Loma Smith, Two-time USGA Senior Women's Amateur Champion, Dies


June 28, 2006

By Rhonda Glenn, USGA

Loma Smith, 92, an all-around athlete who won the USGA Senior Women's Amateur Championship in 1964 and 1965, died June 21 in Pebble Beach, Calif.

Smith was runner-up in the championship in 1967 and 1968.  She was a former California State Senior Women's Champion and won the Southern California Women's title in 1959.  She was an eight-time club champion at Monterey Peninsula Country Club and won the Annandale Country Club (Pasadena, Calif.) title three times.

But Smith excelled in other sports.  She was a four-time United States Singles Champion in badminton and won the doubles title seven times.  She was a member of the National Badminton Hall of Fame.

In 1928 she was the California State Ping Pong Champion and, at the age of 15, was runner-up to Alice Marble in the National Hardcourt Tennis Championship.

As Dennis Taylor wrote Wednesday in the Monterey (Calif.) Herald: "Loma was a tennis player -- not a golfer -- when she married Hulet Smith in 1941, and said she tried golf 'under protest' after reading a manual for new brides entitled, 'How to be a Good Wife.' Lesson No. 1, she said, was 'Do the things your husband likes to do.'"

Loma Smith became a student of the game, taking golf lessons from noted instructors Mike Mura and Paul Runyan.

She won her first USGA title at Del Paso Country Club in Sacramento, Calif., firing 247 in three rounds of stroke play.  She successfully defended in 1965 at Exmoor Country Club in Highland Park, Ill., shooting 242.

She had recorded 11 holes-in-one in her career.