Golf commitments in the United States meant Jenny Lee Smith was unable to accept the North East Sports Personality of the Year award for 1982 in person. She attended the following year’s event, this time to present the trophy to Kevin Keegan. His death last week shocked Smith, prompting her to reflect back on that time. It delivers a snapshot of Smith’s sporting status at a time when Keegan was wooing Tyneside.
- Jenny Lee Smith won the inaugural Women’s British Open in 1976 as an amateur despite illness; returns as a R&A guest.
- As an amateur she could not claim the £210 prize, receiving instead a wooden plinth with candlesticks; today’s champion earns $1.5m.
- Jenny Lee Smith discovered a twin at 55 and co-wrote My Secret Sister, after learning she was adopted aged 14.
- She helped found the Ladies European Tour in 1978, enduring low pay, travel hardships, caravans, and strong player camaraderie.
- Now unable to play after arthritic hand surgery, she treasures family life and welcomes the R&A invitation, praising today’s powerful young players.
“It is very sad,” says Smith of Keegan’s death, aged 75. “We did a lot of work together because I was sponsored at the time by Scottish and Newcastle Breweries, who did the same for the football team. He became a good friend and was such a lovely chap.
“When I was out on tour, they would send a taxi for my mother – who was an avid football supporter – and Kevin would always be asking where I was playing and what I was up to. When he became the manager, the football was magical.”
Smith left Newcastle long ago but Newcastle has never left her. “It is still home,” she adds. “I am still a Geordie at heart, a Geordie in exile.”
The difficulty with a story as multifaceted as hers is knowing where on earth to start. She rubbed shoulders with Keegan due to golfing excellence, with the coming days marking a noteworthy anniversary of her proudest moment. In 1976, at the inaugural Women’s British Open, Smith emerged victorious. Fittingly, she will arrive at Royal Lytham & St Anne’s this week as a guest of the R&A. At the conclusion of what is now the Women’s Open, Smith will present the prize to the tournament’s leading amateur. This was her very status 50 years ago, meaning she could not even collect the £210 first prize. There had been serious doubt over her playing at Fulford – near York – at all.
“It was touch and go,” Smith recalls. “I had a really bad chest infection just before the tournament and really still felt pretty groggy. I was in Newcastle, Fulford isn’t far away, so my mother said to me: ‘Don’t withdraw. Just go and, if you feel ill, come home.’ Then I went and won the thing, which was fabulous. I really can’t believe that it is 50 years. Where has that time gone?”
“I can still remember the last nine holes. In those days you had no scoreboards and you had to rely on whispers coming from the crowd to know what was happening on the rest of the course. After nine holes I was one behind Mary McKenna. I thought standing on the 18th tee, or rather I was told, that on the par five I needed a four to win. Actually that wasn’t so but I took four anyway.”
Her reward, besides a piece of history? “Just a very strange wooden plinth with two candlesticks on it.” This year’s Women’s Open champion will earn $1.5m (£1.125m) from a purse of $10m.
More of the golf later. Sport provides only one element of Smith’s tale. A 2013 book, My Secret Sister, depicts how Smith became acquainted with a twin sister aged 55. “It was absolutely extraordinary,” Smith says. “She lives in Newcastle and I am in Kent so we don’t see each other as much as we would like but we are in touch all the time. Since we wrote the book, a lot more has come to light. It was such a shock to Helen, she had no idea of me existing.”
Smith was adopted, a fact she was unaware of until the age of 14. “I had lost my dad when I was 12,” she says. “I found out I was adopted by cousins in an argument. I was told: ‘You’re not part of this family and that woman downstairs is not your mother.’ So that was extremely hurtful.”
Through an incredible amount of research, Smith eventually met her birth mother after knocking on a door when visiting the north-east for a wedding. Next came Helen (whom their mother had asked Smith not to alert) and the piecing together of what their precise relationship was. “It was a huge shock,” Smith admits. “It was extremely cathartic writing the book but there were a lot of occasions when it was also very upsetting. What we have both been through has made us stronger.”
Smith has a formidable side, then, that is not readily apparent from her cheerful disposition. By 1978, she was a founder member of the Ladies European Tour (initially the Women’s Professional Golfers’ Association). A sport regarded as a male-only domain and routinely discriminatory with that in mind was changing shape.
“I feel very proud and honoured to have been part of that and to have been there at the very beginning,” Smith says. “We would arrive for tournaments at clubs where we had no practice ground or no putting green. Often the members didn’t even know they were having an event at their course. It was tough. We had a tournament in France, turned up and the prize money hadn’t been sent to the bank. That was sorted but we had been sitting in a hotel, ready to play and unsure whether the tournament could even take place.”
“In those days we were playing for a pittance compared to now. My first winner’s cheque was in 1978, £225. I bought myself a caravan and towed it to various events, staying in that overnight. Quite a few of the girls did the same thing to cut down the costs. You weren’t winning fortunes, that’s for sure.”
“I miss the camaraderie. When we turned pro, there was 30 of us going from place to place. We practised together, played together, ate together. They were a great bunch of girls and we all got on so well together. I miss that aspect of it and the excitement of playing.”
It is more than a dozen years since Smith, now 77, has been able to hit a ball at all. An operation to mend an arthritic joint in her right hand left her unable to grip a club properly. “Rather than hack around, which would give me no pleasure at all, I packed it in,” Smith says. “I have grandchildren, I have dogs, and other things take priority now. Golf has given me so much, I feel blessed for that.”
Smith regards her R&A invite as a “great honour”. She has taken a keen interest in how this tournament has evolved and grown. “The standard of golf really is incredible, it is amazing,” smith says. “These girls are so powerful and score so well.
“I am really excited to be going back there; it is not just 50 years since I won, but 50 years since I played the Curtis Cup at Lytham.” The United States defeated Smith’s Great Britain & Ireland team on that occasion. The GB&I contingent from 1986, which surprisingly triumphed in Kansas, will reunite at Lytham on Friday. Another endearing glance towards the past. Smith is fully entitled to enjoy her own as a sporting pioneer.
