Sue Johnson has been involved in scoring at professional golf tournaments for the U.S. Open, the U.S. Women's Open and the U.S. Senior Open. She used to do scoring for about 20 tournaments a year. How did that come about?
I run scoring central for the U.S. Open, the U.S. Women’s Open and the U.S. Senior Open. I used to do scoring for about 20 tournaments a year. I had started volunteering locally for golf tournaments, again through the same country club that my parents belonged to. There was a tournament where I found mistakes on scorecards three days in a row that nobody else found. When I first said something to somebody, it was, ‘Ah, dumb female, what does she know?’ So I went to somebody else and I said, ‘This is wrong. You’re paying the top 10 pros and the top 10 teams for the pro-am, but there’s one person who’s not listed who should be and there are two people that are listed in the wrong spot.’ So they decided to humor me and found out I was right on all three and they were wrong. So when this happened, on the third day they kiddingly asked me if I liked to travel, and I said, ‘I love to travel.’ And they said, ‘No, seriously.’ ‘Seriously. I’m single and I love to travel.’ And they said, ‘OK, we need to talk.’ And I said, ‘You know, I live in Cleveland, Ohio, and if you need help with golf tournaments in Florida in February, hey, I can do that!’ What would happen is that I would teach during the week. The Cleveland airport was 10 minutes away from my school and I actually did the master schedule for the school. The principal allowed me to have the last period of the day free. So Friday I would teach and then I’d head to the airport, fly to wherever the tournament was, work Saturday and Sunday, fly back Sunday night and be back in the classroom Monday morning. I started doing that in ’89. I was mostly doing the Champions Tour and the World Series of Golf every year in Akron, Ohio. Our country club hosted the U.S. Senior Open in 1996 and I was the scoring coordinator for that tournament and the USGA was very impressed with what I did and said, ‘OK, can you come and do this for our tournaments next year?’ So that’s how I started doing the golf tournaments. At this point I have worked around 60 Opens for golf.