Golf: Golfer focused amid gender controversy

By TERRY MADDAFORD

The days when Penny Newbrook played off a 52 handicap are a long-faded memory.

Now on a plus two - 54 strokes better than when she first teed up as a 13-year-old - Newbrook lets her clubs do the talking. Most of the time.

Unwittingly embroiled in one of the more controversial issues to hit the sport in recent years, Newbrook is determined it will not be a distraction.

Asked whether she would have considered taking the matter further had the Bay of Plenty Golf executive not backtracked and let her stay on her club's men's pennants team, Newbrook said: "I'm not that sort of person."

Thankfully, it never came to that.

Newbrook had been blissfully unaware of the storm her appearance at No 4 in Springfield's B team for their match against Omanu two weeks ago had caused.

While the controversy raged at home, she was playing in the Riversdale Cup in Melbourne as a member of the New Zealand team.

And that, she insists, is something she would rather talk about.

"It [the controversy] didn't really worry me," said Newbrook, 20, yesterday.

"I thought at the time a few people might have been unhappy but generally a lot more congratulated me on making the team and on the way I played."

This nonsense out of the way and with some members of the Bay of Plenty Golf executive left to wipe egg off their collective faces, Newbrook is looking to the New Zealand amateur championships in Ashburton from March 12-14 and beyond.

At the end of that tournament the selectors will name three players for April's Queen Sirikit tournament in China.

Newbrook, a member of the team who finished fifth last year in Korea, is keen to hold her place and later win a spot - for the first time - in the team for October's Espirito Santo in Puerto Rico.

Her golf these days is very much a case of have passport, will travel.

She is looking forward to playing in Ashburton, where she won the national under-21 title a few years ago.

Like many New Zealand children, Newbrook grew up trying her hand at a number of sports.

A better-than-average athlete, she also played squash and soccer but in the end it was a toss-up between golf and hockey at which she had represented Bay of Plenty at age-group level.

Golf won.

Her parents allowed her to leave school as a 16-year-old with the proviso she "met certain goals".

"It was either that or go back to school," said father Craig who, as a long-time single-figure player, had coached his daughter in those early years.

"She blew them out of the water."

Her game has blossomed under successive coaches Paul Hartstone, Robert Brookes, Geoff Smart and more recently John Weston at the neighbouring Rotorua Golf Club.

She is a member of the national Titleist squad and is in the process of switching to their irons after playing with their woods and putter for some time.

But, for a time yesterday afternoon, a proud Penny Newbrook put all golfing thoughts behind, pulled on her New Zealand blazer and fulfilled a long-standing invitation to cut the ribbon and open the gymnasium at her old school, Rotorua's Lynmore Primary.

At 1.81m and capable of firing the ball 220m or so from the tee, Newbrook cuts an imposing sight on the gold course.

Now, with the tick of approval from the hierarchy, she cannot wait for her second pennants at Mt Maunganui and the chance to once again trade strokes with the blokes.