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Alma Phillips has been playing golf a dozen years longer than Tiger Woods has been alive, and she took up the sport at age 48.
The Pleasanton Country Club still has Phillips, 93, playing the game she started more than 45 years ago, meeting a San Antonio lady friend her daughter's age on Wednesdays. Because of recent illnesses, Phillips has had to slow down a little and take rests along the 18-hole course.
At about 5-foot-3, Phillips is still a threat on the green.
"I've had three holes-in-ones. You wouldn't believe it," Phillips said. "I don't think it's skill. It's luck."
A plaque at the Country Club commemorates this achievement. But now, she concedes, she plays by her handicap, 36.
"All of my friends are either gone or do not play," Phillips said, although she has made a few new friends. "The young ones have to work. Some of them are dropping out when they're not very old."
Phillips enjoys a hearty 6:30 a.m. breakfast at El Castillo in Pleasanton six days a week: two eggs, two strips of bacon, two pieces of toast, jelly and coffee.
"They say you should eat no more than two to three eggs a week. That's bull," Phillips said. "I just got my blood check back, and it's the same as last time. It doesn't make it change."
The pacemaker to regulate her rapid heartbeat "has been working good." She still drives around town in her own 2007 Chevy Impala, which replaced an old Cadillac. She lives alone, so two of her daughters check on her daily, one in the morning and one at night.
Does she have any health secrets?
"No, I don't, except I play golf, take a lot of vitamins," Phillips said. "I take a lot of pills, though."
Bridge playing "keeps her brain," Phillips said. She dresses in florals, hummingbird prints and bright colors and always adds earrings. She gets her hair fixed every Friday and wears her wedding ring and the diamond ring from her 50th wedding anniversary. Around her neck hangs either a gold coin necklace from her husband, or a cross with a rock inside it. Born May 27, 1915, on a farm near Charlotte, she became valedictorian of her class in Jourdanton.
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