12-time club champion

There is a joyous dollop of destiny in Jenny Jeffreys being Portsea’s most celebrated female golfer. A winner of 12 Ladies Championships, sundry other trophies and an enduringly popular golf club figure for more than half a century, she has made an indelible mark on a patch of the Peninsula that’s forever been her home.

Jenny was born in the front room of her parents’ house overlooking the Sorrento football ground, the ninth of 10 children whose father would follow the renovation vogue of the day by adding another bedroom whenever the latest arrival swelled the place fit to burst.

Her parents were Portsea members, and on Sundays would take their youngest children with them when they played. Jenny remembers her elder sister sitting on their mother’s golf bag on an old hand-pulled buggy. “When we were out of sight of the clubhouse – because children weren’t really accepted on the golf course – they’d hand me a club and ball and I’d have a hit.”

Cow paddocks abutted their back fence, and Jenny would go to the garage and borrow the shortest club in her mother’s bag and hit balls for hours. “I always wanted to hit a golf ball.”

Portsea GC was chosen due to her father’s friendship with Jack Howard, and because it was the club of locals. The latter is important; Jenny and her husband Paul are from families with deep Peninsula roots, a tradition they’ve proudly maintained. The farthest away they’ve lived is Tootgarook.

Winning the 1983 MPDGAA Division One Pennant – (from left) President Joan Wilson presenting VLGU pennant cup to team captain Jenny Jeffreys

Another Portsea ladies legend, Olga Hill, was a great aunt; Jenny’s first job was working with Olga at Stringer’s Stores in its haberdashery days.

“We used to ride our horses down Sorrento main street in the middle of summer, pull up at Slippy’s milk bar, tie the horses to the veranda post and go in for an ice cream. I wouldn’t attempt that now!”

When they were courting, Jenny and her husband would hone their iron play by hitting balls off her parents’ front porch, across the old Melbourne Road (after checking for cars), aiming to land them in the football ground goal square.

Jenny’s 19th birthday present was her first Portsea GC membership. Her first day of submitting a card to get a handicap is miserably memorable. “It was pouring rain, I didn’t have any waterproof gear. I still remember the score – 141.”

The way the older ladies took her under their wing has stayed with her too, and the part her mother Nin played in improving her golf. Not least on another day when her score would count towards her eventual first handicap of 36.

“I asked her what handicap she thought I could get down to, and she said about 18. I thought, ‘I’ll show her!’ I think she did that on purpose to make me more determined.”

At the time handicaps were only adjusted once a year. In one 12-month block Jenny’s came down from 24 to 14. Her first Ladies Championship was contested against Joan McWilliam, who would win 11 titles. Jenny remembers being very nervous, and reflecting on the loss as a learning experience.

On the tee before the 1981 event, Mum Nin (caddying for her daughter) asked, “What are you going to do today?” Jenny vowed that she would let her opponent make the mistakes. “I’d learnt a few things,” she says of a win that came just six years after that first round of almost 70 over par.

She regards each of her dozen triumphs as favourites, but on reflection settles on the year when her mother was ailing. Nin had fought bone cancer heroically, hanging on to a 9-hole membership for as long as she could, getting around in a cart with her daughter’s help.

Presentation night 1996

“She was in care in Sorrento by the time I won in 1992, and I left the golf club and took the trophy down and sat it in front of her,” Jenny says, smiling to recall that every time she dropped in after golf – in a time before mobile phones – Nin somehow already knew what she’d scored that day. “She had a spy!”

Team golf has invigorated her always, not least the thrill of travelling to other clubs and forging bonds. “Some of them you might only see once a year, but they are lifelong friends.” In her 50th year as a member Jenny still plays No.1 in Portsea’s pennant team. She remembers looking to long-standing members for advice, as today’s women look to her. “The tables have turned!”

A foundational tip speaks to her competitiveness.
“I say to the pennant girls, you have to go out there thinking I’m going to beat her. If you don’t think like that you won’t win.”

Nin and Jenny won the Ladies Foursomes (as well as the District Ladies Foursomes). She also teamed with her father ??? to win the Mixed Foursomes. “That probably outshines the championships to be honest, winning with Dad and winning with Mum. Not many people get to do that.”

Every day on the course brings back memories. It’s never been all about winning, far more the mateship and personal challenge. Latterly that’s been to keep her handicap in single figures, knowing that while her driver and rescue clubs are holding up, losing a club worth of distance with her irons demands constant on-course recalculation.

“The girls keep watching me, saying ‘Jeffs, you’re getting close to double figures!’ That just makes me more determined to get a good score.”

Her love of the place runs far deeper than the successes it’s brought her, in keeping with her parents’ early instruction that she never forget that golf is just a game. “I’ve never forgotten that. Sometimes I get a bit angry, but then I think about the ladies who aren’t here anymore, or who are but can’t do it anymore. So I make the most of it.”

One of Portsea’s dearly departed, Barbara Gallagher – an old friend of Nin’s who won an unrivalled eight consecutive championships to 1966 – left Jenny with a gorgeous memory at the club’s 75th anniversary. By then Jenny’s haul had surpassed Barb and 11-time winner Joan McWilliam.

As all living past champions lined up for a commemorative photo, Barb turned to her and said, “You little rotter, you broke my record!”

It’s been her forever home, a place that’s given Jenny far more than even she has given the club. Way back in those early days of studiously bringing her handicap down, another stalwart Pauline Powell (whose daughter Jenny had played junior tennis against) fronted her one day most concerned, reporting that she’d heard a rumour that Jenny was leaving to become a member at Sorrento.

“I said, ‘Pauline, you know me – I’d probably last five minutes at Sorrento!’ And Pauline said, ‘You’re probably right!’”

Delgany Plate Winner

Now she plays for the camaraderie and exercise (and still to feed that competitive streak). Waking up knowing she’ll spend the day at her golf club, not two miles from where she was born, is more treasured than ever.

Recently, Jenny and ???’s grandson, now in his mid-20s, came and stayed, as he still does regularly. Conversation turned to golf, and he asked, “How many rounds would you have played over 50 years Nan?”

Working on an average of two rounds a week, Jenny calculated that she’d walked more than 50,000km playing golf at Portsea – or from Sydney to Perth and back 13 times.

“No wonder my knees ache sometimes!”