JTBC Founders Cup: Shirley Spork and Marilyn Smith Reflect and Remember (Video)
Aug 17, 2014; Pittsford, NY, USA; Fans watch the action on the 9th green during the final round of the Wegman
Tee time for the first round of the JTBC Founders Cup is less 24 hours away. Let’s take this opportunity to reflect on the LPGA’s amazing journey from a small core of determined, strong-willed women who wanted nothing more than to play pro golf to a vibrant global organization that provides a home for the best women athletes in the sport.
From the outset, the Founders recognized that in order to establish and sustain that professional home they needed also to promote and game. Now we refer to it as growing the game. With no PR department, no agents and management companies to help them, they did just that. They recruited new players and fans through personal appearances at baseball games and boxing matches and with an eye to the future they supported collegiate golf programs that would help young women hone and refine their competitive game.
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Each time I see Paula Creamer or Brittany Lincicome promoting the game and the Tour in one of those slick television spots I find myself trying to imagine what it must have been like for those women who fought their way past the 1950s Cult of True Womanhood to get some promotional attention from the press and to lure a few more people to the small galleries that followed their tournaments.
Each time I trace the career of a young rookie back to a collegiate golf program at Stanford or Arizona State or Georgia I’m in awe of the Founders’ foresight. Those 13 women intuitively understood that in order to ensure the future of the game the LPGA must (and did) build strong partnerships with education.
The Girls Golf program at one end of the age spectrum and the LPGA Golf Clinics for Women at the other, designed to open the sport to women of all ages, are the product of their vision as well.
Long before Betty Friedan galvanized American women the Founders quietly forged innovative strategies for living a much-expanded version of womanhood that included (and includes) on-site day care for working moms, making it possible for young women to really have it all.
Listening to these Founders and Pioneers reminisce about how they handled racism when Althea Gibson joined the tour makes me incredibly proud of this game I so love. While the United States as a whole was still trapped in the vise of racial segregation, before there was a civil rights movement, the women who were charting the course of the LPGA would have none of it.
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The Founders understood that sport must and would be color-blind and quietly made it so in their sphere a decade before Dr. King popularized the cause in a broader social arena. And all they wanted, really, was an organizational home where they could play professional golf. They never intended to function as agents of social and cultural change, and yet they anticipated the changes that have transformed the social landscape.
The JTBC Founders Cup is so much more than a golf tournament. It’s a four-day celebration of a simply astonishing journey. At the center, of course, is the tournament because, after all’s said and done, what the Founders really wanted was a place to play golf. They loved competition, and without a doubt they will glory in the slugfest that’s about to unfold on the Wildfire track.
But whether Karrie Webb makes it a threesome or Lydia Ko prevails or Stacy Lewis notches her first win of the 2015 season or a new player joins the 2015 circle of LPGA champions, the tournament itself stands as testimony to the successful labors of the Founders.
Fore!