Katie Mitchell tried to talk Gabi Ruffels out of it.
Ruffels, a University of Southern California sophomore, stood on the 18th tee of the Spanish Trail Country Club in Las Vegas last February during the final round of the Rebel Beach Showdown. Ruffels had a one-shot lead and faced a closing par 5 with water on the left and a huge fairway bunker on the right.
“She had a chance to win her first college event and I tried to get her to back off, to lay up,” said Mitchell, a USC assistant coach and a Fernandina Beach High School graduate. “But she wanted to hit driver off the tee and give herself the best chance to get there in two [shots]. She wanted to go for the kill shot.”
Ruffels birdied the hole and won by two.
“She was fully confident in hitting that shot,” Mitchell said. “She is never scared on the golf course. She takes dead aim.”
It’s that kind of confidence that has been behind Ruffels’ meteoric rise up the women’s college and amateur ranks in the five years since she took up golf at the age of 14, after admittedly getting burned out in junior tennis in her hometown of Sandringham, in Victoria, Australia.
In the past 14 months, Ruffels has earned second-team All-American and first-team All-Pac 12 honors, won the women’s U.S. Amateur and the North and South, climbing to 11th on the World Amateur Rankings.
And it’s the kind of confidence that led her to enter the Jacksonville Amateur July 23-25 at the Jacksonville Beach Golf Club. Ruffels became the first female to enter the tournament in its 59-year history (two area players, Hannah Stevens and Tori Mouton, have since entered) but she doesn’t view it as any kind of symbolism or herself as any kind of a pioneer.
After all, it’s been 12 years since Michelle Wie last played in a PGA Tour event and 17 years since Annika Sorenstam became the first woman to play on the PGA Tour, at the Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth.
“In this day and age, with so much changing, maybe it should be more normal for women to play in tournaments that were all men,” Ruffels said. “Girls are hitting the ball farther and I think we’re under-estimated sometimes, especially in golf. We’ll see. I’m excited to go play there.”
Jacksonville fit her schedule
The main reason Ruffels is playing in Jacksonville next week is simple: many women’s amateur tournaments leading up to the U.S. Amateur Aug. 3-9 at the Woodmont Country Club in Rockville, Maryland, have either been canceled or moved to later in the year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
When Ruffels and her mother were looking for possibilities in Florida (her brother Ryan, a member of the Korn Ferry Tour, lives in Orlando), they came across the Jacksonville Amateur.
They inquired about playing and Jacksonville Area Golf Association officials were only too happy to have a defending U.S. Amateur champion in the field.
“It is clearly an honor to have the reigning U.S. Women’s Amateur titleholder come to Jacksonville and compete in one of North Florida’s oldest and most valued championships,” JAGA said in a statement after her entry was accepted.
Ruffels, a plus-2.5 handicap, already has extensive and recreational experience in playing with men. She frequently tees it up with her brother and his friends, and with members of the USC men’s team.
Ruffels, Stevens and Mouton will play the same tees as the men at Jacksonville Beach (the back tees can stretch up to 6,700 yards) and Mitchell said she likes Ruffels’ chances of being competitive.
“She plays a ton of golf with our men’s team and her brother and she’s very comfortable playing side-by-side with men,” said Mitchell, a two-time winner of the First Coast Women’s Amateur. “She hits it a long way, hits her irons well and loves firm and fast courses. She won’t be intimidated at all.”
Ruffels family had a tennis background
Just a few years ago, golf wasn’t even on Ruffels’ radar.
She seemed headed for a tennis career, which would certainly have kept it all in the family. Her mother is Anna Maria Fernandez, who led USC to two women’s national championships and won the AIAW individual title in 1981 before going on to win five WTA doubles titles; and her father is Ray Ruffels, who reached the semifinals three times in the Australian Open in the 1960s and 1970s, won the 1977 Australian Open in doubles.
