Kathy Whitworth: Golf

American Star of the Women’s International Sports Hall of Fame

Photo: AP Photo/Steve Helber

Kathy Whitworth once said, “Nobody ever conquers golf.”¹ While that may be true, she sure did come close. During her career, which spanned more than four decades, she compiled one of the most impressive resumes the history of golf has to offer. She did not earn her first Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) win until the 1962 Kelly Girl Open during her fourth year on tour. However, once she captured her first title, she would never look back. In fact, that first victory marked the beginning of an astounding streak where she would win at least one title for 17 years in a row. Those titles would include six major championships starting with back-to-back Titleholders Championships in 1965 and 1966. The next year she won the Western Open and her first LPGA Championship. She would go on to win two additional LPGA Championships in 1971 and 1975. It should be noted that there were only two major championships played on the LPGA tour from 1968 to 1971 and from 1973 to 78, spans that overlapped the prime of her career. Most golfers who played before and after Whitworth generally competed in at least three, usually four, major championships per year.

What Whitworth lacked in major championships, she made up for in statistics, earnings, and honors. She is a seven-time winner of the Vare Trophy (1965–67, 1969–72), which is the award given to the LPGA player with the lowest scoring average each season. She also had two different four-year streaks, 1965–68 and 1970–73, where she was the LPGA Tour money leader. This enabled her to become the first woman golfer to reach the $1 million in earnings milestone.² This feat is even more amazing when you consider the purses were much smaller in those days. For example, during a four year span in the 1960s, she won an astonishing 35 tournaments, yet only earned $143,491 during that period.³ Today, LPGA golfers easily clear that amount with just one tour victory. As a consolation for Whitworth, money does not buy LPGA Player of the Year honors, and she earned more than her fair share of those. She won seven in total, earning that distinction each year from 1966 to 1969 and from 1971 to 1973. She also garnered AP Athlete of the Year honors in 1965 and 1967. In addition to these awards, she also captained the 1990 and 1992 Solheim Cup teams. The culmination of these accomplishments is a spot in both the LPGA and World Golf Halls of Fame.

Her tournament wins total, for which Whitworth is most famous, surely did not hurt her bid to become immortalized in multiple golf and women’s sports halls of fame. She became the winningest women’s golfer in history when she won the Lady Michelob Classic at the Brookfield West Country Club in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1982. The victory marked her 83rd, passing fellow golf legend, Mickey Wright, who finished her career with 82 wins. Whitworth was not done there because she knew that Sam Snead’s record of 84 career victories on the men’s side was just one win away. She tied Snead’s mark in dramatic fashion the very next year by sinking a 40- foot putt on the 18th green to win the Women’s Kemper Open. Then, on July 22, 1984, she passed Snead by winning the Rochester International. Her 85th win made Whitworth the winningest golfer, male or female, of all time.⁴ She would go on to win three more tournaments to finish her career with 88 total victories.

Kathryn Ann Whitworth was born September 27, 1939, in Monahans, Texas, but she mostly grew up in Jal, New Mexico. She did not pick up a golf club until she was 15 years old. One day a reporter was talking to Whitworth about then 14-year-old phenom Michelle Wie and asked her, “How good were you at that age?” Whitworth laughingly responded, “I hadn’t even started.”⁵ Whitworth got her start in golf when, by chance, she tagged along with her tennis team for a nine-hole outing. She had a tough game, which was a rare occurrence for such a natural athlete, but she was so enamored during her first encounter with the sport of golf that she never played tennis again.⁶ Whitworth turned professional just four years later. Her humility and drive to succeed would be themes throughout her career. She played with two central beliefs: never give up and never get too full of yourself.⁷ This mentality was developed in part because of Betsy Rawls’s approach to “work harder to shoot 80 than 70.” Whitworth idolized Betsy Rawls for her “great mind” when it came to the game of golf. Whitworth credits much of her success with not getting down on herself during poor tournaments and focusing on the positives. Once she adopted this theory, she started placing in the money.

The first time she placed, she earned $33.⁸ She went on to win $5,000 during her second year on tour, but obviously the winnings would begin to pick up for Whitworth, even if she was not very concerned about them. “You know, money was never a motivation,”⁹ Whitworth has said. However, she does acknowledge primarily going on the professional tour to get experience playing when her family could not afford to have her compete locally in New Mexico. She even left a scholarship at Odessa Junior College in Texas after just one year to pursue a professional career.

The bigger concern for Whitworth, though, was playing the game she loved and helping women’s golf grow. She would eventually serve as president of the LPGA four times. Whitworth was known as a very good sport who rarely showed any negative emotion on the links. Fellow golfers took notice of Whitworth’s modesty and drive to help women’s golf. Rival golfer JoAnne “Big Mama” Carner noted, “Everyone likes her, because she always treated people with such respect and worked so hard to improve the LPGA.”¹⁰

Arguably the best women’s golfer of all time, Kathy Whitworth played in an era after the original trailblazers such as Mildred Babe Didrikson Zaharias and Patty Berg, yet did not receive the benefits of big attention and even larger purses that players like Annika Sorenstam and Michelle Wie have received in the era that followed Whitworth’s playing days. Today’s players owe a debt of gratitude to Whitworth for bridging this gap, and almost anonymously exerting the tireless efforts required to continue the growth of women’s golf. Despite not receiving the wealth and attention that she would have garnered had she played just a few years later, Whitworth has always had a positive outlook. Her philosophy on golf is simple. When asked about her lifetime commitment to the game, she said, “Why not continue to do what you love to do, if you’re successful at it and get some enjoyment out of it? Even if you’re not as successful as some people think you should be, who cares?”¹¹ But few have had more success in any sport than Kathy Whitworth.

Notes

1. Brent Kelley, About.com: Golf, “Biography of Golfer Kathy Whitworth,” http://golf.about.com/od/golferswomen/p/kathy_whitworth.htm (accessed April 5, 2008).

2. Judy Hasday, Extraordinary Women Athletes (Danbury, Conn.: Children’s Press, 2000), 67.

3. Jenni Carlson, “Whitworth Arrived Ahead of Schedule,” Daily Oklahoman, May 25, 2006.

4. Hasday, Extraordinary Women Athletes, 69.

5. Carlson, “Whitworth Arrived Ahead of Schedule.”

6. Jaime Aron, “Whitworth Doesn’t Expect to Add to Record for Pro Golf Titles,” AP Worldstream, August 5, 2002.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Hasday, Extraordinary Women Athletes, 68.

11. Ibid., 66.

This excerpt was written by Ryan Sleeper.

2010 Western Woman of Distinction Award