Finding Miss Glenna

A lunch that changed two lives

In tribute to Women’s History Month — and celebrating a fresh new golf season — here’s a piece I wrote for Yankee Magazine 40 years ago about a forgotten legend for whom the LPGA’s Vare Trophy is named. The piece launched my golf-writing life — and gave me a great new friend.

On a summer day in 1917, at Metacomet Country Club in Providence, Rhode Island, three men stood on a tee watching as a young girl named Glenna Collett hit her first golf ball. She was 14. She may have weighed 70 pounds. The golf ball she hit flew well over a hundred yards and split the fairway into two neat halves. Two of the three observers were flabbergasted. They had never witnessed anything like it - a willowy child who could slug a golf ball as competently as most grown men. But the third observer, George Collett, Glenna's father, was hardly surprised.

At nine Glenna was an accomplished diver and swimmer; at ten she drove the family car. For a while she played baseball - she could throw the ball farther and more accurately than any boy on her block. She was the best tennis player around. In 1922, just 19 years old, she won the U.S. Women's Championship at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and suddenly a nation of sports fans wanted to know more about the politely restrained, winningly attractive girl from Providence who was so superstitious she often wore the same hat and clothes ensemble, the same color of red fingernail polish, through a three-day tournament.

In 1924 she played 60 golf matches and won 59 of them going away. The next year she fulfilled an important criterion of greatness: she won the U.S. championship for a second time at St. Louis, then three more times again. In 1931 she married a wealthy Philadelphian named Edwin Vare, gave birth to two children, a boy and a girl, played less competitive golf than before, took up bridge, needlepoint, and trapshooting, as well as becoming an articulate spokesperson for women's athletics in America. But Glenna was not through with golf and the game was not through with her. In 1935 the "female Bobby Jones" began her historic comeback.