From Sarazen to Greis

"If I were a man I wouldn't have half a dozen Tom Collinses before going out to play, then letting profanity substitute for proficiency on the golf course," said the great woman professional Patty Berg.

That about sums up the attitude of Leslie Greis, a 7-handicapper from Holden, Mass., with brains and balance. Greis made Crimson golfing history yesterday when she played number one on the men's varsity against MIT and Bates.

Leslie finds that when men are competing against her they tend to become unglued after watching her crank out drives well over 200 yards down the middle of the fairway. "Some guys when they find out they're playing me try to kill the ball," she says. "It really wrecks them."

Greis is no newcomer to the psychic struggles that play such a big part in men's golf. As a high school senior at Waschusett Regional H.S., she shuffled between the first and third slots on the boys' team and was voted co-MVP. That was in addition to garnering six letters while playing field hockey and basketball.

Nevertheless, Greis cannot compete with men in terms of distance so she has to rely on the lyrical accuracy of her swing. She routinely plays from the men's championship tees, saying "If I'm going to play with them, I have to play their game." From the men's tees on the Harvard linksters' home course, the Country Club in Brookline, there are seven holes which are impossible for her to reach in regulation. "It's like I'm playing a par 78," says Greis, which puts into perspective her methodical rounds in the low eighties.

Greis had acquired quite a load of silverware since she took up the game six years ago. She was the Massachusetts Girls' Champion in 1975 and finished as runner-up in the state Schoolgirl Championship three times.

Perhaps Leslie's best tourney showing came in the Inter-City Championships, in which teams from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia vie against each another. She rifled a 78 to finish as Boston's top point getter, carding five-and-a-half out of a possible six matchplay points. Right now, Greis is honing her game for the U.S. Women's Amateur, which will be played at Brae Burn, the site of yesterday's match.

Leslie spent three years in high school working on different facets of a science project entitled "The Sand Wedge: Its Mechanics and Design." The sand wedge, otherwise known as the dynamite or blaster, is that concave instrument for delving in golf's farflung hinterlands. Ever since Gene Sarazen built the first one during the winter of 1932 in a Florida machine shop, the wedge has been a godsend for golfers extricating themselves from places previously untrodden by man (or woman).

While exploring the physics of golf, Leslie spent her freshman year "looking into exactly how sand between the golf ball and the club really affects trajectory." To carry out her inquiries she rigged a contraption of weighted pendulums to simulate a golf swing, like "Iron Byron," the machine modeled on the swing of Byron Nelson used by golf ball companies.

The next year, she entered the world of golfing polemics, refuting the iconoclastic thesis of two savants of the golf swing, Alister Cochran and John Stobbs. Leslie showed that the surface of the clubface does, in fact, impart more backspin on the ball depending on its roughness.

Her project won first place in the finals of the Massachusetts State Science Fair, held annually at MIT.

Of course, the male ego is still not completely reconciled to the upsurge of par pummeling women golfers. Leslie Greis may never become another Patty Berg, but nevertheless she is helping to change the old attitude expressed by Chi Chi Rodriguez: "I'm playing like Tarzan--and scoring like Jane."