In Memoriam - Betty Jameson

In the mid-70's I was a huge LPGA fan, sometimes traveling to four or five tournaments a year. One of my childhood friends played on the tour, so I got to know a number of the players. And while I never met Betty Jameson, I'm grateful to her for the role she played in founding the organization.

Betty Jameson, a Hall of Fame golfer and a founding member of the women’s professional tour, died Saturday in Boynton Beach, Fla., where she lived. She was 89.

Her death was announced by the Ladies Professional Golf Association, which runs the tour.

Jameson was one of 13 women who founded the L.P.G.A. in 1950. Among the others were the champion golfers Patty Berg, Louise Suggs and Babe Didrikson Zaharias. They organized tournaments, established rules and bylaws and supervised membership.

In its first year, the tour consisted of 14 tournaments for a total prize money of less than $50,000. In 2009, it will include at least 30 events in 10 countries with total prize money of nearly $55 million, the L.P.G.A. said.

“Generations of women have benefited from her dedication, vision and sacrifice,” L.P.G.A. Commissioner Carolyn F. Bivens said after Jameson’s death. Jameson had 14 victories as an amateur, including the United States Amateur championships in 1939 and 1940. She turned professional in 1945, signing a three-year deal with Spalding, the sporting goods manufacturer, for $5,000 a year. At the time, she was earning $25 a week as a reporter for The San Antonio Light.

In all, James won 10 tournaments on the professional tour, including the 1947 United States Women’s Open in Greensboro, N.C. Her 72-hole score was 295; it was the first time a woman had broken 300. Years later, she called it the proudest moment of her career. Her first-place money was $1,200.

Her career earnings were $91,470, a respectable sum in an era in which the women drove from tournament to tournament in an automobile caravan and often played on courses far less green and manicured than those of the professional men’s tour. But the women drew the attention of news organizations, which placed the blond-haired, photogenic Jameson among the tour’s so-called “glamour girls.”

The golf historian Herbert Warren Wind compared Jameson to Ben Hogan in her ability to hit the ball straight. Her swing was so controlled, The Palm Beach Post wrote in 1999, that she once asked a playing partner, JoAnn Prentice, to mark her ball on the green and remove it as Jameson prepared to play a shot from 175 yards. “ ‘Well, it was in my line,’ ” the paper quoted Jameson as saying.

Jameson was inducted into the Hall of Fame of Women’s Golf in 1951. In 1967, she was one of six inaugural members of the L.P.G.A. Tour Hall of Fame in St. Augustine, Fla. In 2000, during the L.P.G.A.’s 50th anniversary, she was recognized as one of the association’s top 50 players and teachers.

Jameson was also named to the World Golf Hall of Fame, also in St. Augustine, and in 1999 was inducted into the Women’s Sports Foundation Hall of Fame.