Business Report: Putt For Dough

When Donna Shalala became chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1988, the school's alumni and friends told her that in order to raise $400 million for a capital campaign, she would have to learn to play golf. There was no substitute, it seemed, for hitting up potential donors on the links. The university arranged for her to go to golf school for a week. "I had never had a golf club in my hand," says Shalala, now Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services--and one of the few Cabinet officers with a low enough handicap to play with President Bill Clinton. "Today a lot of people I schmooze with, I schmooze with on a golf course."

Shalala is by no means the lone woman out there on the fairway, at least not anymore. Networking on the golf course, long a part of doing business for male executives, has in recent years become par for the course for women. More than a fifth of the 26.5 million Americans who play golf are women--an increase of 24% over the past decade, according to the National Golf Foundation in Jupiter, Fla. And the barriers that once kept them off the links during prime tee times (when the deals get done) have been dropping like Annika Sorenstam's putts. The result: one of the last bastions of old-boy networking has got into synch with the oncoming 21st century.

Not only are women playing more, they are also taking it seriously, to judge by the growing numbers attending golf school. "When we first started, we were getting mostly country-club wives," says Marlene Floyd, sister of tour veteran Ray Floyd and founder of a women-only golf school in Hilton Head, S.C. "But in the past three or four years, the number of career women who are coming for professional reasons has grown to about 60% of our business. We're seeing a lot of stockbrokers, bankers, saleswomen, accountants and lawyers, who are taking their vacation with us to learn golf."

Today's female golfer is likely to be a full-time careerist who sees the green as an extension of her office. "I have got lots of new customers as a result of playing golf," says Lois Rice, 59, an executive vice president of Wells Fargo Bank in Los Angeles. A survey this year by the Executive Women's Golf Association in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., found that its 13,000 members had an average salary of $78,325. Nearly 60% of respondents held upper-management positions with major corporations. Almost 30% owned their own business.

Take Aileen Rappaport, 53, of Washington, a vice president for Loomis, Sayles & Co., an investment-management firm. Seven years ago, she decided to go to golf school so she could compete with colleagues she saw doing deals over 18 holes. It paid off. "Every time I went out on the course, a deal went down," Rappaport says. "On one of my first outings with a client, I closed a $200 million sale." Several weeks ago (after six sessions at golf school), Rappaport closed a $300 million sale.