Betty Jameson: Golf

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

Babe Zaharias vs. Betty Jameison

World Golf Hall of Fame

LPGA

OBIT

During the peak of her golfing career, Betty Jameson worked as a truck driver at an Army depot in San Antonio, Texas. This is one of the last jobs anybody would have imagined golf’s first “glamour girl” working in the early 1940s during the meteoric rise of women’s golf. Jameson simply had no choice. Starting in 1942, most major golf events throughout the United States were suspended due to World War II. Still having to make a living, Jameson turned to writing and took a job in her hometown at the Dallas Times Herald. She enjoyed writing, but was a slow typist and struggled to meet deadlines. That’s when she decided to move south and assist the war effort

by transporting generals. It was the war that actually caused Jameson to turn professional when the Spalding Company talked her into leaving the base to tour the country teaching golf clinics.

While this certainly seemed like the more appropriate occupation at the time, little did Jameson know how much she would miss the amateur ranks. She later recollected:

 

At least I would be making money. I could not afford the amateur game. I did not dream that without match play the whole essence and drama of golf would disappear. I did not realize how humdrum it is, playing hole-after-hole and not daring to take chances. I love match play. The fact that you knew you could make six on one hole and not be out of the match made you a little more daring—you were never protective. For me, it was just a little more exciting.1

 

Being that Betty Jameson was born May 9, 1919, just as World War I was drawing to a close, this is certainly not the first time world history would shape her life. After all, Betty began playing golf at 10 years old when her parents got her a set of golf clubs for Christmas in 1929, just two months after the catastrophic stock market crash and during the first year of the Great Depression. The clubs were the only thing Betty had asked for after taking an interest in golf after seeing a particularly meaningful newsreel at the movies. “I saw a newsreel one afternoon about Betty Hicks beating Collett Vare in the national amateur championship,” Jameson recalls. “Betty was only 19 and she had beaten the best player in the world. I really did not know anything about golf, but the story of Hicks’ win impressed me. That this young girl could dethrone the national champion caught my attention.”2

 

You could definitely say Jameson’s life in golf had humble beginnings. The clubs were a family friend’s well-used-hand-medowns, which Jameson’s parents cut down for her so she could use, but she could not have been happier with her one and only gift that bleak Christmas morning. She began playing as many as 50 holes per day on the cheapest local course around. “It was a little course with sand greens—my father called it ‘Cow Pasture Country Club,’” Betty fondly jokes.3

 

While Jameson’s 13 tour victories do not contend with many of the win totals of her fellow golfers in this book, she was one of the most influential women in golf history. Her major championships include back-to-back titles in the U.S. Women’s Amateur in 1939 and 1940. As a professional, she went on to win two Western Opens (1942 and 1954), as well as the 1947 U.S. Women’s Open, making her one of only six women to ever win both the U.S. Women’s Open

U.S. Women’s Amateur championships. Her Open win in 1947 would add Jameson’s name to the record books in more ways than one, as she also earned the distinction of being the first woman

golfer to score under the 300-stroke mark in a 72-hole event when she set the women’s scoring bar at 295 during the event. Jameson’s best year came in 1955, when she won four events on tour. These wins would be the last of her career, as she would not win another event before her retirement in 1970. Most important to her legacy in golf, Jameson was one of the 13 women who co-founded the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) in 1950. Her contributions to

the organization include coming up with the idea to annually award the woman golfer with the lowest scoring average on tour. In 1952, she donated the original trophy for the award, which was soon named the Vare Trophy in honor of Jameson’s idol, Glenna Collett Vare.4 Jameson was one of 11 charter members in the LPGA Hall of Fame, and her achievements also earned her a spot in the World Golf Hall of Fame.

 

Due to Betty’s blue eyes and blonde hair, as well as the fact that she was a tall, stylish woman, she is known as the first “glamour girl” of golf. While she did not resent this title, her thoughts on women in sport as well as in society are much deeper. “She is almost a solitary voice among women athletes of her generation to speak about both the ‘place of women’ and her personal beliefs on ‘a woman’s place,’” says Jackie Williams, women’s golf historian and author.5 Jameson credits the women in her life for shaping her feminist views:

 

My mother and grandmother were great figures in my life. My mother knew I could be a world beater—that was the old fashioned term—and my grandmother, on the other hand

would say, “Are you still playing golf?” As a woman I always thought I was swimming with the tide. I thought women could do anything and I still do. Women’s place in the world meant something to me.6

 

From starting her golf life by playing on a course of “sand greens” with used clubs tailor-cut to her height, to taking an unwelcome sabbatical from the game to be a truck driver, to eventually turning into golf’s “glamour girl,” Betty Jameson experienced several places in this world, proving along the way that women truly can do anything.

Notes

1. Jackie Williams, Playing from the Rough: The Women of the LPGA Hall of Fame

(Las Vegas: Women of Diversity Productions, 2000), 43.

2. Ibid., 40.

3. Ibid., 41.

4. Wgv.com: Hall of Fame, “Biography of World Golf Hall of Famer Betty Jameson,”

http://www.wgv.com/hof/member.php?member=1068 (accessed May 23, 2008).

5. Williams, Playing From the Rough, 42.

6. Ibid.

 

The exerpt above was written by Ryan Sleeper