Marlene Bauer Hagge, the final surviving founder of the Ladies Professional Golf Association and a member of its Hall of Fame, died on Tuesday in Rancho Mirage, Calif. She was 89.
Her loss of life was introduced by the LPGA
Hagge and her sister, Alice Bauer, who was six years older, had been amongst the 13 golfers who created the LPGA in 1950, at a time when girls’s golf acquired little consideration in the sports activities pages.
The LPGA Tour would ultimately yield vital prize cash. But in its early years, the Bauer sisters and famend gamers like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Patty Berg, Louise Suggs, Betty Jameson and Marilynn Smith competed for slender purses and had been compelled to crowd collectively in automobiles on their travels to tournaments.
Hagge turned the final residing LPGA founder when Shirley Spork, who was recognized particularly for educating girls golfers, died in April 2022.
Hagge, who was a slender 5 toes 2 inches however possessed a strong swing, received 26 professional tournaments, together with the 1956 LPGA Championship, one of the tour’s majors, and her profession prolonged via its first 5 many years.
She was inducted into the LPGA Hall of Fame in the veterans class and the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2002. Her sister, Alice, completed in the prime 10 of LPGA tournaments a number of occasions, most notably at No. 4 in the 1958 Women’s Open.
Eschewing the staid lengthy skirts that had been then a staple of girls golfers’ uniforms, Hagge opted for shorts. She was considered as a glamorous determine of the girls’s recreation, typically showing on the covers of magazines, with many admirers extra fixated on her appears than her abilities. (In a mirrored image of the time, a 1973 problem of Golf Digest included an image of her chipping onto a inexperienced with the caption “Marlene Hagge — good and horny.”)
Recalling the golf clinics hosted by the LPGA earlier than its tournaments, Hagge instructed Sports Illustrated in 2002 that Berg, as the MC, would say to the contributors, “Look at these ladies.”
“She would level at Alice and me,” Hagge recalled, “and say, ‘Isn’t it grand to be fairly and have the ability to hit it, too?'”
Marlene Bauer was born in Eureka, SD, on Feb. 16, 1934, to Dave and Madeline Bauer. Her father, an avid golfer, leased the city’s golf course, about an hour southeast of Aberdeen. When Marlene was 3 years outdated, he reduce down the shaft of a golf membership and started giving her classes. He tutored Alice as properly.
The household moved to La Quinta, Calif., when Marlene was 10, looking for a heat local weather the place golf could possibly be performed year-round. She received the Long Beach City boys’ junior championship simply after the household arrived in California, there being no comparable occasion for ladies. By age 13, she had received a number of tournaments in California.
She emerged on the nationwide scene in 1947 — nonetheless at solely 13 — when she completed eighth in the United States Women’s Open Championship. She received the United States ladies’ junior championship in 1949 and acquired the Glenna Collett Vare Trophy, named in honor of one of the most distinguished figures in girls’s golf. Lincoln Werden, a longtime golf author for The New York Times, described her at the time as “a cool little participant who could make all kinds of shot.”
A couple of weeks later, she achieved a shocking second-round match-play victory in the nationwide novice girls’s championship, besting Vare, the match’s six-time titleholder, and making it to the semifinals.
The Associated Press named her Athlete of the Year and Golfer of the Year for 1949.
Hagge captured her first skilled title at the 1952 Sarasota Open at age 18. She was at her finest in 1956, when she defeated Berg on the first further gap of the LPGA Championship at Forest (*89*) Country Club in Detroit. Her victory was price all of $1,350 (about $15,000 in as we speak’s cash). She received eight tournaments that 12 months, completed second 9 occasions and led the girls’s tour in earnings, garnering greater than $20,000.
In 1971, she set a nine-hole LPGA scoring document of 29 at the Buick Open in Columbus, Ohio, a mark unmatched for 13 years.
She performed on the tour via 1996, when she competed in 4 occasions. She had profession earnings of $481,023.
Hagge’s second husband, Ernie Vossler, a PGA Tour participant and course designer, died in 2013. Her first marriage, to Bob Hagge, additionally a PGA Tour participant, who had beforehand been married to her sister, resulted in divorce. Alice Bauer died of issues of colon most cancers in 2002 at 74. Information on survivors was not instantly out there.
For all her accomplishments, Hagge wasn’t precisely a well-recognized face to the public. In 1958, she appeared on the CBS TV program “To Tell the Truth,” wherein 4 celeb panelists quizzed three folks claiming to be the particular person whose biography had simply been described. The actor Don Ameche disqualified himself as a result of he had met her. Only the actress Polly Bergen accurately recognized her.