Carolyn Cudone, winner of five straight

USGA championships, dies at the age of 90

By RHONDA GLENN of the United States Golf Association
Carolyn Cudone, a merry, gracious player and the only golfer to win five straight United States Golf Association championships, died on Thursday at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She was 90 years old.
Cudone, picture above from the USGA Museum, won the USGA Senior Women’s Amateur Championship five times from 1968 to 1972. Of the more celebrated players who have won the Senior Women’s Amateur more than once – Dot Porter, Anne Quast Sander, Marlene Streit and Carol Semple Thompson – none touched Cudone’s five straight victories, although Thompson won four straight from 1999 to 2002.
Just one week ago, on March 12, she was inducted into the Myrtle Beach Hall of Fame.
Growing up in Staten Island, New York., Cudone was the scourge of Metropolitan women’s golf. She won the New Jersey Women's Amateur five times, 11 New Jersey stroke-play and five Women’s Metropolitan Golf Association match-play titles.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, when women’s amateur golf garnered big headlines, Cudone captured a number of important titles, including the 1958 North & South Women’s Amateur, the 1960 Women’s Eastern Amateur and the 1962 Hollywood International Four-Ball with her fellow Met player, Cookie Swift Berger, as her partner.
Cudone was a member of the 1956 USA Curtis Cup team, where she clinched her lone match, a foursomes encounter with her partner Mary Ann Downey against Janette Robertson and Veronica Anstey, 6 and 4.
It was one of only four points the USA managed in a losing cause against Great Britain and Ireland’s six points.
A strong player, Cudone smacked her fairway woods in shots that screamed low off the clubface, then rose and dropped to the green, much like Patty Berg, who Cudone somewhat matched in her physical stature.
While she assembled a wonderful collection of titles, Cudone never quite cracked the elite group of women amateurs of her era: JoAnne Gunderson, Barbara McIntire, Anne Quast and Barbara Romack. Her nemesis was the feisty Polly Riley. A canny match-play specialist, Riley knocked Cudone out of the semi-finals of the 1953 US Women’s Amateur, beat her in the third round of that championship in 1955 and eliminated her in the fourth round in 1958.
Cudone continued to chase the game’s elite, consistently playing in the national championships and, with her husband Philip, spending the winter on the Florida Orange Blossom circuit.It was as a senior golfer, however, that Cudone proved herself. She played in the USGA Senior Women’s Amateur 10 times, won five of the titles and twice finished as runner-up.
Time dulls her achievements a bit, and Cudone herself couldn’t recall them clearly in an interview several years ago. Her double-digit win in 1968 caused her to say, “I did? By 10 shots? Wow, that’s pretty good.”
In her later years, Cudone lived in Myrtle Beach, where she had settled with her late husband. She founded the Myrtle Beach Junior Golf Program in 1981 and led the organization for 21 years before turning over the reins at the age of 83.
She was a gracious winner and a cheerful loser who loved to laugh.
+Rhonda Glenn is a Manager of Communications for the USGA.