Her death, which was announced by the LPGA on its website, left Marlene Bauer Hagge and Shirley Spork as the last survivors among the 13 pioneers of the women’s tour.
The LPGA said Smith, who would have turned 90 on Saturday, made her last public appearance March 24, greeting players as they walked off the 18th green at the Bank of Hope Founders Cup tournament in Phoenix.
During its first season, the LPGA sponsored a dozen or so tournaments, with prize money totaling just $50,000. Babe Didrikson Zaharias, an Olympic track and field champion in 1932, and Patty Berg were the main draws at first, but Smith, as well as co-founders like Hagge, Louise Suggs and Betty Jameson, became prominent golf pros in their own right.
Last year, the LPGA sponsored 32 events in 13 countries with $65.35 million in prize money.
Smith captured the 1963 and 1964 Titleholders Championship, an LPGA major tournament of her era, which was played at Augusta Country Club in Georgia, adjacent to Augusta National Golf Club, the home of the Masters. She won her first LPGA tournament in 1954 and her last in 1972.
While serving as LPGA president from 1958 to 1960, Smith was instrumental in founding the organization’s teaching division, now known as the LPGA Teaching and Club Professional Membership. She gave clinics throughout the United States and in 37 other countries and was the first woman to be a television analyst for men’s pro golf tournaments. She worked with ABC at the 1973 U.S. Open, at Oakmont in Pennsylvania, and the Colonial, in Fort Worth.
She was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2006.
The LPGA was the successor to the Women’s Professional Golf Association, which was founded during World War II but disbanded in 1949 after incurring financial difficulties. In the LPGA’s early years, it struggled as well, receiving little notice in the press or on the radio and having no TV exposure.
The women also lacked the funds to fly, so they traveled to tournaments in caravans of four or five automobiles when the interstate highway system was in its infancy.
When they reached a tournament site, they had to sell their product to the locals. Smith, an exuberant woman who seemed just right for publicizing the tour, was given the nickname Miss Personality for her cheerleading.
“We would go to major league ballparks, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Washington, D.C., and hit golf balls from home plate out to center field, with a 9 or an 8 iron, and then we’d get on the microphone and ask those baseball fans to come out and see the LPGA play,” she told The Arizona Republic long afterward.
The women were also the tournament directors and rules makers, and they called in results to the news agencies and newspapers. Tournament sites came and went. “We might get one event one year; the next year it was gone,” Smith told The Dallas Morning News in 2000.
Marilynn Smith was born on April 29, 1929, in Topeka, Kansas, to Lynn and Alma Smith. Her father was an insurance executive.
In her pre-teenage years, Marilynn managed and pitched for a boys’ baseball team. As she once told golf.com: “I came home from pitching one day and my mother said, ‘Well, how did you do today, dear?’ I threw my mitt against the wall and I said, ‘Oh, —,’ a four-letter word beginning with S that I had learned from the boys on the sandlot. And she marched me into the lavatory and washed my mouth out with soap.”
When her father came home and learned of her outburst, she recalled, he said, “We better take her out to the Wichita Country Club and teach her a more ladylike sport.”
Her childhood dream was to play baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals, but she agreed to take golf lessons from a country-club pro. Captivated by the sport, she went on to win three state amateur championships and the 1949 national collegiate golf championship as a sophomore at the University of Kansas. She turned pro after that when the Spalding sporting goods company gave her a contract to promote its equipment at clinics.
Smith received the first Patty Berg Award for distinguished service to women’s golf in 1979. In her later years she sponsored a tournament raising scholarship money for female high school seniors planning to continue to play golf in college. Living in Goodyear, a suburb of Phoenix, she played recreationally until she was about 70, when her knees gave out. There was no immediate word on her survivors.
Smith estimated that she had given 4,000 clinics in the United States and abroad. On one of her four trips to New Zealand, she inspired a 10-year-old girl named Marilyn Smith to take up golf. In the 1970s, that Marilyn Smith became the first pro player from her country to join the LPGA Tour.
“With Marilynn Smith as a founding member still playing, they called me MJ Smith,” she once told Wellington Golf, which advises golf clubs in the vicinity of New Zealand’s capital. “Though they did send one of my prize checks to her by mistake.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.