Marlene Hagge-Vossler, founding member of golfs LPGA Tour, dies at 89
Marlene Hagge-Vossler, a Hall of Fame golfer who was the last surviving founder of the LPGA Tour, died May 16 at a memory care facility in Rancho Mirage, Calif. She was 89.
The death was confirmed by Ms. Hagge-Vossler’s family but no cause was given. She had faced health problems over the past year following a fall.
Ms. Hagge-Vossler won 26 times on the LPGA Tour, including the 1956 LPGA Championship, and she was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2002. She was 15-year-old Marlene Bauer when she joined 12 other women — including her older sister, Alice Bauer — in signing incorporation papers in 1950 for the LPGA Tour.
The LPGA is now among the premier women’s sports associations in the world, with players this year competing for $100 million in prize money.
“Marlene will be missed dearly, but I can guarantee she’ll never be forgotten,” LPGA Commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan said. “She was an impressive athlete, a fiery competitor and at a young age showed women and girls that they could achieve greatness in all areas of life. We’re incredibly grateful for her contributions to the LPGA, women’s golf and women’s sports at large.”
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Among the founders she joined were Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Louise Suggs and Patty Berg. Ms. Hagge-Vossler was a star on and off the course, known as one of the “glamour girls” in the early days of the LPGA.
A year before the LPGA began, she won the U.S. Girls’ Junior Championship at age 15 and in 1949 was the youngest to be voted female athlete of the year by the Associated Press.
She won her first LPGA Tour event in the 1952 Sarasota Open. Her last win was in 1972 at the Burdine’s Invitational in Miami.
Marlene Bauer was born Feb. 16, 1934, in Eureka, S.D. Her family moved to California in her childhood.
She won the Long Beach City Boys Junior when she was 10. At age 13, she won the Los Angeles Women’s City Championship, the Palm Springs Women’s Championship and the Northern California Open. She was the youngest player to make the cut in the U.S. Women’s Open and finished eighth.
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“When I won the LA City Women’s championship in 1947 when I was 13, on the back of the scorecard it said, ‘No children under 14 are permitted on the course,’” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1987.
She married Bob Hagge in 1955, shortly after he was divorced from her sister Alice. They divorced in 1964 and she married former PGA Tour pro Ernie Vossler in 1995. Vossler died in 2013. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Washington Post staff contributed to this report.
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