Shirley Spork, Teaching Pro and a Founder of the L.P.G.A., Dies at 94

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Shirley Spork was born on May 14, 1927, in Detroit, where her father was an electrical engineer and her mother was a clerk in a pharmacy. Her parents didn’t golf, but the family home was adjacent to the Bonnie Brook Golf Course.

At age 11, Spork began scaling a high stone wall separating the fairways from the street during the evening hours, scooping up lost balls and selling them to people passing by. When she was 13, she used her earnings to buy a putter and a 7 iron and began hitting balls on the neighborhood course late in the day.

“There were no junior golf programs, so the only way I learned was by going on the golf course and playing it myself,” she said in an interview for the L.P.G.A. Women’s Network website in 2018. “The golf ranger would come around and scurry me away, but that didn’t keep me away from the golf course for too long.”

Spork, the runner-up four strokes behind Judy Kimball at the 1962 L.P.G.A. Championship in Las Vegas, won $82,720 in career prize money. She usually confined her tournament play to the summer while teaching during the winter at country clubs, most of them in California.

She founded the Shirley Spork L.P.G.A. Masters Pro-Am at the Palm Valley Country Club in Palm Desert, Calif., in 2016, with part of the proceeds benefiting the Eastern Michigan University women’s golf program. Eastern Michigan inaugurated the Shirley Spork Invitational in 2017, hosting leading women’s players from Midwestern colleges.

Spork told of her favorite instructional story in her memoir, “From Green to Tee,” with contributions by Nancy Bannon and Connie Kuber (2017).

She recalled her experience playing in Scotland in 1951 and giving an exhibition at St. Andrews.

“I was invited into the clubhouse; the first woman ever in the clubhouse,” she wrote. “And then going into the boardroom and standing on the table and giving a pitching wedge lesson.”

Christine Chung contributed reporting.