Leisurely Lesbia

Texas turns out golfers of a perfectionist and fiercely competitive strain, e.g., Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Babe Didrikson Zaharias. This week Texans were talking about a trim (5 ft. 6 in., 133 Ibs.), professedly lazy 19-year-old girl who appears to be neither a perfectionist nor fiercely competitive, but whose name is already on a lot of golf trophies. It is a name that Texans expect soon to be known to the outside world: Lesbia Lobo of San Antonio.

Smooth-swinging Lesbia, who smacks 220-yd. drives down the fairways, has been playing golf for six years. This year she has won every tournament she has entered : the Texas Amateur, the Texas Public Links (where she set a course record of 70 and was five under men's par in the 36-hole final), and the Broadmoor tournament at Colorado Springs, fortnight ago. Lesbia, tanned and relaxed, has done all her winning despite a strikingly leisurely approach. "I guess I'm pretty lazy about practice. It's so hot here in the summer." In the cool of an evening, instead of hammering shots from a practice tee, Lesbia would just as soon putter around a miniature golf course, a practice which shocks graver golfing types. At the Broadmoor tournament, she flubbed around in 83 in practice. But when the chips were down, she was the tournament medalist with a fine 72. Explains Lesbia: "I never get hot or tired in competition."

Lesbia learned golf from her father, an ex-caddy and high-70s amateur named Joe Lobo (the Spanish surname means wolf). Her first big victory came two years ago in the Mexican Women's Amateur, when Lesbia was only a junior in San Antonio's Thomas Jefferson High School. Since then, Joe Lobo, an engraver who lives above his own shop, has been working overtime to finance his daughter's travel to tournaments. Nowadays Lesbia also gets a helping hand from admiring fellow Texans, who give her a lift to tournaments, sometimes arrange for her to stay in private homes.

This month, for the first time, Lesbia expects to play in the National Amateur championship, where she will be up against such topnotchers as Seattle's Pat Lesser, Georgia's Mary Lena Faulk and Barbara Romack of Sacramento. The thought of "so many of them all so good" prompted Lesbia to get down to a bit of practice last week. Lesbia did not expect to burn up the practice course: "The only time I really like to play is in a tournament. I don't know why, but I just do better with all those people staring at me."

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