women had some very strong personalities,
and when I joined the tour in 1959 they
were all still pretty feisty. But it took strong
personalities for it to happen.”
USGA PHOTO ARCHIVES (2)
LEARNING TO CREATE SHOTS
Suggs’ determination and feistiness is
legendary, but it started in Lithia Springs, Ga.,
where her father owned a nine-hole golf
course. The game was still played with
wooden-shafted clubs in the 1930s, so her
father would literally saw off clubs to fit his
daughter when she started playing at age 10.
“My dad put my hands on the club with a
baseball grip and said, ‘Hit it,’ and that’s how
it started,” she says. “In my day, kids didn’t
play golf and very few women played golf—
just the wives of club members—but there
was nothing else to do out in the country.”
Suggs learned to hit her irons straight by
parking her younger brother, Rell, out in the
driving range with a first baseman’s mitt. Ball
after ball, Suggs would land her shots into
the soft leather of her brother’s glove.
And while Ben Hogan would laud her
smooth swing years later, Suggs says it was
“all about how it felt, not how it looked.” She
never hit the ball long, but she hit it straight
and she learned to play from anywhere on
the golf course.
That point is illustrated in a golf lesson she
once had with Bobby Jones. Jones positioned
the young girl behind a big tree, showed her
several different ways to extract her ball, and
then told her to go home and practice. Jones
helped Suggs become a better shotmaker.
One year, when Suggs was playing the
Titleholders tournament at Augusta Country
Club, her parents came to watch her play. It
was spring and the grass had not yet grown
in and Suggs found her ball in a cuppy lie on
the 10th fairway. She pulled out her 2-iron
and ran the ball 170 yards down the fairway
to within two feet of the hole before tapping
in for birdie.
“My father said, ‘That was the luckiest
miss I ever saw,’ and I said, ‘Dad, that’s the
only way I could hit the ball out of that spot,’ ”
Suggs recalls.
Her father walked back to the fairway to
see where she had hit her shot. When he
rejoined her group, Suggs grumbled to her
father, “Are you satisfied?” And her father
muttered, “Yep.”
Suggs carried a 1-iron for most of her career.
When she first started playing championships,
she had mostly steel-shafted clubs with a
wooden-shafted 1-iron and 7-iron in the bag.
Technology in clubs and agronomy, and
especially in golf balls, were lacking in those
years. Even so, women on the early LPGA
Tour often played course yardages of 6,400
to 6,800 yards long.
w w w. v s g a . o r g
Master_VSGA_MarApr14.indd 23
Initially the owner of a homegrown swing,
Louise Suggs developed a silky motion that
helped her become a premier amateur and
one of the LPGA’s best players of all time.
“We did that because the club members
didn’t want women’s scores to be lower than
their scores,” Suggs says. “I had to chip all
the time to get my pars.”
Suggs’ creativity around the greens
made an impression on many other players,
including a young JoAnne Carner, who
turned professional toward the end of Suggs’
career. Carner’s was a contrast of styles with
the established veteran.
“I’ve always sort of slugged my swing, while
Louise was nice and smooth, taking it way back
and through with balance at the end,” Carner
says. “I also used my wedge everywhere, but it
was Louise who showed me how to play the
pitch and run. She had all the shots.”
A STEELY COMPETITOR
PGA T
our legend Sam Snead once found
that out the hard way in the early 1960s at a
48-player tournament in Palm Beach, Fla. That
event featured 12 men and women amateurs
and 12 men and women professionals, playing
from the same tees. The prize money for the
professionals was $1,000 for the low male
scorer and $500 for the woman with the
best aggregate. Suggs won the tournament
outright and Snead was not happy about it.
“After it was over, we were all changing our
shoes in the clubhouse and Sam kept yelling
at me,” Suggs remembers. “I finally said, ‘Sam,
I don’t know what you’re bitching about. You
weren’t even second.’ Sam scratched out of
that parking lot and he must have left a halfinch of rubber. He didn’t speak to me for
quite a while.”
The tournament director sent Suggs a check
for $1,000—more than what the women’s
winner was supposed to earn—along with a
note that said: “You won this. You deserve it.”
WILLINGNESS TO INNOVATE DESPITE
DIFFERING DYNAMICS
By that time, Suggs was highly regarded as
one of the best women players in the world,
even though she never drew the crowds
that followed the showier Babe Zaharias.
Comparatively, Zaharias was a bull in a china
shop compared to the quiet, and sometimes
stewing, Southern-born Suggs.
Even Ben Hogan once wrote: “If I were to
single out one woman in the world today as
a model for any woman aspiring to ideal golf
form, it would be Miss Suggs.”
“Louise was always honest and respected
the rules of golf and the courtesies given to
other players,” Spork says.
And while Suggs will never openly
criticize Zaharias’ bullish style, Whitworth
noted “Louise and Babe were not on the
same page all the time.”
“People flocked to Babe, but if she wasn’t
in contention, she’d go sit on the veranda
at the clubhouse and play her harmonica,”
Whitworth says. “Babe wasn’t always real
respectful of the other players and sometimes
there was friction.”
Even so, the few women professionals
on the early LPGA T
our knew they had
to make it work even if their personalities
clashed. While Zaharias provided showbiz
bravado and Patty Berg charmed galleries
with her inviting style, the quiet personalities
of players like Suggs simply got things done.
“The L A