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Wright won everything in the game before retiring at 34, suffering from burnoutMickey Wright was the only golfer,
male or female, that the great Ben Ho-
gan said he would pay to see. She had,
he said, “the most beautiful backswing I
ever saw”. He also admired the slow and
graceful way she would drive with her
lower body through the hip, keeping
her weight in her heels, while shuffling
her feet like Lee Trevino. When she
made contact with the ball it went high,
much higher than most players at the
time were able to make it go.
Wright played for the love of the
game, not money, for longer than any
other female golfer of her era, winning
13 major titles between 1958 and 1966.
She is the only woman in the history of
the Ladies Professional Golf Associa-
tion (LPGA) to hold all four majors at
the same time.
Usually bespectacled and often
sporting Bermuda shorts, she would
negotiate the 18 holes with a quiet, re-
lentless rhythm. “At my best,” she said,
“I would go into what I called a ‘fog’. It
was a mental state where I could con-
centrate really well and play with a
greater confidence than usual.”
Wright joined the LPGA in 1955 and
would win 82 events in all. She was in-
trospective and obsessive about prac-
tice and was renowned for her gra-
ciousness off the course, unless jour-
nalists called her the “female Arnold
Palmer”. “I have a classic swing. His is
all wrong,” she once declared. “He’s just
lucky he’s strong as an ox.”
Mary Kathryn Wright was born in
1935 in San Diego, California, the
daughter of Arthur Wright, an attor-
ney, and Kathryn Kline, a housewife.
She attended Herbert Hoover High
School, where she was known as
“Moose” because she was tall and
gawky. Traumatised by the teasing, she
focused on golf to prove that she was
good at something. Her father, who had
introduced her to the game when she
was four, was her greatest critic, con-
stantly motivating her to improve. “He
never told me he thought I’d done well
until it was all over,” she later recalled.
Her first coach, Johnny Bellante,
broke off the limb of a eucalyptus tree
and handed it to her. “He told me ‘I
want you to make this branch sing’. To
make a loud noise when I swished the
club, distance-wise, for making par, hit-
ting both my tee shots and approaches
with that one club. The 5-iron was too
much, the 7-iron not enough. One day,
it broke. The head flew off, and for some
reason it couldn’t be repaired. That was
a sad day.” It became a museum piece.
Practice remained her mantra. “I am
always working on something,” she told
Golf Digest. “Set-up, ball position,
weight distribution, mainly. The funda-
mentals. How far I stand from the ball,
the first moves of the takeaway. That’s
where the joy comes from, in identify-
ing problems and then fixing them.”
Wright retired from full-time golf at
the age of 34 in 1969 partly because of
problems with her feet, but also
through exhaustion. She disliked turn-
ing down any event. She also found the
pressure of being the best hard to bear.
“The press can be very brutal,” she said.
“If you don’t win, if you come in second
or third, there are comments such as,
‘What happened to you? Is your game
falling apart? Are you over the hill?’
This bothered me very much.”
She did compete occasionally after
that and, based in latter years in Port St
Lucie, Florida, would play for fun. She
never married.
Her clubs are on permanent display
at the United States Golf Association
Museum. The Mickey Wright Room
also features trophies, photographs,
clothing and films. She became only the
fourth player, and the first woman, to be
so honoured, alongside Hogan, Bobby
Jones and Arnold Palmer.
“I still love swinging a club more than
just about anything,” she said in old age.
“For years after my last competitive
appearance in 1995, I’d hit balls from
my porch. When the Mickey Wright
Room was formed in 2011 and needed a
few mementos, I sent my little swatch of
synthetic turf. I hit balls off it for one
last time and figured that was it. Then
some good friends of mine in Indiana
heard about this and sent me a brand-
new practice mat. So I keep my hand in,
five or six balls at a time. Just enough to
remain a golfer.”Mickey Wright, golfer, was born on
February 14, 1935. She died of a heart
attack on February 17, 2020, aged 85back to a letter writer to point out any
shortcomings in these respects and
seek changes to improve the quality of
the correspondence. By the same token
he was also the proud bearer of a tradi-
tion (since discontinued) that The
Times should not edit or shorten a letter
without the agreement of its writer on
every point of the proposed changes. As
letters editor it was Pilpel’s task to siftbranch through the air, I had to apply as
much speed as I could, smooth but
forceful. What a wonderful first lesson
that was. It taught me the sensation of
swinging through the ball, not at it.”
Wright’s first important title came
when she was 17, winning the 1952 US
Girls’ Junior. She played incessantly
while studying psychology at Stanford
University, and left after a year. She
later said that mastering the most
treacherous courses in America would
teach her all she needed to know about
psychology.
Her greatest influence was Harry
Pressler, whom she reckoned was “the
finest teacher of female players there
was”. Every Saturday her mother would
drive her for two and a half hours to San
Gabriel Country Club to see him for a
30-minute lesson. “My swing,” she pro-
claimed, “really is Harry’s swing.” On
the wall of his office was a photograph
of Hogan practising with a belt around
his thighs and a band around his upper
arms to keep them as close togetherduring the swing as possible.
