THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS | You see her influence right away, starting with Dinah’s Place, the pavilion surrounding the 18th green at the Club at Carlton Woods. The players’ lounge is also called the 1972 Club. And the ice cream in player dining is a distinct nod to the soft-serve machine that was always a hit in the old Mission Hills clubhouse. Those touches, connecting the past to the present and the present to the future, came together this week at the Chevron Championship because of a committed sponsor, an enthusiastic town, and the impassioned leadership of a past champion and former world No.1 – Stacy Lewis.
Lewis grew up three miles from Carlton Woods, although she only played the course a half dozen or so times.
“We were members at the Woodlands Country Club, so this is very private and not part of the Woodlands Country Club,” Lewis said after posing for pictures outside the clubhouse at Carlton Woods. “That golf course is right down the road – the Player course and the Palmer course – so, yeah, I spent a lot of days (playing around here). The Woodlands was always so great. We would finish school and my parents would just drop me off at the golf course, and that's all I did.
“In 2003 we had 30 girls on our high school golf team. There was a reason, because we had the support of the community.”
Lewis and her husband, Gerrod Chadwell, only live an hour away in College Station where Garrod is the women’s golf coach at Texas A&M. This past Sunday, after Stacy flew home from Hawaii and the LOTTE Championship, the Aggies clinched the SEC Championship, defeating Mississippi State 3-2 in match play. Strangely enough, another LPGA spouse, Charlie Ewing, husband of Ally Ewing, coaches the Bulldogs of Starkville. But when the A&M team’s flight got delayed, Lewis put the couple’s daughter, Chesnee, to bed and told Garrod that she’d see him at home.
“They didn't get to College Station until about 11:15 (p.m.),” Lewis said. “I had told (Gerrod) that I wasn't going to come just because it was late, and with Chesnee, I didn't want to mess up bedtime and all that. Then I just got to thinking, it’s not that often that you win an SEC Championship. So I got Chesnee out of bed and we went and surprised him (at the airport). There were tears, and I think Gerrod had, I would say, probably 25, 30 people that ended up showing up to cheer on the girls.
“It’s been a special weekend for our family and been a whirlwind. The last two, three days have been really busy. It’s been a lot of fun, and just excited to – I guess two of the girls (on the A&M team) got to play in the pro-am yesterday and meet some of the Chevron folks, so for them, what a great opportunity to kind of springboard off that success and then be able to experience this and hopefully see it in their future someday.”
Stacy and Gerrod are staying with her parents, Dale and Carol Lewis, this week. Her caddie, Travis Wilson, and her coach, Joe Hallott, are staying two doors down with some of Dale and Carol’s friends.
“It's something that, definitely growing up here, I thought would never happen, to bring a championship like this to the Woodlands,” Lewis said. “But it's been awesome. There's so many people walking around, so many people that I know, and just to be in a familiar place, you can drive your own car, I know my way around the Woodlands. I don't need a map or anything like that.
“Yeah, it's just really special. Obviously, The Woodlands is very special to me. I seem to have a lot of hometowns as we travel around with the Tour, but I always want to be announced from The Woodlands because it's where I grew up, it's where I learned the game of golf, and it feels like the most home place to me.”
So, given all the leadership and mentorship roles Lewis has played in her time on tour - from serving in the LPGA board, to being a big sister to younger players, to captaining the next two Solheim Cups, to shepherding in KPMG, Marathon, and now Chevron as title sponsors on the LPGA Tour – it made sense that she would be the go-to player when this championship moved to Texas.
“I got on a committee to help with the move,” Lewis said. “Chevron put together a player-advisory group. They wanted to know what was important to us to make the championship special. There are obviously a lot of traditions with this event. What are the traditions that are most important to us? They asked current players, they asked retired players, they asked everybody.
“To me, Dinah is and was the most important thing. You can take the leap into the pond and all that kind of stuff, but to me, there's a reason Dinah is the only non-playing person in our LPGA Hall of Fame. There's a reason for that.
“But Chevron crushed it. You see it with the trophy, with Dinah's Place on 18, everything is about Dinah this week. That's what we tried to tell them over and over again. That’s what’s important.”
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