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Fans' Notes One of the LPGA's founders saw a kindred pioneering spirit
Herbert Warren Wind once said that Betty Jameson and Ben Hogan
could hit a golf ball straighter than anybody he had ever seen.
But Jameson, unlike Hogan, never achieved fame and fortune
playing golf, which is exactly why she may have been the
proudest woman in America on July 10. In 1950 she and 12 other
female golfers (including Babe Didrikson Zaharias) founded the
LPGA, which would help set the stage for women's professional
tennis, Title IX and the jaw-dropping scene she saw on her
television on that July afternoon: a gorgeous blimp shot of the
Rose Bowl, filled with 90,185 fans, all of them there to watch a
women's sporting event. "I was just glued to my TV," says
Jameson, 80. "It was the most thrilling thing I've ever seen."
Jameson screamed with delight when Brandi Chastain made the
World Cup-winning penalty kick, and she got chills again upon
meeting the U.S. team in October, when the Women's Sports
Foundation inducted Jameson into its Hall of Fame. "It's a
sisterhood," Jameson says of the bond she shares with her fellow
pioneers. "There's such a charm and exuberance about these
girls. I was just in awe of them."
--G.W.
COLOR PHOTO: BRIAN SMITH
