Sports Biblio Digest, 8.2.20: The LPGA and the Birth of Women’s Pro Sports
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Michelle Wie; Maya Moore; The Karolyi Way; Althea Gibson; How Sports Shape America; Herschel Walker; County Cricket Returns to The Oval; The Science of Streaks; A Lost Tar Heel Legend; Rocky Colavito; 1961 Yankees; Sòcrates; Remembering John McNamara and Lou Henson
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I’ve often thought that the endurance of the Ladies Professional Golf Association is a testament to the spirit, belief and level-headedness of its founders.
In early 1950, the first tournament in LPGA history, the Tampa Open, was won by Polly Riley. She wasn't among the drawing cards of those earlier years—founders Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Patty Berg and Louise Suggs were.
In fact, Riley was a lifelong amateur, and that landmark win was her only professional victory amid dozens of amateur prizes and a sterling career in Curtis Cup play.
The LPGA succeeded the Women’s Professional Golf Association, which formed in 1944 but folded five years later.
Sensing the need to seize an opportunity that might slip away, those 13 founders—whose living members today include Shirley Spork and Marlene Bauer Hagge—organized a 14-tournament maiden season and pushed women’s pro sports onto a new horizon.
Like its predecessor, the LPGA scraped by for years on minimal funding, exposure and organization, and along the way built up hard-won resilience that sustains it today.
As its 70th anniversary season has been cut short due to COVID-19, the LPGA carries on in similar fashion, resuming play this weekend at the Drive One Championship in Toledo after a 166-delay since the Australian Women's Open.
While women’s pro sports these days are getting more, and well-deserved, attention in team sports—the WNBA and the National Women’s Soccer League are playing condensed summer schedules in “bubble” venues—what’s also come with them are emphatic plays to social-justice issues.
Subsidized by male-dominated entities that are often derided by sports feminists—the NBA and the U.S. Soccer Federation—the WNBA and NWSL clearly reflect the attitudes of some in a generation moved to matters beyond sports.
Operating independently of the PGA Tour since its inception, the LPGA has never had that luxury, and does not now. Its continuing pragmatism has been vital for existing in a pure male-dominated business and sports world.
In the decades before Title IX, star LPGA players marked off hardscrabble courses, traveled from tour stop to tour stop in station wagons, made endless community appearances and took home a small amount of prize money. It was rarely a glamorous life, but they were playing golf, and they soldiered on.
Even when a second wave of star power hit the tour in the late 1950s and early 1960s—led by Betsy Rawls, Kathy Whitworth and Mickey Wright—the LPGA struggled to bring in sponsorships and media exposure. Wright chalked up her early retirement at the end of the 1960s to the heavy burden of having to play at nearly every tour stop, lest sponsors pull out.
After yet another dip, and as a new age dawned for women’s sports in the early 1970s, Colgate Palmolive CEO David Foster and entertainer Dinah Shore stepped up, sponsoring an LPGA major in Palm Springs bearing her name that became one of the celebrated stops on the tour.
(That event is now called the ANA National, but The Dinah, a lesbian cultural festival/party weekend that began at the Dinah Shore nearly 30 years ago, continues on.)
At the same time, the charismatic Nancy Lopez catapulted the LPGA into an even brighter spotlight. Media attention (her first husband was a TV sports reporter who interviewed her) and sponsorship money rolled in.
As the Women’s Tennis Association was making its mark, and women’s team sports in college and at the Olympics were growing, the much more venerable LPGA was suddenly a hot, in-demand entity.
Steady growth marked the 1980s and 1990s, and as a new millennium began, what had been an overwhelmingly American tour became a global attraction, with Sweden’s Annika Sorenstam and other international stars dominating.
Since 1994, in fact, only one American has been named LPGA player of the year—Stacy Lewis, in 2012 and 2014.
She’s not much of a household name at home because the LPGA has undergone yet another sea change in its history over the last decade, one that I was skeptical it could pull off.
