With the exception of Dinah Shore herself, no person is as identified with the desert’s LPGA golf tournament as Hall of Fame player Amy Alcott. The news that the major championship now known as the Chevron Championship will leave the desert after 2022 had Alcott looking at the past as well as the future.
“In some ways, it will be mourning a loss, but in other ways having a sponsor like Chevron who has really been committed will be great,” said Alcott, who won the major championship three times and started the tradition of the winner jumping into the lake at Mission Hills Country Club after her 1988 victory.
Sadness for the Coachella Valley but an understanding that the tournament might be bigger and better in a new location and with sponsorship from Chevron seemed to be the overwhelming reaction to Tuesday’s announcement that the tournament once hosted by Dinah Shore will relocate to Houston in 2023.
“I have a deep love for the event, “said Gabe Codding, the director of marketing for the City of Rancho Mirage who starting working seasonally at the LPGA event in 1996 and worked up to tournament director from 2008 to 2017. “So to see, to know that the event can go to where it started from (in status) and get back to where it needed to be is an incredible feeling. And then absolutely gutted that it is leaving our destination and Poppie’s Pond and Mission Hills. So it’s very conflicting and very hard to process for me personally.”
While he was tournament director, Codding helped with the sponsorship transition from Nabisco to Kraft and then from Kraft to All Nippon Airways. He said the event coordinator side of him understands the need for the LPGA to move the event.
“It’s a North American, U.S. based company,” Codding said of Chevron. “It’s a dream come true.”
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Nicole Castrale has two connections with the Rancho Mirage tournament. She first saw the event when she was 15 years old and a top golfer at Palm Desert High School, with her coach and local golf professional Vern Frazer telling her this tournament was what they were working for. Castrale did make it to the LPGA and played in the major championship eight times starting in 2007.
“That was my goal, playing in it, especially it being in my hometown, being that young,” Castrale said Tuesday while on a trip to Greece. “Seeing Juli Inkster, she was a role model to me, and now we are friends. So all through high school and college, I wanted to play in the event in my backyard.”
Castrale was a winner on the LPGA and played on two Solheim Cup teams, but she never won a major before back issues forced her off the tour. She sees the move of the tournament as both good and bad for the LPGA.
“It is a tough spot, because there are the players who are going to be saddened with history coming to an end, but on the flip side, this is their job, and in a small way this is a little promotion,” said Castrale, who now works in real estate at Toscana Country Club in Indian Wells. “They have a sponsor who appears to be completely backing them and giving them the opportunity that they may not have if they couldn’t find another sponsor.”
Introducing Castrale and every other player on the first tee of the Dinah Shore Tournament Course for the last 22 years has been desert radio personality Rich Gilgallon, who was surprised by the news Tuesday.
“I’m devastated for the community and for the club, and I’m personally devastated,” Gilgallon said.
Gilgallon said he has become friends on the first tee with many players, from Joanne Carner in his first year to Pat Bradley, who shares a New England background with Gillgallon, to Annika Sorenstam, who always wanted to know what was on the card Gilgallon was about to read introducing her.
“I count it as one of the great blessings of my life, really,” he said.
He added that the tournament has still been about original hostess Dinah Shore in recent years.
“I realize it wasn’t called the Dinah Shore, but it was played on Dinah Shore Avenue on the Dinah Shore Course,” he said. “I am sad for that as well, that the legacy didn’t weigh a little more heavily with the sponsor.”
Alcott said the idea that a multibillion dollar company like Chevron sponsoring an LPGA event shows how the LPGA has changed in recent years.
“I remember hearing the adage that women’s golf is sold, and men’s golf is bought,” Alcott said. “And now I think we are getting into a place where women’s golf, because it is exciting, it is global, women’s golf is being bought. People are seeing the value of it.”
As a member at Mission Hills, Alcott said she still senses support for the event locally.
“I sense the members really do want it. Everything changes, but I do sense the members do want it,” Alcott said. “I see the condition of the course, it is in really good shape during the event. I haven’t noticed a change. I have noticed the continued enthusiasm for the event.
“So I think that would be very hard for some people and maybe there will be members who will say great, it’s great to have our course back in April,” she added. “It will run the gambit.”
The financial woes of All Nippon Airways also were a contributing factor in the tournament moving after next year, Codding said. As an international airline, ANA has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and has seen revenues dry up.
“You look at poor ANA with a global pandemic. When we were in negotiation for their second renewal of the contract (a three-year extension through 2022), that was the one thing they were worried about, something semi-catastrophic that just deeply impacts their business and having that much liability, long-term liability,” Codding said.
Castrale said it will be difficult to consider the Chevron Championship as the logical extension of what was once the Colgate Dinah Shore Winner’s Circle.
“The major that we have known and the major that I strived to play in when I was 15 and wanted to have the opportunity to play in, that goal of mine, is not the same,” Castrale said. “But Chevron has now created an opportunity for the next generation to create new memories.”
Larry Bohannan is The Desert Sun golf writer, he can be reached at [email protected] or (760) 778-4633. Follow him on Facebook or on Twitter at @larry_Bohannan. Support local journalism. Subscribe to The Desert Sun.