Patty Berg’s Visit Turns Back The Years

Her trademark flame-red hair is now the color of clean snow. She is stoop-shouldered, arthritic and somewhat frail.

All that is quite understandable for a woman five months shy of turning 80.

But the tempered steel is still there in blue eyes that pierce steadily from behind her glasses. Her wit is still as true as a 3-wood hit dead center.

A few minutes with this living golf legend makes me wonder if she couldn’t step back onto the lush Spokane Country Club course and again shoot par, only this time using her metal cane for a club.

Nothing would surprise me about Patty Berg - who captured the very first U.S. Women’s Open golf championship right here.

Sadly, too many of us have forgotten about Berg. Ditto Spokane’s pioneer role in women’s golf.

But in 1946, the city’s once-powerful Athletic Round Table arranged to have the maiden national women’s championship held on the posh country club links.

Berg never forgot her stay here.

She was fast on her way to becoming one of the greatest women athletes back then. The 5-foot-2 Berg beat her famous friend, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and a field of the game’s best pros.

“I think all the girls who played with me never forgot this course. It is one of the most beautiful I ever played on,” says Berg, who returned to the Spokane Country Club this weekend to help kick off the Washington Senior Women’s Tournament.

Playing here was no cakewalk. Women in those days shot from the men’s tees and Berg still managed to post a 72 and a 73 to win. “I think I played 180 holes in all,” she says. “I was so tired I took a train home and slept all the way to Minneapolis.”

Meeting Patty Berg is the women’s golf equivalent of meeting a Ty Cobb or a Babe Ruth. The difference is that those two lugs never gave back to baseball what Berg gave back to golf.

This feisty, tenacious athlete was more than just great.

She won 28 amateur championships and 57 professional championships. Of those 85 wins, 15 were major titles.

She was the leading money winner three times and three times won the prestigious Vare Trophy for low scoring average.

She co-founded the Ladies Professional Golf Association in 1949 and served as its first president. As a Wilson Sporting Goods staffer, Berg conducted well over 10,000 golf clinics. Thousands of young athletes, girls and boys, have been drawn to golf thanks to Patty Berg.

In 1974, Berg and Didrikson were the only two women pros inducted into the newly formed World Golf Hall of Fame.

Six years later, at the first Women’s Sports Hall of Fame banquet, Berg was inducted with the likes of Amelia Earhart, Didrikson and Althea Gibson.

So how does a Minneapolis girl born in 1918 make her way to the heights of golf?

“I played football with the boys before I ever learned how to play golf,” she says matter-of-factly, as if all girls growing up in the 1930s played quarterback and were nicknamed Dynamite.

Berg grins. “We called ourselves the 50th Street Tigers. We never lost a game. Just teeth.”

The Tigers’ undefeated record was no doubt helped by the presence of a kid named Bud Wilkinson. He played tackle on 50th Street long before becoming the famed head coach for the Oklahoma Sooners.

Grudgingly realizing that her gender would deny her a career on the gridiron, Berg turned to golf. It happened one day when she stole a club from her father’s bag.

Herman Berg returned home to find that his 13-year-old tomboy daughter had hacked up the flower bed and much of the yard. Instead of getting mad, the wise man appreciated the power in her strokes and signed her up for lessons.

Two years later she won the Minneapolis City Championship. The former 50th Street Tiger was on her way.

“I like to think I’ve played as many clinics and exhibitions as I have freckles and I’ve got a million of those,” says the amazing Berg.

“But I enjoyed every second of it. I don’t think you ever get tired of something you love.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo