Ladies Professional Golf Association

Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA), organization that provides professional tournament golf for women and annually holds the LPGA Championship tournament.

Several professional tournaments for women were staged during the 1920s and ’30s; important players from this era include Glenna Collett from the United States and Joyce Wethered of Great Britain. It was not until the 1940s that efforts began in earnest to form a professional golf organization for women. The first, the Women’s Professional Golf Association (WPGA), was chartered in 1944. Standout players soon emerged, including Patty Berg, Louise Suggs, Betty Jameson, and, especially, the multisport legend Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Even Zaharias’s popularity, however, could not ensure success for the WPGA, which folded in 1949. Nevertheless, it proved within its brief existence the need for a professional women’s organization.

The LPGA was incorporated in August 1950 by the aforementioned golfers plus eight others. Funding for LPGA tournaments was at first so poor that golfers themselves performed many of the organizational tasks and course maintenance chores. Soon, however, the introduction of the Weathervane series of tournaments (a series of four 36-hole tournaments that offered a $3,000 prize for each tournament and a $5,000 prize for the overall winner of the four) proved sufficiently popular to sustain the organization throughout the decade.

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The play of such outstanding golfers as Kathy Whitworth, Mickey Wright, Carol Mann, Sandra Haynie, and Sandra Palmer helped maintain a reasonable level of popularity for the LPGA throughout the 1960s. Star players who emerged during the following decade include Jan Stephenson, Jo-Anne Carner, Amy Alcott, and Judy Rankin. The most notable player to emerge during the 1970s was Nancy Lopez, who, by winning nine tournaments (including a record five straight) during her first full season on the tour (1978), was a major force in increasing the popularity and prestige of the LPGA.

Pat Daniel, Betsy King, Patty Sheehan, Juli Inkster, and Laura Davies were among the top players of the 1980s and ’90s. By the turn of the century, the annual purse for LPGA events had increased to more than $37 million per year, and the tour was dominated by Karrie Webb, Annika Sörenstam, Pak Se Ri, and Lorena Ochoa, among others. Sörenstam made headlines in 2001 by becoming the first female golfer to score 59 in competition, and in 2003 she became the first woman to compete in a men’s Professional Golf Association tournament since Zaharias in 1945.

Winners of the LPGA Championship are provided in the table.