She’s Still Swinging, After All These Years : Golf: Marlene Hagge, 56, needs a win in the Dinah Shore to reach Hall of Fame, but she doesn’t expect to get it.

As the sun drops behind the San Jacinto mountains, a familiar silhouette can be seen driving golf balls into the dusk on the range at Mission Hills Country Club.

It’s a swing that has been honed during 53 of Marlene Hagge’s 56 years.

“I should have the swing down by now,” she said, reflecting on a professional career that has spanned 40 years.

To put that into perspective, think about Jack Nicklaus as a 10-year-old, Harry Truman as President and the Dodgers in Brooklyn five years away from winning their first World Series.

That’s how long the lady has been a professional golfer.

Hagge, one of 12 charter members of the LPGA in 1950, is embarking on her fifth decade of professional golf.

She was still a month away from her 16th birthday when she played in her first LPGA tournament.

She was 18 when she won for the first time, at Sarasota, Fla.

“That was a lot of golf balls ago,” Hagge said, trying to recall her first victory. She is honest enough to say she can barely remember her last victory, which was in 1972.

“I don’t even remember some of the tournaments I’ve come close to winning,” she added. “It doesn’t happen very often.”

It happens rarely enough to make people wonder why she continues playing a game she can’t win. She lives comfortably in a condominium on the Mission Hills course and earns enough money representing Landmark Co. that she doesn’t have to play anymore.

“Winning isn’t that important to me anymore,” she said, admitting she still gets mad enough to utter some unprintable words after poor shots. “I play because I feel like I can still compete, or at least I feel capable of getting into contention.”

If she didn’t believe that, she wouldn’t continue to work on all parts of her game, in the hope that everything comes together during the Nabisco Dinah Shore, starting today at Mission Hills.

“The only question is my nerves,” Hagge said. “I don’t know if my nerves would hold up during the last three or four holes if I was in contention. I’m not being negative, just realistic. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a chance to win.”

Besides, she enjoys playing for the sheer pleasure of the game these days.

“A lot of the people who follow me are happy if I just finish 18 holes each day,” Hagge said. “I learned a long time ago, you don’t have to win to make it out here. And it is much more fun without the pressure.”

But don’t think that she’s one to shy away from pressure--not Hagge. After all, she was swinging a club almost as soon as she was able to walk. She was 3 when her father, David Bauer, put a club in her hands and pointed her toward a driving range.

“He really tried to make my older sister, Alice, play at first,” Hagge said, “but she was already 9 and didn’t like it. So, he thought he had better start me when I was too young to know the difference.”

Bauer would take Marlene to a driving range, where people would gather around to watch her hit golf balls.

That, apparently, is what made Alice change her mind about the game. Marlene helped to make it seem like fun.

“The summers weren’t long enough in (Eureka) South Dakota,” Hagge said, “so we moved west and wound up in Long Beach when I was 9.”

That’s about the time she started getting frustrated with the game, because she just wanted to be a little girl.

“I never felt like I had any ambition in golf,” she said. “It was strange. I was like a wind-up doll. My dad just wound me up and put me on the first tee, and I played golf.”

She played it quite well, too. Well enough to win the Long Beach boys’ city championship at the age of 10. As a 13-year-old, she won the Los Angeles City women’s championship at Griffith Park.

“Some people didn’t like that,” Hagge said, “because it was pointed out to me that I was really too young to be playing on the course. On the back of the scorecard, it said you had to be 14 to play on the course.”

That was the first time she started to see some of the injustices in the game.

“They really didn’t make it easy for juniors to play in those days,” she said. “They didn’t have the kind of junior programs they have today. And if you were a girl, it was that much tougher. If you didn’t belong to a private club, which we didn’t, it was almost impossible to do anything. I never thought it was fair. I always thought talent should win out, no matter the circumstance.”

Talent did eventually win out in her case, although she had to turn pro for it to happen.

“We just didn’t have the money to play in the tournaments my father wanted me to play in,” Hagge said. “Sometimes a few clubs would get together and send me to a few tournaments, but the U.S. Golf Assn. found out about it and made me ineligible to play in the Curtis Cup and other prestigious amateur tournaments.”

That’s when she and her sister started making money by teaming up to beat amateurs and pros from private clubs.

“That was fun while it lasted, but it didn’t last long,” Hagge said. “That’s when the Wilson (Sporting Goods) Co. started sending their girls to private clubs to promote their equipment. Why should anybody pay $5,000 to play the Bauer sisters when they could play the other great players for free?”

That was in 1948. Two years later, with the help of Fred Corcoran (who was Babe Zaharias’ manager), the LPGA was chartered.

She was still Marlene Bauer at the time and still playing for her father.

“There were times I really resented it,” she said, “but it was all I was trained to do. I kept telling myself that the first time I had a chance to quit, I would. I knew, though, that it wouldn’t happen until I was on my own.”

That chance came when she married Robert Hagge, and together with a mutual friend, they planned to buy a golf course in the Carolinas in 1956.

“In the meantime, I was going to play in a few tournaments until we got things settled,” Hagge said.

But she won one tournament, then another, then put off buying the course because she wanted to see how much money she could win that year.

It turned out to be her finest year, with eight victories and nine runner-up finishes.

“Somebody figured it out for me and told me if we were playing for today’s purses, I would have won close to a million dollars that year,” Hagge said. In 1956, the total was slightly less than that--$20,235, to be exact.

That was the beginning of her best stretch in golf. She won 25 tournaments during her career, 21 of them between 1956 and ’65. Hagge won both the LPGA Championship and the World Championship in ’56. She led the tour in money once and ranked among the top 10 seven times.

“I never did get around to buying that golf course,” Hagge said. “There was always something preventing it.”

Despite her accomplishments, Hagge will conclude her career knowing she will never make it into the LPGA’s Hall of Fame. It’s something of a sore point with her.

The LPGA is the only sport that has set exact criteria for induction. Besides playing for 10 consecutive years, one must win 40 tournaments. One can also get in with 35 victories plus one major, or 30 victories plus two majors. They must be different majors, though.

“I’m five victories short,” Hagge said. “(I have) 25 wins plus two majors--the World Championship was considered a major back then--(but) there’s no way I’ll ever win five more tournaments or another major.”

She feels blessed, however, to still have her health and the ability to play every day.

She doesn’t like to compare players from different eras but does admit that today’s players are probably a little smarter.

“These players today know how to avoid a big number,” Hagge said. “They used to take more chances and were more creative 20-30 years ago.”

The best player she has ever seen? “Mickey Wright,” Hagge said. “She was so good, when she didn’t win a tournament it was because she wasn’t playing well.”

As for herself, Hagge won’t say where she fits in. She believes her record says it for her. Whenever the Dinah Shore is played, Hagge knows that everything might suddenly come together and she would have that major victory she needs for the Hall of Fame. Then she realizes that the course is just too long for her.

But now that she has switched to the long-handled putter, Hagge is beginning to think that maybe something strange and wonderful might happen this week.

The putter works well for her and feels good in her hands. She makes a lot of short putts with it and also lags well with it, causing her to say:

“I might be playing this game for a long time if this thing really works.”