As a preteen, Marilynn Smith played pitcher and coached and managed a boys’ baseball team. Golf, she thought, was a sissy sport, and it had never crossed her mind to play it. Until one time when she came home from a bad day at the ball field her mother asked her what she had done that day, and young Marilynn, still in her baseball uniform and pigtails, took off her glove, threw it on the ground and let out several expletives.
Her mother immediately took her to the bathroom and washed her mouth out with soap. When Marilynn’s mother related the story to her father, he said, “I think we’re going to have to take Marilynn to the Country Club of Wichita and teach her a more ladylike sport.”
Young Marilynn took to the game quickly and never considered it a sissy sport again. Her amateur career included three victories in the Kansas Women’s Amateur, the first in 1946 at age 17, and the NCAA Championship in 1949. Later that year she turned professional, during which time she would go on to win 21 U.S. Women’s LP-GA Tour titles, including two majors (1963 and 1964 Titleholders Championships). In 1949 the Women’s Professional Golf Association, which was founded in 1944, was gasping its last gasps. Lack of organization and finances were key factors in its demise.
A group of pioneering women refused to see this as the end. Instead, they were determined to prove that they could make a living as professionals on the golf circuit.
The founding assembly of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) was held in 1950 at the US Women’s Open in Wichita, Kansas, where Smith and several other women laid the groundwork for what has been called “the most successful women’s sports organization in the world.”
Despite the titles that several founders initially held, each had a role to play in selling the Tour from the beginning. Smith, who served as secretary (1957) and president (1958-1960) of the association, made numerous radio and television appearances, and made LPGA presentations at civic luncheons and press conferences.
In addition Smith, a lifelong fan of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team in Missouri, wanted the LPGA to appeal to baseball fans in particular, so he could appear at Major League Baseball and hit golf balls to center field to promote the sport.
In the early days of the LPGA, Smith became known by the nickname Miss Personality due to her extroverted presentations on behalf of golfers and the LPGA. Her role as LPGA president was no less effective. During Smith’s tenure, she spearheaded the formation of the LPGA’s Teaching Division, established pro-ams related to professional tournaments and formed the LPGA National Golf School. Since 1949, Smith has conducted more than 4,000 clinics at home and abroad, reaching more than a quarter of a million people, and continues to teach today.
In addition to co-founding the LPGA Tour, Smith has led the way on the golf course on many other occasions.
She ventured into territory previously uncharted for female golfers, and paved the way for her peers. The 1970s saw Smith, along with Kathy Whitworth, become the first female golfers to appear in a television commercial. It was also the same decade when Marilynn became the first female television commentator for major men’s golf tournaments.
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