In 1950, thirteen women professional golfers sat down together and founded the Ladies Professional Golf Association. They did this without significant financial backing, without guaranteed sponsorship, without a television deal, and without any assurance that the tournaments they were organizing would attract spectators or prize money sufficient to sustain a professional circuit.

They did it anyway.

The founding of the LPGA is one of the most significant acts of organizational entrepreneurship in the history of American sport — and it is also one of the least celebrated. Understanding what these women built, and what they had to overcome to build it, is essential to understanding women’s golf and, more broadly, what professional women’s sport has cost the people who created it.

The Women’s Professional Golf Association

The LPGA was not the first attempt to organize professional women’s golf in America. In 1944, a small group of women professionals formed the Women’s Professional Golf Association — an organization that struggled to attract sponsors, establish a reliable tournament schedule, or generate the prize money necessary to sustain professional careers.

The WPGA collapsed within a few years, largely for financial reasons. But it established a proof of concept: there was an audience for professional women’s golf, and there were players of sufficient quality to make it compelling. What was needed was better organization, more committed leadership, and a clearer vision of what a professional women’s tour should be.

The Thirteen Founders

The women who founded the LPGA in 1950 understood this. They organized themselves with a deliberateness that the WPGA had lacked — establishing a formal governance structure, setting standards for professional conduct, and committing to building a tour that would be financially sustainable over time rather than dependent on the enthusiasm of a single organizer.

The thirteen founders included several of the best players in the world at the time: Patty Berg, Babe Zaharias, Louise Suggs, Betty Jameson, and others who had won amateur titles, competed successfully in the limited professional events that existed, and were prepared to invest their own credibility and competitive careers in building the new organization.

Each of these women deserves individual recognition, but two stand out for the scale of their contributions.

Patty Berg

Patty Berg was perhaps the most important organizational figure in the LPGA’s founding. She won 60 LPGA Tour events over her career — a total that ranks among the highest in tour history — but her significance extended well beyond her competitive record.

Berg was tireless in promoting women’s professional golf to sponsors, to media, and to the public. She gave clinics, made appearances, traveled constantly, and functioned as a one-woman marketing operation for the tour. She understood, before most of her contemporaries, that the LPGA’s survival depended not just on the quality of its golf but on its visibility and its relationship with the commercial world.

Her work in the early years of the LPGA was, in many respects, what made the organization survive long enough to become stable. The tour almost collapsed several times in its first decade. Berg’s relentless promotion was a significant reason it did not.

Babe Zaharias

Mildred Ella “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias is one of the most remarkable athletes in American history — in any sport, of any era, of either gender.

Before she turned her attention primarily to golf in the mid-1930s, Babe Zaharias had won two gold medals and one silver medal in track and field at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, set world records in javelin and hurdles, played competitive basketball, baseball, and tennis, and been named the greatest female athlete of the first half of the 20th century by the Associated Press.

She took up golf seriously in 1935, and within a few years was the best woman golfer in the world. She won the US Women’s Amateur in 1946, became the first American woman to win the British Ladies’ Amateur in 1947, and went on to win 41 LPGA Tour events after the tour’s founding in 1950 — including three US Women’s Open titles.

Zaharias brought to women’s golf what Arnold Palmer would later bring to the men’s game: a celebrity personality whose appeal extended beyond golf fans to the general public. She was funny, outspoken, physically spectacular, and genuinely compelling as a personality. Crowds came to watch Babe in a way they had never previously come to watch women’s golf.

Her death from cancer in 1956 at age 45 was a devastating blow to the LPGA — not just in terms of the competitive talent lost, but in terms of the star power and public visibility that she had provided. The tour spent years trying to fill the void her death created.

What the Founders Built

The LPGA that the thirteen founders created in 1950 was a genuinely remarkable institution. It was organized and governed by the players themselves — not by a commissioner, not by a television network, not by corporate sponsors. The players set the rules, managed the finances, recruited sponsors, and promoted the tour.

This was both a strength and a burden. The strength was that the organization was genuinely controlled by the people most invested in its success. The burden was that professional golfers are not necessarily skilled administrators, and the demands of running a professional tour while also playing competitive golf were, for many of the founders, genuinely unsustainable.

The administrative model gradually evolved over the years — a commissioner was eventually hired, corporate sponsorship became more central, and the governance structure professionalized. But the founding DNA of player ownership and player control remained a distinctive feature of the LPGA for decades.