Jay Sigel, Amateur Golfer Who Played Like a Pro, Dies at 81

Jay Sigel went to Wake Forest University in 1962 on a golf scholarship named for Arnold Palmer. He won an Atlantic Coast Conference individual title and became a second-team all-American. He would later tell friends and reporters that he went to college to play golf, not to study, and that he thought more about turning professional than about graduating.

But his plans were deferred after a serious accident. Sigel — who died at 81 on April 19 in Boca Raton, Fla. — did not turn pro for nearly three decades, until he became eligible for the Senior PGA Tour at age 50.

In the intervening years, he became widely viewed as perhaps the greatest amateur golfer of the post-World War II era in the United States.

At Wake Forest, Sigel inadvertently put his left hand through a pane of glass in the summer of 1963 while trying to keep a door from closing. The accident severed a tendon, and the wound, near his wrist, required more than 70 stitches. He remained hospitalized for nine days.

It took months to regain something resembling the completeness of his skills. His left little finger remained hooked, and he did not regain full feeling in the hand, which often grew cold, his wife, Betty Sigel, said. (She confirmed the death, in a hospital. She said the cause was complications of pancreatic cancer.)

But the injury altered the arc of Sigel’s career and his life in a way that he came to see as fortunate and providential.