He later became a prominent coach and helped the doubles team of Todd Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde — “The Woodies” — win the gold medal in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
Gabi Ruffels showed promise in tennis, until at the age of 14 she abruptly quit, saying simply that she got “burned out.”
“I had enough,” she said. “It’s not that I switched tennis for golf. I gave up tennis and then didn’t do much for awhile.”
Her mother said she and her husband never forced tennis on their children and understood Gabi’s feelings.
“It wasn’t difficult at all for us when she made that decision,” Anna Maria Ruffels said. “There was never a doubt. Ray and I never wanted them to do anything that they didn’t get up in the morning and go out and enjoy.”
But a few months later, Ruffels was restless for something to do – and something where she could be competitive. She asked her mother one day if they could go hit some golf balls, the first time she had ever made that request.
“The next day, she asked if we could go hit some more balls,” Anna Maria Ruffels said. “The next day, she wanted to play a few holes. At that point, I told her if she wanted to pursue it, she might want to take some lessons.”
Gabi Ruffels began working with former Australian Tour member Andrew Pitt at the Yarra Bend Golf Course outside Melbourne, Australia. She then played in her first junior tournament and turned to her mother and said, “Wow … that was fun.”
Anna Maria Ruffels quickly realized one of the reasons why her daughter turned to golf.
“She was amazed about how social the players were,” she said. “She told me, ‘everyone talks to each other … they’re so social.’ I told her, ‘well, that’s golf.’ She enjoyed the competition in golf. I don’t know how much she enjoyed the competition in tennis.”
USC coach takes ‘big risk’
Within 18 months Gabi had a scratch handicap and was playing as many tournaments as she could.
“I love playing,” she said. “I’d much rather play 36 holes than practice for two or three hours.”
By the time Ruffels reached college age, she had represented Australia at the 2017 World Junior Girls Championships, was third at the 2017 FGC Junior International, qualified for the Australian Amateur Match Play and the Australian Amateur and was on the Victoria women’s and junior state teams.
That attracted the attention of former USC women’s coach Andrea Gaston, who was friends with Anna Maria Ruffels. USC lost three players to the LPGA after the 2017 season and even though Gabi Ruffels had done well in Australia, she still had not climbed out of the top-800 on the world amateur rankings.
Gaston offered her a partial scholarship. In two years with the Trojans, she has 10 top-20 and seven top-10 finishes.
“I had always wanted to go to USC and coach Gaston took a risk on me,” she said. “I was still ranked somewhere lower than No. 800 when I started college and that’s where I’ve really progressed. I owe her a lot for her belief in me.”
Ruffels takes off in the summer of ’19
Last summer, Ruffels dominated women’s amateur golf with her victories in the U.S. Amateur at Old Waverly in West Point, Mississippi, and the North and South. She went a combined 11-0 in match play in those tournaments, and defeated Stanford’s Albane Valenzuela 1-up in the U.S. Amateur championship match with three birdies in her last four holes to become the first Australian to win the title.
Ruffels made a 10-footer for birdie on the 36th hole to clinch the title in her first trip to the U.S. Amateur.
“I was just excited to be there,” she said. “I was a qualifier, not an exempt player but I did have some confidence by winning the North and South. I knew I could compete against the best in the world.”
Now she will compete against the best men on the First Coast, a list headed by defending champion and former University of North Florida star Jordan Batchelor, other UNF players Michael Mattiace, Jack Comstock and Cody Carroll, past Jacksonville Amateur champions David Anthony and Duke Butler IV, and past Underwood Cup team members Jeff Golden, Chris Henderson, Devon Hopkins, Matt Kleinrock, John Lobb, Toby Ragland and Michael Smith.
Ruffels will be ready, Mitchell said.
“It’s so refreshing to watch her play sometimes because she hasn’t played golf that long and she still goes at it like a little kid, in a childish frame of mind … but in a good way,” Mitchell said. “She doesn’t think about the pressure because she’s having too much fun.”
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