Mid-life golfer tees off
on a 'hole' new career
by Carole Andrews
The Business Journal
 WHITMAN - When Mary E. Porter returned to her Southeastern Massachusetts hometown in 1980 as a divorced mother of two, she launched a career in the insurance business, never guessing that a future hobby would eventually change her life's direction.
Within a few short years, having achieved a fair level of financial success, she took up golf to relax. In 1991, she organized SWING (Sporting Women's Invitational Golf), a group of 28 women who played just for fun.
By SWING's second summer, there were 250 women signed up, and soon Mary was publishing an informational newsletter of scores and upcoming events. By its third year, SWING was offering 14 sporting events, the newsletter was at 16 pages, and advertisers were clamoring to be included. In 1995, her modest publication became Tee Time: New England Women's Golf Magazine, and Mary quit the insurance business for good.
A glossy 36-page magazine with an estimated readership of 35,000, Tee Time circulates through paid subscriptions and through distribution at more than 390 New England golf course pro shops, and all LPGA and FUTURES events held in New England.
While most subscribers live in New England, the current mailing list includes addresses in Canada, China, South Africa, Australia and the Philippines. "And one in either Greenland or Iceland," Porter adds as an afterthought. An active website (www.teetime-mag.com), she says is responsible for many far-away readers.
Included in each issue are golf lessons and tips from a wide variety of male and female golf professionals and writers, some based as far away as California, Colorado and Florida, along with celebrity interviews, event schedules, health and training advice, reviews of golf courses and equipment, hole-in-one announcements, classified advertising and even golf humor.
The readership is apparently more than women, however. Not only do male golfers pick up the magazine for their wives, many report reading and enjoying it themselves, perhaps because of its instructive and highly readable format.
"What I saw was that the major golf magazines were printing very detailed three or four-page articles on how to do something," Porter says. "We try to keep our stories short, simple and to the point, as well as to include a little humor."
It's not really the first time Mary Porter has managed to parlay doing something she loved into a respectable living. As a young teen, she and a brother hitched ponies to an umbrella-shaded cart and sold ice cream on a six-hour route throughout the town of Whitman. On weekends, they expanded the endeavor to include pony rides.
 Her earliest career memory is of herself as a six-year old polishing shoes and making change in her parents' downtown shoe store in Whitman, MA. Both Mary and her older brother Bob worked after school and on Saturdays in Finlays Shoe Center helping their parents earn a living in the 60's and 70's. "Growing up in a family business was a great experience." Mary boasts.
The magazine was not really planned or intended, she acknowledges. "The newsletter kept growing in size and circulation, and I agreed to sell advertising at first only to defray the cost of printing. As it got better known, we were able to get interviews with women on the LPGA tour and other people - including golf instructors - began to request subscriptions.
While "making tremendous money in insurance," Mary Porter eventually found herself at a crossroads. "I hated my job, my father died and my brother was seriously ill," she recalls. "I looked at my life, and decided it was time for a change."
Today, she is the magazine's only full time employee, although she has part-timers handling ad sales and copy editing. She shoots many of her own photographs and personally visits and critiques new courses, generally working about 60-hour week, which means she doesn't play as much golf as she used to. SWING activities also don't get as much of her time as in the past, although with 400 members (age range 25 - 70; average age 45 to 50) enrolled, there's quite a bit going on. Her handicap is about 20, she acknowledges.
Having recently passed the magazine's fifth anniversary, Porter is proud to say the endeavor "has never been in the red. We're not making a tremendous profit, but we've made it past a critical milestone and we're growing and keeping our heads above water."
She's also experienced "tremendous support" from golf courses, many of who say they appreciate expanding ranks of female golfers.
"Among the things we teach readers are the courtesies of the course, how to repair divots, remove ball marks, rake sand traps, and even how to drive a cart properly," Porter explains.
Many course owners, she reports "say they prefer women on their courses as they are more conscientious about the speed of play and more likely to repair damage." Porter sees further growth ahead, looking forward to the point where she can expand to a 48-page layout. The National Golf foundation says nearly half of all beginning golfers are women, she points out, and more women are becoming aware of the business advantages of playing golf.
Women are finding that you can learn a great deal about someone in three or four hours on the course - personality, temperament, honesty - information that is useful in the working world," she maintains.
 Asked to assess the view from the editor's desk after five successful years, Porter acknowledges several surprises. "I definitely didn't expect the attention," she relates. "People stop me at golf events everywhere and thank me for the work I do. Sometimes they ask for my autograph. I certainly didn't expect to be working this hard, or loving it this much."
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