"I guess you could call me a York Road streetcar baby," said LPGA Hall of Famer Carol Mann. "I attended the old Notre Dame Prep, where I played a variety of sports, and was 9 when I started playing golf at the Country Club of Maryland in Towson."
Mann, who celebrated her 67th birthday Feb. 3, was born in Buffalo, N.Y., and later moved to Rodgers Forge, where she lived until moving to Chicago with her family in 1955.
As a youth, she became one of the top amateur golfers in the country and later attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Mann turned professional in 1960 and joined the LPGA the next year. During the next two decades, she won 38 tournaments, two major titles, the 1964 Western Open and the 1965 U.S. Open in Atlantic City. She was the tour's leading money winner in 1969.
In 1968, Mann won 10 tournaments and the Vare Trophy with a 72.04 scoring average that stood until Nancy Lopez broke the record in 1978.
Mann, who now lives in The Woodlands, Texas, is candid about the end of her professional career.
"It was Labor Day 1981, and I was in Springfield, Ill. I had become mean and angry. I looked in the rearview mirror of my rental car and said, 'I'm never playing tour golf again,'" she said. "Of course, I missed it. It had been my life for 21 years. It's where your friends are. It's all you ever know. It's scary having to change course."
Mann became a broadcaster for NBC, ABC and ESPN, covering PGA and LPGA tours. She wrote a book, The 19th Hole, and a regular golf column for the old Houston Post, and became a highly sought-after golf instructor.
Mann, who lived in Towson from 1964 to 1979, was a special consultant to the men's and women's Division I golf teams at Towson University in 2005.
"I'm now an unofficial consultant at the university," she said.
She was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1998 and is now a "special consultant and ambassador for the organization," she said.
She's busy planning the Carol Mann LPGA Players Invitational FORE! the Women's Home, a Houston facility for women in crisis. The tournament will be held in April.
She's also recovering from a December hip replacement.
"I'm now bionic. No more pain," Mann said, quickly adding, "My doctor says this replacement will last for 27 years, by which time I'll be 93."