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GREENSBORO — She struck quite a figure, tall, thin and matronly, standing over putts at Starmount Forest long after she’d lost her firm grip on the game of golf.

People would walk past and say hello, and others would just stand and watch. Marge Burns, the best female golfer of her time and maybe the best we’ve ever produced, died early Wednesday at the Morningview Assisted Living community. She was 83.

She was one of the great teachers of the game, and though the awards piled up through her lifetime, her contribution to the game lives on in the fluid swing Burns taught generations of golfers in Greensboro and across the state and the nation. She won 50 amateur titles, as best she could remember, and was considered one of the giants of the game when amateurs still ruled American sports.

It’s hard to understand the status of the amateur golfer in this day and age, when success is measured by money and commercial achievement. But there was a time in this country when some of the best sportsmen and sportswomen avoided turning professional as a matter of principle. This area has a long history of great amateur golfers, and Burns was as good as Greensboro will ever produce.

Marjorie Jane Burns had to make the decision about whether to remain an amateur early, right here in Greensboro when what we now know as the Ladies Professional Golf Association began to take form. The stories of the origin of the LPGA are sketchy, but it’s pretty well agreed that the entire organization began here when a group of women who would become the pioneers of the game met and discussed, among other things, the formation of what they would call the Women’s Professional Golf Association.

The first women’s U.S. Open to be played with modern scoring (stroke play instead of match play) was held at Starmount.

Burns, at age 22, played in it.

She was a phenom who learned the game at age 7, was breaking 100 by the time she was 11 and was being told she couldn’t play in some tournaments at the age of 12 or 13 because she was too good.

Burns certainly was good enough and was the perfect age to join the tour after she got out of Woman’s College (now UNCG) just as the LPGA was taking off. But her dad had just become one of the original 13 distributors of Tupperware, and she was smart enough to know working for him was a better decision than going up against Babe Zaharias and Patty Berg every week for a relative pittance.

“Maybe I was born 20 years too soon,” she said several years ago. “But I have no regrets.”

While making her way in business, she rewrote the amateur records in this state, winning the North Carolina Women’s Amateur 10 times, the Carolinas Amateur six times and the prestigious Teague Award as the top amateur athlete in the state five times.

No one else won it more than twice.

At Starmount, they still talk about the day Berg came to Greensboro and agreed to play a 13-year-old kid in an exhibition. Berg went on to win 60 times on the LPGA tour. The skinny local kid knew then what she wanted to do with her life.

Burns would play regularly until she could compete no more, then became one of the nation’s top golf instructors. Before a stroke slowed her in 1999, Burns played golf almost every day at Starmount, still taking the time to teach anyone who asked and to tell stories of her career.

In 1984, she was named to the Carolinas Golf Hall of Fame and the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, and in 2005, she was part of the inaugural class of the Guilford County Sports Hall of Fame.

While her greatest award might have come in 1976, when she was named the LPGA’s national teacher of the year, Marge Burns’ greatest joys always came at Starmount. That’s where she struck ball after ball in that long, fluid motion that seemed so effortless, yet came from years and years of hard work only a few of us were lucky enough to witness.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com