Whitworth Is Glad She Took a Chance Joining LPGA Tour

Back when there was chrome on cars and graphite was used for pencils, not golf clubs, 19-year-old Kathy Whitworth from little Monahans, Tex., decided to give something called the Ladies Professional Golf Assn. a whirl.

What the heck, all you needed was a set of clubs, a full tank of gas and the approximate location of a traveler’s best friend, Stuckey’s. Car trunks became the equivalent of home and your belief in humanity was confirmed only when the tournament check didn’t bounce like a golf ball on a cart path.

And, heh, it had been, what, 10 years since the first pro women’s tour--the Women’s Professional Golf Assn.--had shanked its way into oblivion? Surely everyone had forgotten about that sports debacle. Or had they?

So here was Whitworth, the New Mexico State Amateur champion two years running, trying to earn a living along with about 30 other women golfers.

“Back then, all we had to do was print some tickets, announce where we were going to play and that was it,” Whitworth said in a telephone interview.

The LPGA players did the rest. “We did the pairings and we had a treasurer who wrote the checks right there,” Whitworth said. “We each had little press packages, but we didn’t have very many girls so it wasn’t that much of a problem. We kind of divvied up the chores, too. When I came on the tour, we didn’t have a commissioner. Our president ran the tournament, signed the contracts. We did the pairings and we had a treasurer who wrote the checks right there. I mean, we ran it right out of the back of the car.”

Now there is a $28-million LPGA complex near Houston that houses the association’s Hall of Fame and offices. There’s a pension plan, television coverage, a commissioner with an Ivy League education and a staff of 22. Annual tournament purses now total about $10 million. During Whitworth’s rookie season, a tournament normally could offer about $5,000 worth of winnings.

“Yeah, there wasn’t a whole lot of money,” Whitworth said.

There is now. This week’s $330,000 Uniden LPGA Invitational at Mesa Verde Country Club--with 144 competitors--is only the seventh-highest purse in 1986. The winner receives $49,500, which is a little less than Whitworth, the all-time United States official victory titleholder with 88 career wins and more than $1,600,000 of earnings, made during her first five years on the LPGA tour.

No longer do tournament sponsors, as they sometimes did during the early part of Whitworth’s career, meekly motion for an LPGA official to join them for a private, post-tournament meeting. The players knew what was happening and, on occasion, so did passers-by as you might hear the following conversation:

LPGA official: “Whaddya mean there’s not enough money?”

Sponsor: “We a) overestimated ticket sales, b) underestimated your reaction, c) does this mean you’re not coming back next year?”

“We had it where there wasn’t enough money in the bank,” Whitworth said. “When that happened, we just took what they had and vowed never to come back.”

Whitworth won her first tournament in 1962. It was called the Kelly Girl Open, followed soon thereafter by a victory at the Phoenix Thunderbird Open. You took what you could get back then.

In 1963 there were wins at the Carvel Open, the Wolverine Open, the Milwaukee Jaycee Open, the Ogden Open, the Spokane Open, the Hillside Open, the San Antonio Civitan Open, the Gulf Coast Invitational. You get the idea that the winner received a modest trophy, an even more modest paycheck, but a nice meatloaf dinner at the clubhouse restaurant.

Course conditions often were an adventure. It wasn’t that certain courses, club pros and maintenance personnel minded the women golfers, it’s just that they didn’t knock themselves out to decorate the welcome mat. When Whitworth began her professional career, many of the courses the LPGA played had no watering systems. Fairways were dry and raw. Greens should have been called Browns.

“It was like putting down a highway,” she said.

Sometimes a greenskeeper might see fit to point a hose at his course. Other times not. LPGA players would walk the course and mark ground under repair. An LPGA staff member does that sort of stuff now.

“I was with Mickey (Wright, a fellow LPGA Hall of Fame member) last week and we were talking. We don’t think that any of us felt like we were being discriminated against,” she said. “We never felt put down. This is what we had to do to survive. It never dampened our spirits.”

And what of the media that follows the men’s and women’s tour like paid shadows? Whitworth remembers the LPGA received “pretty good press, but there was no such thing as a press room.

“A reporter got all the information himself,” she said. “Whatever he got, he got it on his own.”

Nowadays, there is a press tent at every tournament. Computers send tournament results to New York and the wire services the moment the last putt touches the bottom of the cup. A full-time LPGA public relations coordinator oversees the details. When Whitworth started, whoever had a spare nickel for a phone call might read the scores to some newspaper agate clerk.

By the late ‘60s and early ‘70s there were less Tall City Opens and more S&H; Green Stamp Classics. Corporate sponsors such as Sears or Sealy and their corporate bank accounts became a welcome sight for the LPGA. They provided a sense of legitimacy, not to mention a sense of security. Purses increased, as did the number of touring players.

Despite the advances, the LPGA was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy in 1975. That’s when the association hired its first commissioner, Ray Volpe. Volpe, as the story goes, was a Bronx native who had never seen a country club. But he knew how to market and advertise. Financial stability arrived not long after Volpe did.

Colgate and its megabucks showed up in the early ‘80s. Dinah Shore, it seems, always has been there to pat the LPGA on the back.

Check the corporate roster this season and there’s not a Civitan Club Open in the bunch. Now it’s car, insurance, fast food, credit card and electronic and telecommunications companies, for example, who pay the bills.

“The attitude has changed a great deal,” Whitworth said. “The corporations’ attitude has changed toward women in sports. Women are consumers, they’re business people.”

Certainly so, but there was a time when the LPGA had a tough time convincing people that the L belonged with the other three letters.

“We still have a problem with some of that,” Whitworth said. “We were looked at maybe as not being that feminine. We took our knocks, but we didn’t back away from it. I think that image has changed a great deal. Anyway, it all boils back down to the game itself. If she can put good numbers on the board, the rest doesn’t matter.”

Just in case, the LPGA provides glossy photographs of selected pros decked out to the nines. Jan Stephenson has her own calendar. An overreaction?

“I don’t think it’s bad,” Whitworth said. “It shows another aspect. It shows them as women as well as golfers. You know, whatever gets the people through the gate. If cheesecake is what gets them there, fine. But what’s going to keep them there is golf. The game is always going to survive.”

Whitworth isn’t without her gripes. The improved course conditions and level of competition is wonderful, she said. Couldn’t be happier with the purses or the corporate sponsors, too. “Our problem is that we haven’t been able to get the television coverage,” she said.

Eighteen LPGA tournaments are scheduled to be televised this season. But that includes ESPN cable broadcasts as well as one tournament on Canadian television. Twenty-five years ago it would have taken a constitutional amendment to ensure television coverage.

Whitworth paused and then amended her comments. “I feel so lucky to be here in the formative years,” she said. “I was part of helping it grow. It’s a rare thing to be in the beginning of a great business.”

But does she miss the years when the LPGA was more adventure than bottom line, when times were a bit simpler?

“If we had only wanted (the LPGA) to be a certain size, we probably would have lost a lot,” she said. “We probably would have disbanded.”

Instead, there is stability, tradition and, surprise, the knowledge that bigger was better.