Marlene Hagge: Bio of LPGA Founder, 5-Decade Player
Date of birth: February 16, 1934
Place of birth: Eureka, South Dakota
Date and place of death: May 16, 2023, in Rancho Mirage, California
Also known as: She first gained fame under her maiden name, Marlene Bauer. After her first marriage, she went by Marlene Hagge, and "Hagge" remained part of her name for the rest of her life. (In articles, she was sometimes called Marlene Bauer Hagge.) Following a later marriage, she went by Marlene Hagge-Vossler.
Nickname: Gremlin, often shortened to "Grem." (A nickname she was given early in her LPGA career, decades before the movie Gremlins changed our conception of the term, it was a reference to the term's original meaning, something along the lines of "mischievous sprite.")
Her Biggest Wins
Marlene Bauer Hagge is credited with 26 victories in official LPGA Tour tournaments. That total is in the Top 25 on the list of golfers with the most LPGA wins. This is a list of those wins:- 1952 Sarasota Open
- 1952 Bakersfield Open (tie with Betty Jameson, Betsy Rawls, Babe Zaharias)
- 1954 New Orleans Open
- 1956 Sea Island Open
- 1956 Babe Zaharias Open
- 1956 Pittsburgh Open
- 1956 Triangle Round Robin
- 1956 LPGA Championship
- 1956 World Championship
- 1956 Denver Open
- 1956 Clock Open
- 1957 Babe Zaharias Open
- 1957 Lawton Open
- 1958 Lake Worth Open Invitational
- 1958 Land of Sky Open
- 1959 Mayfair Open
- 1959 Hoosier Open
- 1963 Sight Open
- 1964 Mickey Wright Invitational
- 1965 Babe Zaharias Open
- 1965 Milwaukee Open
- 1965 Phoenix Thunderbirds Open
- 1965 LPGA Tall City Open
- 1965 Alamo Open
- 1969 Stroh's-WBLY Open
- 1972 Burdine's Invitational
- 1949 U.S. Girls' Junior
In the Majors
Hagge won one major championship, had a few runner-up finishes plus a slew of Top 10s in the 1950s and 1960s.Her major championship win was in the 1956 LPGA Championship (now known as the Women's PGA Championship). Aged 22, Hagge held or shared the lead following each round of the tournament. After the final round, that lead was shared with Patty Berg after both scored final-round 76s to post 291. They finished five strokes ahead of the nearest competitor.
Hagge and Berg (who still holds the LPGA record for most wins in majors) went into a sudden-death playoff. Hagge bogeyed the first extra hole, but Berg double-bogeyed it to give Hagge the win. In her title defense at the 1957 LPGA Championship, Hagge tied for third place.
Hagge had two runner-up finishes in other majors, one before her LPGA victory and one after. In the 1952 U.S. Women's Open, when she was just 18 years old, Hagge tied Betty Jameson for second, albeit seven strokes behind Louise Suggs. And in the 1965 Women's Western Open, Hagge had a two-stroke lead over Susie Maxwell entering the final round. But she scored 74 to Maxwell's 69 and Maxwell won by three.
At the 1956 U.S. Women's Open, Hagge tied third, finishing one stroke out of a playoff. In the 1969 LPGA Championship, she was the co-leader with Carol Mann following the third round. But Hagge struggled to a 79 in the final round and finished fourth, five back of Betsy Rawls.
The U.S. Women's Open was founded in 1946, and Hagge (then Marlene Bauer) first played it that year as a 12-year-old. She held the record as the tournament's youngest competitor until 1967. A year later, at age 13, Hagge made the cut in the 1947 USWO, setting a tournament record she still holds today as youngest to make the cut.
Also in the U.S. Women's Open, in addition to finishes already mentioned, Hagge tied third in 1959 and 1960, tied fourth in 1951, tied sixth in 1949 (as an amateur) and 1950, and tied eighth in 1962. Hagge ultimately played in the USWO a total of 33 times, another tournament record she still holds today.
In the LPGA Championship, in addition to the ones already mentioned, Hagge tied third in 1957 and 1972, was solo fifth in 1959, tied seventh in 1965, tied eighth in 1964 and tied 10th in 1960.
