With her putter making birdies sing and the snow-capped Rocky Mountains shining in the distance, Jennifer Kupcho reminded me how splendid golf can be during a time when everything beautiful we took for granted now feels fragile and uncertain.
“It would be really cool to get my first professional win … It’s definitely a big priority,” Kupcho said Wednesday, after shooting a sweet 67, which put her in second place on the leaderboard through one round of the CoBank Colorado Open.
At the tender age of 23, Kupcho has already staked a claim as the best female golfer ever to come out of Colorado. Last year, she won inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur, as well as more than $500,000 a rookie on the LPGA Tour. Her 2019 read like a fairy tale.
But as she was introduced on the first tee at Green Valley Ranch Golf Club, the gallery that welcomed her home consisted of nobody except Mom and Dad, who both cheered from behind the masks necessary in these weird, pandemic times.
“We wanted to follow the rules,” said Janet Kupcho, grateful to attend the first major sporting event in this state since the pandemic shut everything down in March.
The coronavirus has ripped out pages of the sports calendar and rewritten the rules of how the games we love are played. Being staged without fans, the 26th women’s Colorado Open defines the new normal.
“Slow day in pro sports?” asked Mike Kupcho, wondering if a sportswriter that zings John Elway for a living somehow got lost in the tall grass of an 18-hole track near Denver International Airport.
“Never been so happy to be on a golf course in my life, as this chance to see your daughter play,” I replied.
And it was the absolute truth, despite a newspaper career that has blessed me with the opportunity to hear the Masters roar like a rock concert on Easter Sunday and see Tiger Woods win the British Open at St. Andrews. Like every fan in Colorado, I’ve been starving for the unique thrill that is live sports. So for me, this local tournament is as delicious as a bacon cheeseburger.
When Kupcho took out a 3-wood and blasted a shot 265 yards over cattails dancing in a water hazard to land her golf ball softly on the green of a par-5, it gave me goose bumps not felt in nearly three months.
“It was nice to have my parents out here with me,” Jennifer said. “They haven’t been able to watch me play in a tournament since I don’t know when.”
And what a thrill it will also be for her maternal grandparents, nonagenarians cooped up by the coronavirus, to see a loved one’s name in headlines of the sports page. “They read The Post every day and get so excited anytime they see their granddaughter’s name in the paper,” Janet Kupcho said.
This pandemic can hit home so hard it can rattle the foundation of any Colorado household.
Although Mike Kupcho doesn’t swing a driver as sweetly as his daughter, he does possess the skills of a 12-handicapper. And that’s not too shabby. But after a rough seven-month stretch in which his sister and father both passed away, topped off by his 84-year-old mother surviving a bout with COVID-19 inside a local memory-care facility where other residents died, Mike was so emotionally spent that something as familiar as a 8-iron was beginning to feel oddly foreign in his hands.
So during a recent practice round for the Colorado Open, it’s understandable why he stood on the No. 17 tee alongside a daughter he taught the game, staring at the 195 yards between him and the pin, with the harsh realization he was a mere 12 strokes shy of an embarrassing score of 100, with two tricky holes left to play.
“How you doing, Dad?” asked Jennifer, with love.
Her father grabbed that old reliable old 8-iron and feathered a shot onto the green of the par-3, then sank a putt for birdie. He marched to No. 18 tee, doing the pessimistic math that eventually messes with every golfer’s head, figuring he still had nine strokes to shoot 99.
“And I used all nine strokes, including three putts, to break 100,” said Mike, chuckling at his struggle. “But I did what I needed to do. I made it happen.”
In 2020, isn’t that a new definition of beauty?
In these crazy pandemic times, merely finding any way to survive and move on should be recorded on the scorecard as a major victory.
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Kiszla: Her grandma beat COVID-19. So shooting a sweet 67 at the Colorado Open? That’s easy. - The Denver Post
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