Kathy Whitworth, who has died aged 83, won more US Professional Golf Association events than any golfer, a total of 88 between 1962 and 1985. At her peak, between 1965 and 1973, she was Ladies PGA player of the year seven times, the top money winner on the LPGA tour eight times, and seven times claimed the Vare trophy for the best scoring average.
She was the Associated Press’s female athlete of the year in 1965 and 1966, and in 1975, while still playing, was voted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. In 1981 she became the first woman to pass the $1m mark in prize money. Although she won “only” six majors, in her peak years there were only two or three tournaments designated as such; since 2012 there have been five. If her 10 wins in non-LPGA events are included, along with 93 runner-up positions, it can be argued that she was as dominant as any golfer in history.
Golf was not Whitworth’s first sport. Tall and athletic as a girl, she was at first a talented tennis player. She was born in Monahans, Texas, but grew up in Jal, New Mexico, where her father, Morris Whitworth, ran a hardware store. She was playing tennis in high school when some teammates took her golfing, and she found the difficulty of the new sport a challenge.
Her parents joined the local country club so she could take lessons with the club pro, and her promise was so evident that he referred her to Harvey Penick, a renowned pro teacher at the Austin (Texas) Country Club. Her mother, Dama (nee Robinson), would make the long drives with her.
In 1957, still 17, Kathy won the New Mexico state amateur championship; when she repeated her victory a year later, she dropped out of Odessa Junior College and, after her father, by now mayor of Jal, organised a syndicate to back her, joined the LPGA tour.
She struggled at first, and considered quitting, but instead in 1961 took time off to attend a six-week clinic run by the LPGA co-founder Patty Berg. She came back to place second four times, and in 1962 won her first tournament, the Kelly Girls Open (Kelly Girls was a secretarial temp service) in Maryland.
Her second win came in the Phoenix Thunderbird, by four strokes over Mickey Wright, then the dominant woman on the tour, and created a terrific rivalry between the two. Whitworth took her first major, the Titleholders (the women’s version of the Masters) in 1965, and repeated the achievement in 1966. The next year she won the Women’s Western Open and the LPGA Championship, which she would also win in 1971 and 1975.
Intense, and subject to self-criticism about her play, she went into a slump in the late 70s, which led her to return to Penick in 1981 to rebuild her game. The results were immediate; in 1982 she broke the now-retired Wright’s record of 82 wins, and in 1984 she won her 85th tournament to break Sam Snead’s men’s best of 84, which has since be revised downward to 82 and matched by Tiger Woods.
Six more wins followed, and Whitworth won her last tournament, the United Virginia Bank Classic, in 1985. In that year she and Wright teamed up in the Legends of Golf tournament, from which the women’s Seniors Tour grew. When the tournament organisers asked Whitworth to pair up with her old rival, she suggested they ask Wright first, knowing how she “loved the spotlight”. “We already have,” they replied, “and she said she’d play, but only with you.” The only women’s pair in the event, they hit off the men’s tees, which angered some of the male pros, and finished respectably in the middle of the pack.
Whitworth later worked as vice-president of the LPGA, and in 1990 published Golf for Women, written with Rhonda Glenn, a pioneering guide specifically for women. In that year she also served as captain of the USA team in the inaugural Solheim Cup, a female version of the men’s Ryder Cup, matching the USA versus Europe. The Americans won in Florida, and Whitworth captained them again in 1992 when they lost to Europe at Dalmahoy in Scotland.
Moving to Flower Mount, Texas, with her partner Bettye Odle, she stayed active with the LPGA. She retired in 2005, and in 2007 wrote Kathy Whitworth’s Little Book of Golf Wisdom (2015, written with Jay Golden), whose title was a tribute to Penick’s Little Red Book of Golf.
She is survived by Bettye.
• Kathrynne Anne Whitworth, golfer, born 27 September 1939; died 24 December 2022