After losing a good chunk of its stateside sponsorship and television deals during the recession, and following the controversial reign of the only female commissioner in LPGA history, current commissioner Michael Whan, a virtual unknown, undertook an active rebranding of the tour.
The marketing pro was mocked by some in sports media who don’t know much about women’s golf, but truth be told, Whan had a gargantuan task when he took over in 2010.
Quietly and stubbornly, Whan built out a global tour, especially in golf-crazy Asia, where female pros are among the biggest names in sports.
Total prize money last year on the tour was $70 million, compared with $40 million during the peak of Sorenstam’s career (She won 72 LPGA events, trailing only Whitworth and Wright, and leads the all-time earnings list with $22 million).
Since late January, when he cancelled an LPGA event in China, Whan has been scrambling once again to build back sponsorship and media support. Although still largely unnoticed among sports executives, Whan is now the longest-running LPGA commissioner ever, and remains eternally vocal for his tour.
He spearheaded pledges from sponsors whose tournaments were cancelled to contribute to a $1 million prize pot this weekend.
It’s the first step back in a vastly new sporting environment, one that that has included a player testing positive for the virus as the Toledo tournament got underway.
For the LPGA, swinging back into action is another step forward in the tour’s long history of plugging away, one shot at a time, in uncharted, often choppy terrain.
More Distaff Dispatches
Michelle Wie was touted as women’s golf‘s next phenom as a pre-teen, and proclaimed ambitions of competing on the PGA Tour. But none of that has transpired, due to a rash of injuries. At the age of 30, as a wife and new mother, she’s taking stock of time and her career, which has taken a new turn. She hasn’t played a competitive round on the LPGA since last year, and has been named the assistant captain of the U.S. Solheim Cup team for 2021;
The newly-published “A People’s History of Tennis” includes issues of race and gender on the court, which cannot be told without Althea Gibson, who trained in segregated Wilmington, N.C.; from the Oxford American in 2019, Shaun Assael profiles a man there who resurrected the “black country club” of Gibson’s youth;
WNBA star Maya Moore is sitting out a second straight season at the prime of her career for social-justice reasons. Now 31, she's been inspired by a great-uncle in prison ministry, and recently helped free a family friend whom a judge ruled had been wrongfully convicted of assault and robbery and sentenced to 50 years;
The American Basketball League (not to be confused with two previous men's pro circuits) lasted less than three years, hatched in the mid-1990s by Silicon Valley investors with an ethos that embodied a free-wheeling, big-spending era. Although boasting legendary players like Teresa Edwards and Dawn Staley and featuring an excellent championship team in the Columbus Quest, the ABL was “a dot-com bust before most people knew what dot-com even was” and was easily eclipsed by the better-funded and branded WNBA;
A detailed, fresh look at the Silver Bullets, an Atlanta-based women’s baseball barnstorming team that I covered a bit in the 1990s. Sponsored the Coors beer company, the team was the brainchild of Bob Hope—not the show business star but a former Braves PR man-turned PR agency founder in Atlanta—and Braves pitcher Phil Niekro. I’m not sure how much the Silver Bullets paved the way for other pro women’s sports, but they did leave something of a light on for further organization of women’s baseball.
