Betsy Rawls, who gained 8 main golfing championships, together with 4 United States Women’s Opens, within the first twenty years of the L.P.G.A. Tour, and as an govt and event director helped propel the coming of the ladies’s professional circuit as a big-money enchantment, died on Saturday at her house in Lewes, Del. She was once 95.
Her loss of life was once showed via the Ladies Professional Golf Association.
Rawls was once the primary four-time Women’s Open champion, profitable in 1951, 1953, 1957 and 1960, a document matched most effective via Mickey Wright, who captured her fourth Open in 1964. From 1951 to 1972, Rawls gained a complete of 55 occasions at the L.P.G.A. Tour, which was once founded in 1950.
Her different main victories got here at the Women’s Western Open in 1952 and 1959 and the Women’s P.G.A. Championship in 1959 and 1969. She was once a three-time runner-up throughout the Nineteen Fifties within the different main event of her time, the Titleholders Championship, and was once some of the six authentic inductees into the L.P.G.A. Tour Hall of Fame in 1967. She was once additionally inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame.
Rawls gained the 1996 Bob Jones Award, the United States Golf Association’s easiest honor, and the L.P.G.A.’s fiftieth Anniversary Commissioner’s Award in 2000 for her contributions to girls’s golfing. She was once decided on in 1980 as the primary girl to serve at the laws committee for the lads’s United States Open.
Elizabeth Earle Rawls was once born on May 4, 1928, in Spartanburg, in northern South Carolina, one of two kids of Robert and Mary (Earle) Rawls. In the early Forties, the circle of relatives moved to Texas, the place Betsy’s father labored as an engineer at an airplane plant in Arlington, a suburb of Dallas, throughout World War II.
Robert Rawls, who had performed golfing as a tender guy in Indiana, employed Harvey Penick, one of the sport’s most famous academics, to provide Betsy her first lesson when she was once 17. Penick charged $3 for that one-hour consultation at the Austin Country Club and remained her trainer, unfastened of rate, for her whole profession.
“He always brought me back to the basic mechanics on which a good swing is built,” Rawls recalled in “Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book: Lessons and Teachings From a Lifetime in Golf.”
Her sturdy swimsuit was once the fast recreation. “I had a reputation of being able to get the ball up and down out of a garbage can,” she instructed The News Journal of Wilmington, Del., in 2010. “The sand wedge, off the fairway or out of the rough, was my best club. I could get it down in two from almost any place. I was a good putter under pressure.”
Rawls graduated from the University of Texas in 1950, incomes a bachelor’s stage with concentrations in physics and arithmetic. She additionally completed an astonishing 2nd, at the back of (*95*) Zaharias, as an newbie within the Women’s Open in 1950, the L.P.G.A. Tour’s inaugural season.
She became professional in 1951 after Wilson carrying items recruited her to enroll in its workforce of main gamers who have been giving clinics on its behalf across the nation. That yr Rawls bested Louise Suggs via 5 strokes to seize the Open.
At the time, Wilson paid her bills, at the side of a wage that she recalled was once about $3,000 a yr (round $35,000 in as of late’s greenbacks), since prize cash at the time was once meager.
She led the excursion in victories in 1952, 1957 and 1959, when she set single-season information with 10 wins (together with two majors), $26,744 in income and the bottom scoring moderate in step with around, 74.03, bringing her the ladies’s Vare Trophy.
She were given a wreck in profitable the 1957 Open, at Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, N.Y.
Jackie Pung of Hawaii completed with a four-round overall of 298 to Rawls’s 299. But officers briefly spotted that Pung’s enjoying spouse, Betty Jameson, who was once protecting rating for Pung, had indexed a 5 at the fourth hollow of the ultimate around, regardless that she had in fact scored a 6. Pung had made the similar error in protecting rating for Jameson, who wasn’t in competition for the victory.
Although Pung’s card confirmed a right kind overall rating, she was once disqualified, as was once Jameson, the automated penalty underneath golfing’s laws for a participant who arms in a card with an wrong rating on any hollow.
So the championship, at the side of $1,800 in prize cash, went to Rawls.
“It’s always great to win, I guess, but I sure hate to do it this way,” United Press International quoted Rawls as announcing. “I feel sorry for Jackie.”
But Pung wound up because the No. 1 cash winner: Members of the Winged Foot Club, distressed over her shedding the name on a technicality, raised about $3,000 to ease her loss.
Rawls was once the L.P.G.A.’s president in 1961 and 1962 and its event director for 6 years following her retirement from festival in 1975. After that, she was once the chief director of the McDonald’s Championship, which was once discontinued in 1994 when it become the longtime sponsor of the L.P.G.A. Championship. Continuing in her post with that main tournament, she helped lift tens of millions of greenbacks for charity.
Rawls was once handled for breast most cancers in 2000 however endured overseeing the L.P.G.A. tournament, held at the DuPont Country Club in Wilmington, Del. She retired from her govt director’s post in 2002 however stayed on because the event’s vice board chairman.
Rawls’s brother, Robert Rawls Jr., died in 1992. She left no speedy survivors.
Rawls earned $302,664 in her 25-year profession at the professional excursion, touchdown underneath the highest 450 at the L.P.G.A.’s present income listing.
“Today I look at the money they play for with amazement, but not with envy or bitterness,” Rawls instructed The Philadelphia Inquirer in a while ahead of receiving the Bob Jones Award. “In the beginning, we played for so little that money wasn’t the motivating factor. But when I won, it seemed like it was a lot of money at the time. I enjoyed winning when I did.”