things weren’t quite going the
way that I wanted, I could press too hard; and that’s when things start
falling apart in golf, when you press too hard and start wanting things
too much.”
Stone’s final tournament of this season
will be the OGA Players Championship, Oct. 20-21 at Columbia-Edgewater
Country Club in Portland. In the future, she said, she’s considering
trying to qualify for the U.S. Golf Association’s Mid-Amateur
championships, and taking another crack at qualifying for the amateur
berth in the LPGA’s Safeway Classic at Pumpkin Ridge.
In short, there’s a lot of golf ahead, for a woman who has played a lot since she won her first tournament at age 7.
“I like golf the same amount, but I’m
more appreciative of golf now,” Stone said. “It never was a chore to
come to the golf course, but now that I don’t get to do it as much, I’m
just more grateful to be playing.”
