THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
On Christmas Eve, Kathy Whitworth collapsed and died while attending a party at a neighbor's in Flower Mound, Texas. She was 83. Most of her obituaries have led with her success: she won more tour events, 88 of them, than any other professional golfer, male or female.
From the mid-Sixties to mid-Seventies she was the dominant golfer on the Ladies PGA Tour. The LPGA began choosing a Player of the Year in 1966; Whitworth won seven of the first eight awards. She won the Vere Trophy, given to the golfer with the lowest scoring average, eight times in nine years. She was the Associated Press' Female Athlete of the Year in both 1965 and 1966, and in 1975, while still playing on the tour, she was voted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. In 1981 she became the first woman to pass the $1 million mark in prize money, but that year she had her best finish, third, at the US Open, the only major she never won. "I would have swapped being the first to make a million for winning the Open," she said, "but it was a consolation which took some of the sting out of not winning." Although she won "only" six majors, through her peak years there were only two or three tournaments designated as majors; nowadays there are five. If you include her ten wins in non-LPGA events, and 93 runner up finishes, you could argue that at her peak she was as dominant as any golfer in history.
But what was fascinating to me was the way her period of dominance coincided with the first great leap in popularity of the women's tour. Partly, of course, this was because of television bringing more sport into America's living rooms, but it was also due to the way in which Whitworth and Mickey Wright competed against each other, a kind of women's Palmer and Nicholas before that was even a thing. Both were tall, and at 5'9" looked taller, because they were slim and because the hairstyles of the day added an inch or two. In golf people often equate size with power, but many of the game's longest drivers are shorter, with lower centers of gravity from which to generate torque, or powerful forearms and wrists to whip the club through the swing.
Whitworth and Wright looked like the epitome of American country club wives out on the course - a very necessary thing to attract golf's smaller but affluent TV audience. Whitworth once described her own golf game as "bump and run", she wasn't the biggest driver, but played an accurate and heady game with the irons and was so smooth as a putter she was once described as "silky". Wright, on the other hand, was formidable off the tee: her swing was often compared to Ben Hogan's and Whitworth herself described how other golfers, male and female, would stop swinging at a driving range, drawn by the explosive sound of Wright's club against ball then mesmerized by the beauty of the swing.
Wright was the big name on the circuit when Whitworth joined, and the LPGA was still a sort of traveling carnival, with its few dedicated performers sharing cars from tournament to tournament, playing for small prize money in front of relatively small crowds. But it had come a ways from its founding, in 1950, at the Rolling Hills golf club in Wichita. It grew from the ashes of the Women's Professional Golf Association, which ran from 1944 to 48 and was started by 13 golfers. The WPGA's biggest names were Patty Berg, Louise Suggs and Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Zaharias was the winner of three medals at the 1932 Olympics - golds in hurdles and high jump and a silver medal in the javelin, a professional basketball player with her own team of all-stars, and a baseball player who pitched in four big league exhibition games and barnstormed with the men's House of David team. Berg was generally considered the best golfer of her era, and was the tour's first president, but the original group also included a couple of top amateurs, which helped the professionals to gain quick acceptance.
It was also to Berg that Whitworth turned when she was struggling in her first years on the tour. This was crucial to Kathy, who needed to have her game honed to the highest point in order to win; although she seemed supremely graceful and confident, she really thought of herself at heart as a grinder, and felt her game to be finely balanced, and easily disrupted.
This may have been down in part to her transition to golf from tennis, her primary sport as a young teen. She played her first game of golf aged 15, on a lark with some tennis teammates, but found the sport's difficulty a challenge which fascinated her; not to put down tennis, but it was more a strength and reflex game. "Golf just grabbed me by the throat," she recalled. "I can't tell you how much I loved it. I used to think everyone knew what they wanted to do when they were 15 years old."
She had been born in Texas, but moved to Jal (named for John A Lynch cattle brand) in the southeast corner of New Mexico, on the border with Texas. Her father ran a hardware store, and her parents were dedicated to helping Kathy with her sporting dreams. They put her into golf lessons with the local pro, Hardy Loudermilk, on a nine-hole course owned by the El Paso Natural Gas company. She outgrew her coach's teaching, and he passed her on to Harvey Penick, the coach of the University of Texas and pro at the Austin Country Club. Penick had coached Betsy Rawls, then a star on the LPGA tour. Penick coached her by phone, via Loudermilk, but her mother also began driving her all the way to Austin for lessons.