Hagge still holds a couple Women's PGA Championship records today, too: most appearances, 35; and most consecutive starts in tournament, 30 (every one from 1956 through 1985).
More About Marlene Bauer Hagge
Marlene Bauer was just 15 years old when she and 12 other golfers, including her older sister Alice Bauer, signed incorporation papers to create the LPGA Tour. That was in 1950. And this golfer wasn't finished playing on the LPGA Tour until five decades later, in the 1990s.
Long celebrated for being one those 13 "LPGA Founders," Hagge's long career including many wins. And in those earliest years, she was one of the LPGA's biggest draws. Often called one of the tour's first "glamour girls," Hagge, the LPGA has stated, was a "player who brought a splash of California glamour to the LPGA Tour."
Golf journalist Ron Sirak described her impact his way: "As a Founder, a champion and tireless promoter of the LPGA, she was truly one of the game’s faces during golf’s period of greatest growth."
How did a 15-year-old wind up in a room full of adults, helping launch the LPGA in 1950? Marlene was there because the Bauer sisters were already famous. Their father, a golf pro named Dave Bauer, started both in golf when each was three years old. When Marlene was just a few years older than that, their father was booking golf exhibition tours for "The Bauer Sisters."
Born in South Dakota, Marlene grew up in Aberdeen, S.D., where her father ran the golf course. But when she was 10, the family moved to California, where her father figured they'd find better business opportunities.
And they did. The Bauer sisters, and especially the pixieish Marlene, were famous by the mid-1940s, several years before they helped launch the LPGA. But it wasn't just the exhibitions that brought Marlene attention. She was winning golf tournaments by age 10, including the Long Beach (Ca.) City Boys Junior tournament.
In 1947, at age 13, Marlene won the Western Junior Amateur, the second-biggest title for junior girls at the time. And in the 1947 U.S. Women's Open (the second one ever staged), she tied for eighth place. (As noted above, Hagge still holds the record as youngest to make the cut in the USWO.) It was a big year for little Marlene as she also took titles in the Northern California Open, and the women's city championships of both Los Angeles and Palm Springs.
In 1949, the year she won the U.S. Girls' Junior, she was named the Female Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press. For winning the U.S. Girls' Junior, Bauer was presented the Glenna Collett Vare Trophy. A few weeks later in the 1949 U.S. Women's Amateur, she beat Vare in the second round and advanced to the semifinals before losing. Bauer won her quarterfinal match by a score of 8 and 7, which remains tied for that tournament's largest quarterfinal margin of victory.
So it makes complete sense why 15-year-old Marlene Bauer was included in that 1950 meeting that solidified the creation of the LPGA Tour. She turned 16 about a month and half into the LPGA's Year 1. Her first runner-up finish on the tour was the following year at the 1951 Ponte Vedra Beach Women's Open to Babe Zaharias. (Hagge would later win the Babe Zaharias Open three times.)
In 1952, Marlene earned her first LPGA victory at the Sarasota Open. She was 14 days past her 18th birthday, establishing a record for the youngest winner on the LPGA Tour. And that record stood all the way until 2011.
She won twice in 1952, and almost won twice more in 1954. She did win the 1954 New Orleans Open, but lost in a playoff to Louise Suggs in the Betsy Rawls Open.
By 1956, Marlene Bauer had become Marlene Hagge, and 1956 was Hagge's breakout year as a tour winner. She claimed eight victories that year, including what would be her lone major championship title at the LPGA Championship. Hagge started the year off right by winning the first tournament on the schedule, the Sea Island Open, in a playoff against Mary Lena Faulk and Joyce Ziske. Other victories included the first of her three Babe Zaharias Open victories, plus the World Championship at Tam O'Shanter.
In the 1956 Clock Open, Hagge beat Ziske in another playoff, but in the Dallas Open she lost a playoff to Patty Berg. She ended the year as the leading money winner (and the first LPGA player to top $20,000 in single-season earnings) and the Player of the Year.
And in the 1956 Pittsburgh Open, the Bauer sisters finished 1-2 (Marlene first, Alice second), the only title that happened on the LPGA Tour. But it happened at what was likely a low point in the sisters' relationship.
