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\n 99-year-old Central Texas women bond through love of golf
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Eventually, the game brought the two women together. Bledsoe and Butler met through the Women\u2019s Golf Association at Onion Creek and continued to share decades on the course. Neither can begin to estimate how many rounds they\u2019ve played over the years.<\/p>\n
For Bledsoe, the appeal of golf has always been less about competition and more about the people around her.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s always been just for fun, games, things like that. Be with your friends, that type of thing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
But their decades at Onion Creek Club haven\u2019t just been about playing the game. Butler remembers a time when women didn\u2019t have the same opportunities on the course as men.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were on the backside of golf,\u201d Butler said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have a lot of privileges that the men had. At Onion Creek, we fought for them and we got them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Butler said women were once prohibited from playing golf at the club on Saturdays and were not allowed inside an area reserved for men. She said members of the Women\u2019s Golf Association (WGA) pushed for those rules to change.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe WGA fought long and hard for some of these things,\u201d Butler said.<\/p>\n
Decades later, Butler said the game has \u201cprogressed a lot\u201d for women.<\/p>\n
The years have also changed how often the two friends play.<\/p>\n
Butler said she now makes it to the course about twice a week at most and sometimes doesn\u2019t play a full 18 holes. Bledsoe, who lives at Onion Creek, said she also plays about twice a week.<\/p>\n
Nearly 50 years after they joined Onion Creek, neither woman offers a complicated explanation for why they\u2019re still playing.<\/p>\n
Asked what has kept her on the course for so long, Butler credited \u201cthe good Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Bledsoe, the answer was just as simple.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou just wanna do it, that\u2019s all,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
And after nearly a century of life and decades spent around the game, they still do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two 99-year-old golfers reflected on nearly half a century of friendship and their time playing together at Onion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":406696,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-406695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/406696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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