A Few Good Reads
On Sunday afternoon at 2:30 ET in the U.S., the Cape Fear Museum in North Carolina will feature a Zoom conversation, “How Sports Shape America.” The guest is Ken Cohen, curator of American culture and politics at the Smithsonian Institute’s Museum of American History and author of “They Will Have Their Game,” a history of sports, drinking, gambling and theater in the early Republic;
In London, county cricket fans last weekend enjoyed a return to The Oval for the first time since COVID-19, with only 1,000 allowed in a venue that seats more than 25,000. Spectators were amply spaced out to watch Surrey and Middlesex, many not worried about virus fears: “Even if it’s boring as hell, it’s still lovely to be here;”
Fans weren’t allowed inside stadiums for the end of the English Premier League season, and there are many who think crowds for the 2020-21 season will be very few in number;
The Brazilian legend Sòcrates ended his soccer playing days with one game in 2004 at the age of 50 with lowly Garforth Town club Yorkshire. It was an improbable twist in a career that included 22 international goals and several years as Brazil's national team manager and who in later years was a democracy activist before dying young of a liver ailment;
It’s been 40 years since Herschel Walker’s stelllar freshman season leading Georgia to its only national championship in college football, but something still bothers the former Heisman Trophy winner about his debut;
Rocky Colavito, well into his 80s and living in Pennsylvania, has signed 1,000 copies of a print portrait of his likeness that’s being sold in Cleveland by a local aficionado who wants to build a statue of the former Indians slugger in the Little Italy neighborhood. That’s because the team won’t allow statues of players who aren’t in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Colavito played the first five years of a 14-year career in Cleveland, and is a member of the Indians Hall of Fame, was chosen for nine All-Star games and hit 374 home runs;
Former sports writer turned PR man Rick Bause is recreating the 1961 New York Yankees season on his blog, The SportsLifer, with daily game recaps and highlighting the Roger Maris-Mickey Mantle home run chase. It was a season to savor, at least for Yankees fans, with 109 wins, a home run record and another World Series title. Box scores also included!
Sports Book News
Dean Smith’s first big star at North Carolina is a player lost in time, as well as due to the many legendary names who followed him. Larry Miller, the subject of a forthcoming memoir, remains UNC’s only two-time ACC Tournament MVP, and played a few years in the ABA. Writer Stephen Demorest explains here how he started the book project with a reclusive subject;
At the Front Porch Republic, humanities professor Michael Stevens reviews a new biography of Negro Leagues star Oscar Charleston against the backdrop of a surreal new baseball season.
Now Hear This
Ben Cohen, author of “The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks,” was a recent guest of the New Books in Sports podcast, discussing a book that isn’t only about sports but that makes plenty of references to them, including Stephen Curry’s epic 3-point shooting prowess;
The Gangrey Podcast, which is devoted to longform writing, recently featured an interview with Alex Belth, a friend of this newsletter and a recipient of the Baseball Reliquary’s Tony Salin Memorial Award. He talks about his curation of classic American newspaper and magazine writing, collected most recently at The Stacks Reader, sports topics and others;
The End of Sport podcast, hosted by three academics exploring social justice and athlete activism (in The Chronicle of Higher Education, they advocate cancelling the college football season), recently examined abuse issues in women’s gymnastics, tracing its origins in Eastern Europe and delving into the world of Bela and Martha Karolyi, whose Texas academy they set up after emigrating from Romania closed in the wake of the abuse scandal that has rocked the sport.
Passings
Lou Henson, 88, who reached the men’s basketball Final Four with both Illinois and New Mexico State, won 779 games in a coaching career that started in the high school ranks in 1956. A small-town sharecroppers’ son, he bounced around the hardscrabble Southwest before solving the riddle of recruiting elite black high school talent from Chicago to make the Illini a Big Ten force during the Indiana dynasty of Bob Knight, with whom he shared a mutual animosity.
The Illini never won a conference title under Henson, but appeared 12 times in the NCAA tournament. After 21 years in Champaign, he returned as an assistant at New Mexico State, then came back to Illinois in 2005;
John McNamara, 88, was 1,160-1,233 as a manager with six Major League teams, but will be forever known as the Red Sox skipper whose late-game moves in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series perpetuated “The Curse of the Bambino.” But it just wasn’t his questionable decision to leave in defensive liability Bill Buckner at first base in the later innings.
After the death was announced, Dan Shaughnessy of The Boston Globe contacted McNamara’s widow and Roger Clemens, reopening some old wounds between the ace and the manager that were never resolved. “I do not want John’s professional career defined by one game. He was so much more than that,” Ellen McNamara said.
Painful sports memories never die in Boston. Ever.
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives. This is Digest issue No. 212, published Aug. 2, 2020.
I’d love to hear what you think about the Digest, and Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations, review copies, newsletter items and interview requests to Wendy Parker at sportsbiblio@gmail.com.