Louise Suggs
by Susan Hafner
 When asked if she would grant an interview for Tee Time, 77 year old Louise Suggs gave me her famous long stare, pondered for a moment as if over a game-winning putt, and said, “Call my room tomorrow at the hotel and we’ll pick a place to meet.”
Just that simple. One of golf’s greatest female Hall of Fame legends offered her observations and opinions in the midst of the 50th anniversary celebration of the LPGA at the World Golf Village in St. Augustine, Florida in October, 2000. While other co-founders, Hall of Famers, tour players, teaching professionals, and amateur golfers milled and chatted around us, “Miss Sluggs” held court. As her nickname suggests, Louise Suggs could hit golf balls a very long way in her heyday. A native of Atlanta, Suggs turned professional in 1948 and won the respect and admiration of golf fans everywhere with her classic swing and on-course concentration. She garnered 58 career victories, of which 11 were major titles. Bob Hope nicknamed her “Miss Sluggs” at a charity event after he witnessed her mammoth drives off successive tees.
Her career spanned the early years of the LPGA, but she continued to play in LPGA events until 1984 and Senior Challenge events until 1997. Suggs has won the Vare Trophy (1957), been inducted into the LPGA Tour Hall of Fame (1967), served as president of the LPGA three times, set scoring records at numerous tournaments, and turned to teaching after her tour days ended. Recently she won the 2000 Patty Berg award, a coveted prize given to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to women’s golf. Yet many people have never heard of her.
I reminded her of a Golf Channel interview with Peter Kessler a year or two ago when she told him that if it weren’t for the 50th anniversary celebration publicity, no one would know who she was.
Does she still feel that way?
“Not now! Everything this year has busted loose actually. It has been a very rewarding year….very insightful. More people have learned about us co-founders and how the whole thing (LPGA) started. Most of these youngsters just thought that the Tour fell out of the sky. They didn’t realize that human beings were behind all of it starting. They are so much younger than we are.”
The early years
Louise got her own start as a youngster with a father who owned a couple golf courses outside Atlanta. In those days, the courses were quite a distance from the city, and the young Suggs “with nothing else to do” picked up a club at age ten and started hitting golf balls. Her father, the head pro, paid no attention to her, but when she was 13 or 14, her game caught the eye of the women’s state champion at the time, Martha Daniel, who watched her hit and played a few holes with her. “Who is that kid out there?” She asked Suggs’ father. “I think you better do something with her—you’ve got a champion on your hands!” Her father also owned a baseball club in the area, and Suggs credits her athletic ability to his influence and her surroundings as a child. “He gave me a lot of common sense and taught me how to conduct myself.”
The good old days
How did fans treat her in the early days of her career? Were they different from today’s galleries? “The people who followed you in those days were true golf fans. They walked with us in the fairways. They were as close to me as you are right now. There were times when I had a fairly short pitch shot to the green when I’d never see the ball hit the green because the gallery would close in front of me.
“One time in Virginia Beach when it had been pouring rain, and I was at a par-3… we weren’t playing the embedded ball rule that day; didn’t think about it, I guess. My ball embedded about a foot and a half off the green in the fringe. We were allowed to lift and clean because of the rain, but they forgot about the embedded ball rule. I picked it up—it had a big hunk of mud on it—cleaned it, and put it back in the hole where it was. A man in the gallery said ‘What did you do that for?’ and I said because that’s the rules of golf, otherwise I’d be cheating. He said ‘I wouldn’t have stuck it back in the hole’ and I said, well, that’s the difference between us! You get what you pay for sometimes, because I almost holed the next shot. I half-topped it, but it rolled very close to the hole. When I finished, I walked back by that guy and said ‘See?’ Think I taught him a lesson too, right there!”
The most significant victories for Suggs were the US National Women’s Amateur title (1947) and being on the Curtis Cup team (1948). Memories come clearly to 77 year old Suggs, who recalled the ship journey to England that year for the Curtis Cup and the career changes that followed. “Over there we won our Cup matches and I won the British Amateur. By this time the manufacturers, who decided that women’s golf might be the coming thing… Wilson and Spalding had several women on their staffs, and they were after me to turn pro. My dad advised me to go with a company that had no women on staff because I would be in a senior position, so I went with MacGregor. In those days, we traveled all over the country giving exhibitions and clinics at clubs, driving ranges. Wherever the company sent us, we went.”
Did she enjoy this job? For a young woman to be traveling about the country, alone for the most part, was most unusual. Suggs’ father was fine with it, but her mother “took to the bed with the vapors.”
 “When you grow up around a golf course, you get used to anything and everything,” Suggs explained. “I wasn’t sheltered, but I wasn’t a big talker either, like I am now!”
When asked about her quiet, business-like demeanor on the course, Suggs noted that she considers the golf course “my office.” She was appalled by some of the displays and showy exhibitions put on by some of her contemporaries, who wanted to call attention to women’s golf in any way possible.
“ I was very upset by some of the stuff Babe [Zaharias] did. We all had personalities, but Babe was a showman. No other way to describe it. We all had to get along, though.”
What was it like playing with Patty Berg?
“We weren’t real good friends, but we were friends in a business sense. We weren’t personally involved. We didn’t share secrets and things like that. I would spend time with my family and people that I grew up with. There are very few people I can think of (on the Tour) who played golf and were truly ‘buddy-buddy’.”
Still playing golf today
Nowadays Suggs teaches part time at Sea Island, Georgia, where she lives part of the year. She will play a few holes occasionally, but can’t stand up for long periods anymore and refuses to sit in a chair!
“Sometimes I get in the middle of my backswing and can’t finish it. Which is why I won’t play a full round anymore.”
Other sources have reported that Suggs is also a member at a club in Boynton Beach, Florida, where she sometimes plays against fellow members JoAnne Carner, Beth Daniel, Meg Mallon, and Karrie Webb. Carner has said publicly that Suggs is just as competitive as ever, and all she wants to do is beat her opponent. The burning desire is still there, no matter what her age. Where is the LPGA going and is it in the right direction?
“It can’t go anywhere but up. Hopefully! But Leslie [King, LPGA’s Director of Communications] and I were talking the other day about the need to get more of the players involved with the media somehow. I would hope that the media would make the LPGA more of a top priority. I might get shot down for this, but the golf writers like we used to have, like O.B. Keeler, Grantland Rice, Red Smith… writers who really knew golf…They walked with us on the courses and they asked golf questions. They didn’t get into personal lives. There was no television in those days and as a result no footage of many of the tournaments. We (the LPGA) need more exposure and interaction with the media.”
I asked what Louise thought of the golf TV coverage today and her opinions of the current broadcasters. Are they knowledgeable?
“Some of them are. I think Judy Rankin does a hell of a job. She doesn’t back down and says it like it is. I don’t like the editorializing that some do, stating (what a certain player) is going to do, what shot he is going to hit. What the hell do they know what’s in the player’s mind?”
Words of wisdom for the rest of us
For high handicappers and weekend players, Suggs didn’t have to think twice to offer a key piece of advice:
“Always get somebody to check your grip. That’s the only thing that’s hanging on to the club. If your grip’s no good, it doesn’t make any difference what you do—you’ll never hit the ball properly. Grip size is important too- can’t be too large or too small. If it’s correct, you’ve got it made.”
 Susan Hafner is a frequent contributor to Tee Time. Besides playing golf, she enjoys writing about it. She is a published author, with various interviews, feature stories, travel articles, and short fiction to her credit.
A native of Ohio, Susan has a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s in student personnel. She is working on a novel about women’s golf. Her dream is to write full time for a golf magazine and be able to hit her driver 200 yards, every time.
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