The pantheon of illustrious female golfers who grace the walls of the World Golf Hall of Fame, money lists, and Major Champions records books owe their legacy and presence in the sport to Mary Queen of Scots.
Mary, who ruled Scotland from 1542 to 1567, was the first female to play golf and imparted instant credibility and inclusion to the fledgling game.
In 1850 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert built Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands, igniting a royal enthusiasm for Scottish history and culture, including golf outside the coastlines of the British Islands.
The notoriety and publicity generated by the sport of golf and the emerging industrial revolution brought progress to Scotland and the game of golf to the masses. In 1852, Railroads began regular passenger service to St. Andrew’s, the birthplace of golf, generating a tourism boom and widespread interest in the golf courses located around Glasgow, Edinburgh, the northern and western borders, and the Firth of Ford.
Golf quickly became Scotland’s national pastime, a working-class, well-known participation attraction extending to all ages, gender, and social classes.
As the sport flourished, golf clubs soon sprung up all over the British empire, paving the way for the game to grow, thrive, and eventually spreading to American shores.
Shinnecock Hills in South Hampton, New York, became the first American Golf Club to extend women playing privileges in 1891, opening the door to additional clubs accepting women members accompanied by the growth of golf clubs and courses being built, founded, and spreading across America, leading to a proliferation of women’s golf events, amateur tournaments, and social organizations.
The Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) was formed in 1948, with thirteen high-profile female golfers as the founding directors, including Helen Hicks, Marilynn Smith, Alice Bauer, Bettye Danoff, Louise Suggs, Helen Dettweiler, Opal Hall, Shirley Spork, Sally Sessions, Betty Jamison, Marlene Bauer Hagge, and Babe Zaharias, with Patty Berg serving as the inaugural President, adding legitimacy and authority to the game and monetizing the sport.
In addition to those pioneering legends of the game who formed and promoted the LPGA, additional exceptional women golfers grace the list of the top women athletes of all time.
The honor roll includes Glenna Collett-Vare, Joyce Wethered, Micky Wright, Nancy Lopez, Betsy Rawls, JoAnne Carner, Beth Daniel, Sandra Hynie, Betsy King, Patty Sheehan, Julie Inkster, Pat Bradley, Karrie Webb, Annika Sorenstam, Amy Alcott, Lorena Ochoa, Michelle Wie, Lyndia Ko, Se Ri Pak, Dame Laura Davis. Inbee Park, and Park Sung-Hyun.
All Hall of Famers, incredible players, remarkable athletes, and Major Champion winners.
Yet their accomplishments pale beside those of the brightest light to shine in the constellation of stars that grace the pages of golf history and are the most celebrated golfers of all time, not just women but men too, including Tiger Woods, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, and Bobby Jones.
That woman is
Kathy Whitworth, who won 88 golf tournaments on the LPGA Tour and 98 overall championships worldwide, more than any player in Professional Golf except Jumbo Ozaki, who claimed 94 titles on the Japanese Golf Tour.
Whitworth also placed second an incredible 95 times and was involved in 28 playoffs, giving her 183 one-two finishes on tour, surpassing any other player’s performance or record in history, regardless of whomever it was who picked up or swung a golf club, A winning performance that will never be outperformed nor surpassed.
Sam Snead and Tiger Woods share the record for wins on the PGA Tour at 82.
In 1981, she became the first woman to earn over one million dollars on the LPGA Tour and won at least one golf tournament a year for 17 straight years, a record she shares with Jack Nicklaus, the greatest male golfer of all time.
Kathy was inducted into the LPGA Hall of Fame in 1982 and is generally acknowledged as the best woman player, competitor, and winner in history.
Whitworth passed on Saturday, Christmas Eve, 2022. She was eighty-three.
Kathrynne Ann Whitworth was born September 27, 1939, on the eve of World War II, in Monahans, a small dusty, gritty prairie town nestled in the extreme Southwest corner of Texas, near the Mexican and New Mexico borders.
