Louise Suggs, Golf Pioneer, Dies at 91; Helped Found the Women's Pro Tour - New York Times

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Louise Suggs at a golf tournament in 1946. Credit Em/Associated Press

Louise Suggs, a Georgia-born founder of the women’s professional golf tour and one of its most successful and outspoken players, died on Friday in Sarasota, Fla. She was 91.

Her death was announced by the Ladies Professional Golf Association, which said she had been in hospice care.

Suggs turned professional in 1948, when she was the reigning United States and British amateur champion. Two years later, she was one of 13 players who formed the L.P.G.A. She, Babe Didrikson Zaharias and Patty Berg were the main stars on the early tours.

“We figured if we could maybe get some tournaments together, we could at least pick up a little pocket change,” Suggs once said. “We were so dumb that we didn’t know we couldn’t succeed. We survived and succeeded despite ourselves.”

In 1950, the women played 14 tournaments, with purses totaling $50,000. This year, the L.P.G.A. Tour encompasses 32 tournaments with purses totaling close to $60 million.

Suggs won 58 pro tournaments, including 50 on the tour. Her 11 major titles included the 1949 United States Women’s Open, which she won by 14 strokes, the most one-sided victory on the tour until Laura Davies won a tournament by 16 strokes in 1995. Suggs won every season of her professional career and in 1957, at the L.P.G.A. Championship, became the first player on the tour to capture the career Grand Slam, winning all of the tour’s major events. The L.P.G.A. Tour’s rookie of the year award is named after Suggs.

With all that success, Suggs’s career earnings totaled less than $200,000. And those earnings, or lack of them, remained a sore point for Suggs, who was always known to speak her mind. (Her automobile license plate read “TEED OFF.”) The Associated Press reported that in 2007, at an L.P.G.A. awards dinner at which Angela Park won the Rookie of the Year Award after earning $983,922 on the tour, Suggs declared, “I wish like hell I could have played for this kind of money, but if not for me, they wouldn’t be playing for it, either.”

She also expressed little tolerance for people she considered spoiled. That included today’s touring pros.

“They get mad now if they don’t have the right food in the locker room,” she said. “We were lucky if we got peanut butter and crackers. We paid to get things done.”

The early years of the tour, she recalled, were hardly glamorous.

“Some courses had so little grass, and it was in clumps,” she once said, “that we took farm machines, tractors with discs, to outline fairway and rough. Between rounds, we set the pins for the next day, called newspapers with the day’s scores and tried to charm potential sponsors.”

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Pictured in 2007, Suggs taught golf five days a week into her 70s. Credit Oscar Sosa for The New York Times

Suggs always contended that women could beat men with their short games, and in 1957, she had a chance to prove it when she and other women played against 12 male professionals in a 54-hole tournament over a par-3 course in Palm Beach, Fla. She won with rounds of 53, 52 and 51, beating Sam Snead, Lew Worsham, Chick Harbert, Dow Finsterwald, Tommy Armour and others.

Snead was so annoyed at losing, Suggs told The A.P., that he stormed off and peeled out of the parking lot.

“He burned a quarter-inch of rubber,” Suggs said.

Ben Hogan, by contrast, was openly admiring.

“If I were to single out one woman in the world today as a model for any other woman aspiring to ideal golf form, it would be Miss Suggs,” Hogan wrote. “Her swing combines all the desirable elements of efficiency, timing and coordination. It appears to be completely effortless. Yes, despite her slight build, she is consistently as long off the tee and through the fairway as any of her feminine contemporaries in competitive golf. And no one is ‘right down the middle’ any more than this sweet-swinging Georgia miss.”

Mae Louise Suggs was born on Sept. 7, 1923, in Atlanta. Her father, Johnny, was a left-handed pitcher for the Atlanta Crackers, a minor league baseball team owned by his father-in-law.

At one Crackers game, Spalding, the sporting-goods manufacturer, was giving a set of golf clubs to any Southern Association pitcher who hit a home run. Johnny Suggs did, and he took up golf as a result. He later built a nine-hole course near Atlanta, charging greens fees of 75 cents on weekdays and $1 on weekends. When Louise was 10, he started her on golf with a cut-down women’s 7 iron.

Suggs grew to 5 feet 6 inches and 135 pounds and could hit the ball far with fairway woods. That impressed the comedian and golf enthusiast Bob Hope so much that he called her Miss Sluggs.

She served as president of the L.P.G.A. from 1955 through 1957. In 1951, she became one of the six charter members of the L.P.G.A. Hall of Fame. She was the first woman to be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in Florida and the first woman to be elected to the Georgia Athletic Hall of Fame, in 1966. The United States Golf Association honored her with its coveted Bob Jones Award in 2007, and this year Suggs was selected to join the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews in Scotland after it broke with tradition and began inviting women.

Suggs retired from competition in 1962 but continued to play occasionally on tour until 1984. By 2000, she had decided to leave most of her estate, perhaps $500,000, to the L.P.G.A. She had already given the organization $500,000 to promote junior golf.

Information about her survivors was not immediately available.

Into her 70s, Suggs taught golf five hours a day, five days a week. She also played socially, using her old persimmon woods, and was still competitive. “If you spot me enough yardage,” she said, “I will take your money.”

But she could be philosophical about golf. “Golf is very much like a love affair,” she once said. “If you don’t take it seriously, it’s not fun. But if you do, it breaks your heart. Don’t break your heart, but flirt with the possibility.”

She published an autobiography last year, titling it “And That’s That!”