Alice Bauer married Bob Hagge in 1952. After several years of unhappiness, Alice divorced Bob in 1955. By that time, the LPGA gossip mill was churning with talk about how Alice's husband had been spending more time with Marlene than with Alice. And Marlene married Bob Hagge later in the same year in which Alice divorced him.
It caused a schism in the Bauer family. The Associated Press quoted the sisters' father saying, "I wouldn't allow Bob in the yard now. Since she (Marlene) is married to him that would include her."
But Marlene and Alice eventually repaired their relationship. (Marlene divorced Bob Hagge in 1964. He eventually began using the name Robert von Hagge and became a very well-known golf course designer.)
Marlene Hagge closed out the 1950s by winning twice each in 1957, 1958 and 1959. Those victories included a playoff win over Jo Ann Prentice in the 1958 Land of Sky Open. Also in 1958, Hagge appeared as the mystery guest (whose identity the panelists had to guess) in the game show, To Tell the Truth.
She was winless for several seasons before getting back on the board at the 1963 Sight Open, where she beat runner-up Mickey Wright by nine strokes. At the Muskogee Civitan Open that year, though, Wright bested Hagge in a playoff. Then Hagge won the 1964 Mickey Wright Invitational. (Wright, in her 1962 book Play Golf the Wright Way, called Hagge "one of the finest women putters.")
Her last big year was 1965, when Hagge won five times, was runner-up five times, and finished second on the season money list. At the 1965 Babe Zaharias Open, Hagge won in a playoff against Clifford Ann Creed and Carol Mann. One of her second-place finishes was a playoff loss to Sandra Haynie at the Cosmopolitan Open. Late in the 1965 season, Hagge won three tournaments in a four-week span: the Phoenix Thunderbirds Open, LPGA Tall City Open and Alamo Open.
The wins thinned out considerably for Hagge after that, in fact she had only two more on the LPGA Tour. She got into a playoff in the 1968 Gino Paoli Open, but fell to Kathy Whitworth. Then Hagge won in 1969 at the Stroh's WBLY Open.
She was runner-up twice in 1971. During the 1971 Buick Open, Hagge scored 29 over one of her nines — the first sub-30 score for a front nine or back nine in LPGA history. The record was tied in 1975, but nobody had a lower 9-hole score on the LPGA Tour until 1984.
Hagge's last win was at the 1972 season-opener, the Burdines Invitational. She had been on the tour for what seemed like her whole life, and for literally the LPGA's whole life, but was still only 38 years old.
Later in 1972 Hagge was runner-up in the Quality First Classic. And her final second-place finish was at the 1973 Orange Blossom Classic.
In addition to money-list finishes already mentioned, Hagge finished fifth in 1965. And although the wins slowed down and finally stopped as the 1970s dawned, she remained among the frequent contenders, as her season-ending money-list rankings from 1966 through 1973 show: 15th, 22nd, 22nd, 15th, 24th, 10th, 11th and 16th, respectively. After the 1973 season, Hagge was sixth on the LPGA's career money list.
She dropped out of the Top 25 on the season money list in 1974, rebounded to 24th in 1976, but continued falling after that. She still played 20 or more tournaments a year (sometimes more than 30) every year but one through 1990, and she continued playing a handful of tournaments each year after that until completely retiring from tournament play in 1996.
Over her long career, Hagge also served in official roles for the tour's administration. She was an LPGA treasurer, its vice president, and served on the tournament committee and pairings committee. Hagge she also earned a reputation — from her earliest days on tour to her last — of being a very nice person and a very helpful fellow pro, especially to younger players and rookies.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when LPGA players often traveled together over long car rides to shared hotel rooms, she was known for her great cooking. And for being a very fast driver. Many fellow pros rode with her, but some only rode with her once.
Hagge married former PGA Tour winner Ernie Vossler in 1995, and they were married until he died in 2013. When LPGA founder Shirley Spork died in 2022, Hagge became he last living member of the LPGA's "Original 13." Her own death followed little more than a year later, at age 89 in 2023.
Marlene Bauer Hagge is a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, the LPGA Hall of Fame, the South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame and South Dakota Golf Hall of Fame.
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(Book titles are affiliate links; commissions earned)
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