As she preferred to be called, Kathy was the youngest of three daughters born to a successful mercantile merchant and shopkeeper who would later enter politics, becoming the mayor of JAL, New Mexico.
Jal, a small rural hamlet in Lea County, is New Mexico’s southeasternmost community and shares a border with Texas and Mexico.
In the early 1800s, the area served as a grazing property for the John A Lynch cattle ranch in New Mexico territory. When a post office was established in 1913, local authorities registered the ranch’s cattle brand, JAL, as the town’s name.
On November 1, 1927, oil was discovered in the area. JAL went from a sleepy, scruffy cattle ranch to an oil boomtown with all the accompanying expansion problems, concerns, worries, and stereotypes.
Housing was in short supply, and ranchers opened their homes to oil workers. New businesses sprang up, and the population 
increased, with El Paso Natural Gas becoming the dominant employer in the region and natural gas exploration as the main economic driver.
Into this environment, Kathy Whitworth was born a daughter of privilege, with manners and speech that belied her status and upbringing on the rough, harsh, and rumbling South Texas plains. Her relatives all worked as middle-class employees at El Paso in the rapidly expanding energy production industry, while her father was the town’s mayor.
Tall and lanky, with a natural grace, demeanor, and composure, yet presupposed with athletic proclivity and fierce competitiveness, she initially gravitated towards tennis but switched to golf in her teens and learned to play with her grandfather’s clubs on the gas company’s semi-private country club.
Her first golf professional was Hardy Loudermilk, Texas born and bred and no stranger to the vagaries of the knockdown, low-rising, wind-hugging trajectory shots needed on the barren, unsheltered, dried-out fairways of Texas panhandle golf courses.
It was Hardy that tutored the young Whitworth on the basics of the golf swing and encouraged her to play every day instead of hours of endless practice and beating golf balls on the driving range. Lifelong applications that contributed to Whitworth’s legendary short game, recovery shots, putting skills, and bunker play.
Loudermilk was a friend and contemporary of Harvey Penick, a celebrated Professional at the Austin Country, Coach of the Texas Longhorns Golf Team, and a well-known teacher and mentor of LPGA Touring Professionals Betsy Rawls, Sandra Palmer, Judy Kimball, and Micky Wright.
Loudermilk would call Harvey in Austin, who would convey swing tips, instructions, and playing advice over the phone to the young, receptive, and impressionable Whitworth, who would take those lessons to the golf course.
“I was fortunate to know what I wanted to do, and golf grabbed me by the throat. I loved it. I thought everyone knew what they wanted to do when they were fifteen years old.”
She tried college in nearby Odessa, but the siren call of competition rang with a passion and commitment that forecasted her enduring fame, celebrity, and renown.
In 1957, she was eighteen when she won the New Mexico Women’s Amateur, won the tournament again the following year, collected her trophy, turned professional, joined the LPGA, and was on her way, never looking back on her pathway to golf immortality.
The following exploits and achievements were chronicled, reported, and supported by Whitworth Hall of Fame’s career.
She was the LPGA’s leading money winner eight times, Player of the Year seven times between 1966 and 1973, won the Vare Trophy for best scoring average by an LPGA Tour player a record seven times between 1965 and 1972, and was inducted into the LPGA Hall of Fame in 1975 and into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1982.
She was named Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year in 1965 and 1967 and named “Golfer of the Decade” by Golf Magazine. And she received the 1986 William Richardson Award from the Golf Writers Association of America for outstanding contributions to golf.
Kathy is a member of the New Mexico Hall of Fame, the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, the Texas Golf Hall of Fame, and the Women’s Sports Foundation Hall of Fame.
Among all the many other significant women’s sports and golf awards she has received, she is most assuredly, one of the most celebrated and accomplished athletes of all time.
“Winning never got old,” Kathy told me in an interview we did together on my Radio Show “Talking Golf with the Golf Guy.”
And winning golf tournaments was something she did best, more often, and better than any other human being, man or woman, who ever lived, competed, and played the game of golf.
Kathy Whitworth-Champion of Champions
