Photos courtesy of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection at UTA Libraries.

Bettye Mims Danoff, left, and Betty Jameson were Sunset High School alumnae and are among the LPGA’s 13 founding members. 

The Sunset High School football team were city champions in 1927, and the basketball team won the Sanger Trophy for being city champs in 1930.

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Back then the golf team was just getting warmed up, entering high school tournaments and sometimes winning, after Stevens Park Golf Course was installed in 1925. In the late 1930s, Sunset became a Texas golf powerhouse, reigning for more than a decade thanks to course availability and a few superstar athletes.

The school’s first golf star was a kid named J. Ward Fouts, who had a hole-in-one on the fifth hole at Stevens Park in March 1934. Less than two months later, he led Sunset to the city title. Fouts died in 1943 at age 24.  Leslie A. Stemmons Jr., the younger son of the Winnetka Heights developer who has a freeway named for him, was among Fouts’ teammates, along with Briard Mims and a girl, Betty Jameson.

Jameson had taken the Dallas Women’s Golf Association’s city title in a tournament that spring. About a week prior to that high-school city championship, in which she scored a 74, she won her first major tournament, the Southern women’s title, in New Orleans in May 1934. It was the week of her 15th birthday.

Known statewide by the age of 13 for her power and accuracy at the tees, she turned pro in 1945 and won seven tournaments before the LPGA was formed. She won the 1947 U.S. Women’s Open with a 295 total, making her the first woman to score under 300 in a 72-hole tournament. She and fellow Sunset alumna Bettye Mims Danoff, whose family owned the bygone Sunset Golf Course, were among the 13 founding members of the LPGA. Jameson, who won a total of $91,740 over seven years in the LPGA, also founded the Vare Trophy, which is given to the LPGA member with the lowest total score for the season, named in honor of Jameson’s idol, Glenna Collett Vare.

The school’s next stunner was Earl Stewart Jr., who won the individual state title for Sunset in 1937, 1938 and 1939. 

A teacher at Highland Park High School originally devised the tournament because students at that out-of-district school were not eligible to compete in the city tournament. It was played at Cedar Crest Golf Course all three times Stewart creamed everyone. Sunset also won the team state title in 1938. Stewart went on to win the national NCAA individual golf title for Louisiana State University in 1941. LSU won the national team title the following year with Stewart as a member.

Stewart became a PGA tour pro, and he won the tournament now known as the Byron Nelson at the Oak Cliff Country Club in 1961, beating Arnold Palmer by one shot; he’s still the only pro in history to win a major tournament on his home course.

He later became the head coach at Southern Methodist University, where he brought the women’s team to the NCAA Division 1 championship title in 1979. The late PGA champion Payne Stewart (no relation) was another of his athletes at SMU.

And then there’s Don January.

Photo of Don January and Billy Maxwell as college students courtesy of the UNT Libraries.

With January on the team, Sunset won three straight city tournaments. He went on to what is now the University of North Texas, which won four national Division I NCAA titles in a row, from 1949-1952.

As a pro, he won 10 PGA titles, including the championship in 1967. That came five years after he shot a 68 in the 1961 PGA Championship, losing by one stroke in a playoff to Jerry Barber, so he holds the record for the lowest losing score ever in an 18-hole playoff for a major tournament.

January also won 22 Senior PGA tournaments and had a career in the golf-course design business. Now 91, he’s still living and owns a home in Dallas.

Photo of Jimmy Powell via PGAtour.com.

The last of Sunset’s big golf stars was Jimmy Powell, who died this past January at age 85. He won the individual state championship for Sunset in 1952 and attended the same college as January.

Powell played two full-season tours in the PGA, but his biggest success as a pro was on the Senior PGA Tour, now known as the PGA Tour Champions. He won four tournaments and still holds three records on that tour.

Between the end of his PGA touring days and his 50th birthday in January 1985, when he was eligible for the Senior PGA, he was the golf pro at Stevens Park Golf Course, although he otherwise made his home in California.