Daughter of Crocodile

Catherine Lacoste, 22, is a fair-to-middling horseback rider, an energetic handball, volleyball and basketball player, a strong bowler and--by her own admission--a "lousy" tennis player. Which may be a source of some disappointment to her father Rene, who as France's famed "Crocodile" of the 1920s, twice won the U.S. and Wimbledon championships. But girls are supposed to take after their mothers anyway, and Catherine's mother, the former Simone Thion de la Chaume, is a golfer--the winner of six French amateur titles. Last week, at the Cascades Golf Club in Hot Springs, Va., chunky Catherine Lacoste proved that she is a pretty fair chip off the old niblick. Firing rounds of 71, 70, 74 and 79, she whipped a field of 56 pros to become the youngest player, the first amateur and the first foreigner ever to win the U.S. Women's Open.

Catherine's victory was doubly embarrassing to U.S. lady pros because she is not even a full-time golfer. She has been playing the game ever since she was eight, won the French junior championship in 1964, the French Ladies' Open this year. But too much golf is a drag. "I get fed up every October," she says, "so I just don't play all winter--except for maybe nine holes a week. After a tournament, I always quit for a week. I think golf should be fun, and I wouldn't have much fun as a pro." During the Open, while the pros were getting their sleep and spending long hours on the practice tee grooving their swings, Amateur Lacoste was swinging in groovier fashion--bowling, taking in a movie, dancing a wild midnight Charleston, giving piggyback rides to children in her hotel.

The pros did their bit to beat themselves at Hot Springs. Texas' Mickey Wright, looking for her fifth Open title, shot an 80 in the second round; Louise Suggs, a two-time winner, pulled to within one stroke of Catherine--only to overshoot the green on the par-five, 534-yd. 16th hole and take a double-bogey seven. Playing methodical, unspectacular golf from tee to green and putting superbly, Catherine opened up a seven-stroke lead that put the tournament safely out of reach, despite a case of last-round jitters--six bogeys in seven holes. Finishing with a ten-over-par 294 and a two-stroke victory, she dashed off to a telephone to break the news to her father, who was celebrating his 63rd birthday in Paris.

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