The Founders Cup and the Women Who Built the LPGA

There are some tournaments that matter because of the leaderboard, others because of the golf course, and still others because of the names they attract.

The Founders Cup matters for a deeper reason.

This week’s Fortinet Founders Cup, being played at Sharon Heights Golf & Country Club in Menlo Park, California, is an event that exists to celebrate the 13 women who founded the LPGA in 1950. In a sport that can sometimes move too quickly past its own origins, that makes this tournament one of the most meaningful weeks on the calendar.

That origin story is worth lingering over.

The LPGA was not handed to its founders in polished form. It did not begin as the finished, global tour we know today. It began with 13 women who believed women’s professional golf deserved more than scattered opportunities and second-tier attention. The LPGA’s own history identifies those founders as Alice Bauer, Patty Berg, Bettye Danoff, Helen Dettweiler, Marlene Bauer Hagge, Helen Hicks, Opal Hill, Betty Jameson, Sally Sessions, Marilynn Smith, Shirley Spork, Louise Suggs and Babe Zaharias.

That list reads like a roll call of nerve, talent and conviction.

They were not just players. They were promoters, recruiters, salespeople, ambassadors and, when needed, laborers. Beth Daniel once recalled that the founders would arrive on Monday and put ropes around the tees and greens themselves. It is a wonderful image because it strips the story down to its truth. These women were not simply competing inside a tour. They were building one with their own hands.

That is why the Founders Cup has always felt different.

Most tournaments ask us to admire performance. The Founders Cup asks us to remember effort. It reminds us that the women playing for titles, money and points today are also the beneficiaries of a far older kind of courage — the courage required to create a professional path where almost none existed before. The tournament’s whole reason for being is built around that act of remembrance.

And no founder embodies that bridge between star power and structural importance more vividly than Babe Didrikson Zaharias.

Babe was already one of the most famous female athletes in America before the LPGA formally came together, and her presence gave women’s golf credibility, visibility and electricity. Long before the tour was established, she had already built a résumé that demanded attention. She won the 1946 U.S. Women’s Amateur, and four years later stood among the LPGA’s founding members. In that sense, she was not just a great player who happened to be there at the beginning. She was one of the reasons the beginning carried such force.

But the story is larger than any one name, even Babe’s.

Patty Berg brought leadership. Louise Suggs brought edge and brilliance. Betty Jameson brought vision. Marilynn Smith and Shirley Spork helped extend the tour’s reach and staying power. Opal Hill, Helen Hicks and the others helped turn possibility into routine, and routine into institution. Today, it is easy to see the LPGA as established. Back then, established was exactly what they were trying to become.  

That is part of what makes golf history so compelling when it is told honestly. The game’s most important stories are not always about the biggest trophies. Sometimes they are about the people who made trophies worth chasing in the first place.

The Founders Cup gives the LPGA a chance to say that clearly every year. It tells players, fans and anyone paying close attention that the tour did not spring up fully formed. It was imagined, argued for, carried and sustained by women who were talented enough to compete and stubborn enough to insist the sport make room for them.

So yes, this week’s golf at Sharon Heights will matter. There will be contenders, momentum swings, pressure putts and all the usual ingredients of tournament golf. But the best thing about the Founders Cup is that the tournament never lets the present completely crowd out the past.

It asks the game to pause, just for a moment, and remember the women who built the road everyone else now gets to travel.

That is not a side note to LPGA history.

It is the center of it.

Note: Founder Shirley Spork was a long time GHS member and collector of golf memorabilia. You can see her interview in the GHS Zoom series HERE.