One interview has played in the back of my mind all year. Conversations with legends tend to have that effect. Not enough people in golf know the name Shirley Spork, the 94-year-old LPGA founder who helped create the tour’s Teaching and Club Professionals division.
Spork arrived at Mission Hills Country Club last March during the ANA Inspiration looking rather spring-like in her lavender ensemble, topped off with a delightful woven sun hat adorned with indigo flowers. Spork brought a bag of Jelly Beans to the interview as a gift because she’s a thoughtful pro who knows that one is never too old for Easter candy.
“I am six weeks from 94 and some days I feel about 60,” she said, “and some days I do feel 94. My intelligence of the golf swing, I’ve been very fortunate to teach golf for seven decades. Every 10-year span the methodology has changed.”
She recalled UCLA conducting a test in the 1950s at the LA Open where they put meat scales in the ground and piled turf on top to measure the player’s weight shift.
In 1959, Spork and fellow LPGA founder Marilynn Smith went to the Ryder Cup at Eldorado Country Club in Indian Wells, California, to watch the male pros take divots. The women had only been taught to “sweep, sweep, sweep.”
When asked to talk about her favorite swings, the conversation immediately turned to the late great Mickey Wright, who was taught by Harry Pressler to use her legs in the golf swing and stay down through it. Spork admired Wright’s consistency and the fact that she never overswung.
“With the full swing of the driver, her hands were level to her ear,” said Spork, “they were never up here or over there. You could stick her finger in her ear.”
Professional golfer and co-founder of the LPGA, Shirley Spork stands on the first tee box during competition rounds of the Solheim Cup at Inverness Club. (Photo: Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports)
Spork appreciates the compact, controlled swing of Hall of Famer Inbee Park, which she says has gotten more refined over the years, calling it the “perfect golf swing for her.”
Good teachers individualize.
“If you have a set message that’s A-B-C and you want everybody to be A-B-C,” she said, “I don’t think that’s the best way.”
Good students practice.
“If you understand what you’re trying to do,” she said, “you have the possibility of allowing it to happen. But we live in a cyber world where it’s boom, boom, boom. They want instant.
“Mrs. Woodington Wells III is going to learn to play golf and she wants six lessons and to go out and play. I said ‘You know, to learn the game of golf, you have to take one year to understand what you’re doing, and the rest of your life to let it happen.”
Spork still gives lessons from time to time at Monterey Country Club, a 27-hole community in Palm Desert with 1,200 condominiums. In some cases, she has taught three generations of the same family. Many come in the winter for a tune-up. Spork has lived in the desert since the 1950s.
The best interviews with golf legends always end up with the subject giving a demonstration with a fork or a pen. Spork was explaining the root cause of thumb injuries on tour when she asked yours truly to grip a pen.
“Are you left-handed?” she asked. “Did you ever play left-handed? Did you ever try?”
(The answers are yes and no.)
Gary Wiren, she said, emphasized that instructors should watch a left-handed person rotate both ways to see which is the easiest.
“When I was in high school,” she said, “I used to play with a priest, and every time I got 2 up he made me play with his clubs, which were left-handed.”
When Spork taught groups of teachers, she’d often have them go to the range and hit balls from the opposite side so they could remember for a few moments the awkward struggle that beginning students feel.
Those who are left-handed and play from the right side are the hardest to teach, she said. (Yikes!)
“Any book that Tommy Armour ever wrote, he always said ‘Hit the hell out of it with your right hand,’ ” she said. “He was left-handed and couldn’t hit it himself, so he always talked about that.”
That was a light-bulb moment for yours truly and a conversation that has been on replay ever since at the range.
Shirley Spork, one of the founders of the LPGA, watches as her putt slides past the hole during a pro-am at the RR Donnelley Founders Cup in Phoenix.
This is a woman who turned professional because Babe Zaharias turned to her one day and said “Kid, why don’t you turn pro? We need players out here.” Spork would go on to become one of the LPGA’s 13 founders and one of the most important teachers in the game. Hopefully, the tour does the right thing and soon puts Spork, along with every other LPGA founder, into its own Hall of Fame.
“Golf is a game that in four and a half hours you’re a star; you’re a bum; you’re average,” she said. “In 18 holes, you’re all those things. Golf is not a game of perfect, it’s a game of playable misses.”
Where the lessons, thankfully, never end.