At the inaugural Tall City Open in
1964, Wright shot a 62 in the third and
final round. It was the lowest score in
LPGA Tour history at that time, on a
course, Hogan Park, in Texas, on which
the men’s record was 66. Wright won a
play-off and recalled the joy of seeing
her parents standing together. After
their divorce they had taken it in turns
to watch her play.
“Mickey was the Tiger Woods of her
day,” said Peter Alliss, the commenta-
tor. “For all the bullshit today, if you hit
the fairways and greens with three or
four simple but enormously different
shots, that does it. Jack Nicklaus is the
greatest golfer because he made the
least mistakes. Mickey made it so easy
and she spoke to people nicely.”
Her favourite club was her 6-iron.
“Long after I retired, I loved taking the
club out to a short stretch of holes
behind my house. It was the perfectThe only thing to ruffle
her was being called the
‘female Arnold Palmer’
Mickey Wright
American golfer and early star of the ladies’ game whose swing was described by Ben Hogan as the ‘most beautiful I ever saw’
PGA OF AMERICA/GETTY IMAGESLeon Pilpel
Letters editor of The Times who was so angered by sloppy thinking that correspondents would be sorry they had written in
Overhearing a telephone call in which
Leon Pilpel, the letters editor of The
Times, was berating one of the great and
the good for an infelicity of grammar or
misremembered date, a colleague re-
marked that it was not enough for him
to make the letter writer feel bad for
their mistakes, he was going to make
them sorry they had ever thought of
writing to the paper at all.
Joining The Times as a sub-editor on
the home desk in 1951, Leon Pilpel
became known during his 40 years on
the paper for the precisely articulated
thinking he brought to his tasks in two
rather different offices, that of chief
home sub-editor from 1967 to 1980, and
thereafter as letters editor until his
retirement in 1990.
The effects of his training in the
home news department never left him
and his insistence on the rigorous
checking of all copy by his subeditors
and an absolute adherence to The
Times style guide were hallmarks of his
regime as chief sub.
As letters editor he was equally ada-
mant that comments by the writers of
letters were based on ascertainable
facts and rigorous reasoning, and he
and his staff would not hesitate to go
through the 250 to 300 letters received
by the newspaper every day to select
the 15 or so that would eventually make
it into the next day’s edition.
Leon Pilpel was born the second of
four children in London in 1924 and ed-
ucated at Dartington Hall, Devon. His
father, Maurice, was a silk merchant,
his mother, Millicent, a housekeeper.
After leaving school in 1940 he began
work on Advertiser’s Weekly, from
where he was called up into the Green
Howards in 1944. He was commis-
sioned in 1946 before transferring to
War Office public relations with the
British Army of the Rhine. In 1947 he
joined The Irish Times in Dublin as a
sub-editor, beginning a degree in En-
glish and French at Trinity College Du-
blin in the following year.
When he joined The Times in 1951,
the paper was under the editorship of
the Irishman William Casey, a quiet but
complex sceptic who had had plays
produced at the Abbey Theatre in Du-
blin during a spectacularly unsuccess-
ful career at the Irish Bar. As a man who
had, in the words of The History of The
Times, “a Tolstoyan belief that no
human act could make much difference
to events”, Casey was an unusual figurein the Fleet Street of the period. He was
to be succeeded in 1952 by Sir William
Haley, whose more active, not to say
bracing regime, was to shape the young
Pilpel’s outlook and attitude to news.
By the time Pilpel became chief
home sub-editor in 1967 the Astor own-
ership of The Times had given way to
the proprietorship of the Canadian
newspaper magnate Roy Thomson
who was determined to increase his
new acquisition’s circulation. The news
coverage expanded to cover a much
greater variety of stories with a conse-
quent increase in staff on the news side.
The editorial regime had changed
too, with the (then) progressive figure of
the young William Rees-Mogg newly
installed in the editor’s chair, leaving the
news operation largely to run itself
while he directed The Times’s editorial
voice through its leader columns, to
which he was a prolific contributor. In
such circumstances night editors and
the production staff were to a greater
extent in charge of getting the content
and balance of the paper right, and
Pilpel became known throughout the
paper for the exactness of the sub-edit-
ing operation on the home news side.
In 1941 he had met Kay Lewis, a fash-ion journalist at a small publishing
house just off Fleet Street. It had taken
him six months to ask her out and ten
years, including a temporary break-up
when he embarked on military service,
to marry her. He had made an early im-
pression on his future mother-in-law:
she asked him to dig out an old lilac
bush which, after a heroic struggle, he
did. “That boy’s got character,” she said.
Their daughter, Alison, works as a
headhunter. Their son, Jonathan, died
in an accident, aged 20, in 1978. As a
result of that event Rees-Mogg moved
Pilpel, once the paper had resumed
publication late in 1979 having been
suspended for a year because of a
dispute with unions, from his post as
chief home sub to letters editor, also a
demanding role but less pressured and
with more sociable working hours.
Pilpel was faced with a torrent of
letters. As he put it: “It seemed that
during the 11-month gap people had no
one to write to, so everyone decided to
write at the same time, eventually
causing a six-month backlog.”Leon Pilpel, journalist, was born on
April 7, 1924. He died on February 26,
2020, aged 95Pilpel sifted through 300 letters a dayTIMES NEWSPAPERS LTD