This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
In the early 1950s, Jackie Pung brought the aloha spirit to professional golf.
Gregarious and cheerful, the self-taught golfer from Hawaii hula danced at tournaments and presented leis to competitors, injecting warmth and color into a staid, male-dominated and overwhelmingly white sport.
But she was more than just a crowd favorite. With her booming drive and technical precision, she quickly became one of the top players on the newly formed Ladies Professional Golf Association tour, known as Hawaii’s First Lady of Golf.
In 1957 she was on a winning streak when she arrived at the U.S. Open, the most prestigious championship in women’s golf. It would be the defining test of her career.
The event was held at the Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, N.Y., whose punishing design made the course notoriously difficult. Pung put together a stellar final round score of 72 (one under par) to beat the future World Golf Hall of Famer Betsy Rawls by a single stroke, nailing a 40-foot putt on the 18th hole to secure the win.
Her daughter Barnette rushed onto the green to embrace her. Pung was ushered inside for photos and interviews. Amid the frenzy, she quickly scribbled her signature on her scorecard.
No one noticed that the hastily signed card contained a costly mistake.
After the celebration subsided, tournament officials approached Pung with the unwelcome news: Her card indicated that she had completed the fourth hole in five strokes instead of six. Even though her final tally was otherwise correct, the error was cause for disqualification; it was as if she hadn’t competed in the tournament at all.
Distraught, Pung ran out of the room, her daughter chasing after her, but managed to compose herself and come back.
Then she watched in despair, her head in her hands, as Rawls was handed the trophy.
“They took her title away from her,” Pung’s daughter said in an interview. “It was very sad. Very, very tough on the family.”
While the rules were clear that this type of infraction resulted in disqualification, no one was happy with how things turned out.
“It’s nice to win,” said Rawls, whose career would ultimately include 55 tour wins and eight major championships (including four U.S. Open victories). “But I feel very badly about what happened to Jackie.”
The renowned golf writer Herbert Warren Wind went further in expressing his displeasure.
“The shocking news of Mrs. Pung’s disqualification filled everyone with a personal sense of impotent anger and with compassion for the victim of so important a ruling based on so insignificant a technicality,” he wrote in Sports Illustrated at the time. “Had the technicality of disqualification been waived, the rules of golf would not have been weakened, and, I really believe, the spirit of golf more honestly served.”
Pung took the high road and said a few words at the conclusion of the celebration: “Winning the Open is the greatest thing in golf. I have come close before. This time I thought I’d won. But I didn’t. Golf is played by rules, and I broke a rule. I’ve learned a lesson. And I have two broad shoulders.”
A hat was passed around the crowd to collect cash for Pung, and more than $3,000 was raised (about $35,000 today). It was almost double what Rawls took home, but it was small consolation.
Pung never came close to winning the U.S. Open again. She won her final L.P.G.A. event — the Jackson Open — in 1958. She also became a mentor for younger players on tour in the late 1950s and early ’60s, including Judy Rankin, a future Hall of Famer.
“She took some of the younger players under her wing,” Rankin said in an interview, “and exposed us to some things we’d never seen before.”
But by 1964, the distance from her family was taking a toll on her. It was time to return to Hawaii.
Jacqueline Nolte Liwai was born on Dec. 13, 1921, in Honolulu, to Jacqueline Nolte and Jack Liwai. Her father was a traveling musician who left Hawaii at 17 to play music on the mainland. He met Nolte one night in 1919 when he was playing in Memphis. They eloped to Hawaii against her parents’ wishes.
Jackie’s father worked as a home health aide for wealthy families around Honolulu, but his real passion was golf. He started bringing her along when she was 5, and discovered she had a natural talent. In 1938, she won her first of four Territorial Women’s Amateur Championships in Hawaii as a junior in high school.
“Golf was a gift,” she told Betty Dunn for her 2005 biography, “Jackie Pung: Women’s Golf Legend.” “The game came easy to me.”
Pung attributed her success to learning how to hula from her grandmother. “I honestly believe that the fluid motions and rhythm of the hula gave me an advantage,” she said.
After winning her second Hawaiian championship and graduating from high school in 1939, she met Barney Pung, a competitive swimmer and a fireman. They married the next year and had two daughters; Pung was eight months pregnant when she won her third Hawaiian championship in 1941. (She won one more in 1949.)
Eventually, her skill would take her to the mainland, where she encountered some surprises.
“On one of the early holes I saw a garter snake slithering across the green,” she recalled to Dunn about the 1946 U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship in Tulsa, Okla. “We don’t have any snakes in Hawaii. From then on, I spent more time watching for snakes than paying attention to the golf game.”
Pung won the 1952 U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship at Waverley Country Club in Portland, Ore., becoming the first golfer from Hawaii to win a national championship. She went pro the next year and won another five L.P.G.A. tour events.
After returning to Hawaii in 1964, Pung moved to the Big Island, where she worked as a golf professional, giving lessons at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel and eventually becoming their director of golf.
She was inducted into the Hawaii Golf Hall of Fame in 1988. She died on March 15, 2017, in Kona, on the Big Island, having lived long enough to see a Hawaiian woman — Michelle Wie — win the U.S. Open in 2014. Another Hawaiian, Allisen Corpuz, won in 2023.
In 1998, Pung returned to Winged Foot, the site of her career-defining setback, to celebrate the club’s 75th anniversary.
She said in interviews that she no longer thought about her loss. Rather, she was proud to have spread her knowledge of the game.
“I had been blessed with this talent, golf,” she told Dunn, adding, “I needed to share it.”
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