Whitworth won the New Mexico Open at 17. She entered Odessa Junior College but when she won the same event again at 18, her family gathered round the kitchen table and agreed to help her turn professional. It helped that by now her father was the mayor of Jal; he gathered backers to finance his 19 year old with $5,000 a year for three years on the tour. Around that time Rawls met Whitworth. "Mickey Wright and I played an exhibition with her in Roswell, New Mexico, and she was this teenager and green, just starting out in golf. We never thought we'd see her on tour because she was just so unpolished… she learned to play on tour, and she learned it very well."
Her rookie season saw her win $1,217; her first check for was $30. At one point she went home, but her father told her to use the three years. Then, in 1961, she took six weeks off and enrolled herself in a golf clinic run by Patty Berg. She returned to place second four times, and then, in 1962, won her first tournament, the Kelly Girls Open in Maryland. Older readers may remember Kelly Girls, a temp service. But the next win, after six more runner up finishes, was the one that put her on the map; at the Phoenix Thunderbird she beat Mickey Wright, then the dominant woman on the tour, by four strokes. She made the decision then to go for the pin on a shot where it was behind a trap. She holed it, and that may have been the definition of her game: once she was close to the green, she played for the hole.
The win created that terrific rivalry between her and Wright, which starting in 1965 Whitworth dominated. She took her first major, the Titleholders (the women's Masters) in 1965 and repeated in 1966. Her recognition by the AP was a sign of how far she and Wright had brought the women's game. In 1966 she won two more majors, the Women's Western Open and the LPGA, which she would also win in 1971 and '75. After which, she went into a sort of slump as a new generation of players hit the tour, and her competitive intensity took hold. As Rawls described her, "Kathy was a very intelligent person. It was unacceptable for her to make a mistake. She hated herself when she made a mistake. She was wonderful to play with - sweet as she could be, nice to everybody - but oh, man, she berated herself something awful. And that's what drove her."
In 1981 she returned to Harvey Penick to rebuild her game. The results were immediate; in 1982 she broke Wright's record of 82 wins. In 1984 she won her 85th title, which broke the all-time men's record held by Sam Snead. (Snead's record has since been revised downward from 84 to 82, tied by Tiger Woods.) Whitworth won her last tournament, the United Virginia Bank Classic, in 1985. But more importantly in that year, she and Wright were invited to team up as the first-ever women's pair in the Legends of Golf tournament, in Austin, from which the Seniors Tour grew. Whitworth, knowing how Wright "loved the spotlight" suggested the organizers approach her old rival first. "We already have," they replied, "and she said she'd play, but only with you."
This was golf's equivalent to Billie Jean King against Bobby Riggs, but without any of the attendant hype. The men's field included Arnold Palmer (paired with Dow Finsterwald) and Sam Snead (with Lee Elder), and the women would play from the extra distance of the men's tees. Although the fact that Whitworth was only 45 and still playing on the tour bothered some of the men (Wright, who'd retired early because of injury, was 50, and played rarely) they knew that gentlemen never asked ladies their age. They finished middle of the pack, and eventually a women's senior tour would follow the men's.
After retiring, Whitworth worked as vice-president of the LPGA, and in 1990 published Golf For Women, written with Rhonda Glenn, the first guide to the game written specifically for women. In that year she also served as the captain of the USA team in the inaugural Solheim Cup, a women's Ryder Cup matching the US versus Europe. The Americans won at home, but Whitworth captained them again in 1992 when they lost to Europe in Scotland. She moved with her long-time partner Bettye Odle, to Flower Mount, Texas, in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, playing occasionally on the Legends Tour. She was a key part of building the status of her local Trophy Club, in nearby Roanoke, where her tree stands next to Ben Hogan's. In 2007 she published Kathy Whitworth's Little Book Of Golf Wisdom (written with Jay Golden), whose title was a tribute to her old coach Harvey Penick's famous Little Red Book of Golf.
After her sudden death, Bettye Odle described her best: "She left the world the way she lived her life, loving, laughing and creating memories."
