A Romp at the Gables

We’re not going to sugarcoat it for you: 1970 was a weird, mostly bad year. Vietnam was still raging. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died. The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel broke up. Bell bottoms—like, the really big ones—were happening. 

On the golf course, Doug Sanders made the wrong kind of history in the Open Championship at St. Andrews, missing a 3-footer that would have given him his first major title. Instead, he lost to Jack Nicklaus in an 18-hole playoff. Donna Caponi nearly suffered a similar fate at the U.S. Women’s Open, limping home with a 77 and having to watch a double-bogey putt on No. 18 hang on the lip for a terrifying half-second before somehow falling to avoid a playoff and secure her second major victory. Tony Jacklin won the U.S. Open at Hazeltine, but the week will be remembered mostly for the hellacious opening round, where winds gusted up to 40 mph and half the field, including Nicklaus, couldn’t break 80. (Although, to be fair, that’s a round of golf we would have loved to watch.)

With all that going on, you can forgive a bunch of folks for getting dressed up in some spectacularly goofy outfits in order to get away from it all for one blissful spring day. And that’s the scene in this uncredited collection of images provided by Broken Tee Society Member Robert Rubin, from an event simply called “Women’s Golfer Fun Day at the Coral Gables Country Club in Florida,” proving once again that there is no better place than the golf course to momentarily escape reality.

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+ Click to enlarge