Lefties Unite on the Links

Golf is evil. Your game can be on one minute and off the next. And rarely is the fix immediately apparent.

Things are even tougher for 7% of all golfers--those who are left-handed.

“It’s very difficult to get equipment,” says Mannix Delfino, a Huntington Beach resident who has been playing lefty golf for 10 years. “Even the shoes we have, the pressure points are in the wrong places.”

Making matters worse, Delfino and her ilk often take heat from right-handed golfers.

“Everybody makes jokes as if we were blonds,” she says.

Things got a little rosier for Delfino three years ago when she joined the National Assn. of Left-Handed Golfers, an organization founded in 1936, when the first national left-handed tournament took place in St. Louis. Today, the group has nearly 3,000 members, from regular duffers to low-handicap golfers. Several hundred reside in Southern California.

Among the benefits of the $20 annual membership fee are the ability to enter any group tournament (including about 100 state and regional lefty tournaments annually), a subscription to the Southpaw Newsletter and, perhaps most important, camaraderie, and the chance to play with other lefties, swap clubs and complain about the fact that more than a few golf course designs favor right-handed players.

Each year, however, lefties have a chance to even the score at the National Lefty / Righty Tournament. This year’s Lefty / Righty takes place Sept. 8-11 in Lenoir, N.C., where, for four days, lefties will experience a brief bit of equity in a right-handed world.

For more information on the National Assn. of Left-Handed Golfers, call (800) 844-NALG or visit the group’s Web site at https://www.nalg.org.