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.
Sigel remained at Wake Forest, received a degree in sociology in 1967, married Betty Wingo in 1968, started a family, worked as an insurance agent and then opened his own insurance company in the Philadelphia area, where he grew up. And he recovered sufficiently from his injury to win United States Amateur titles in 1982 and 1983; the British Amateur title in 1979; and U.S. Mid-Amateur titles, for golfers 25 and older, in 1983, 1985 and 1987.
He participated in a record nine Walker Cup tournaments for amateurs from the United States, Britain and Ireland. And he shot the lowest score among amateurs at the Masters tournament in 1980, 1981 and 1988; the British Open in 1980; and the U.S. Open in 1984.
“I always thought things happen for a reason,” Sigel told USGA.com, the website of the United States Golf Association, in 2024. “The hand injury was the best thing to happen to me.”
Many considered Sigel to be the greatest American amateur since Bobby Jones, who won the U.S. Open four times, the British Open three times and the U.S. Amateur championship five times, all in a luminous period between 1923 and 1930.
Steely composure during match play, in which golfers compete head-to-head against an opponent, became a hallmark of Sigel’s game. And he was a superb ball striker, with power that emanated from his 6-foot-1½ frame down to his size 13 feet.
“He was a really tough match-play player; he didn’t feel like he was going to lose,” Jeff Kiddie, the head professional at Aronimink Golf Club in Newtown Square, Pa., to which Sigel belonged for more than 50 years, said in an interview. “And I’d say he could hit the ball as far as he wanted to hit it.”
Had Sigel turned professional out of college, Lee Trevino told The New York Times in 1994, “he might have been a great one” on the PGA Tour. But, his wife said in an interview, Sigel had some concern about whether his hand could withstand the weekly grind of the tour.
He remained an amateur until he joined the somewhat more relaxed senior tour, now called the PGA Tour Champions, in 1993, when he turned 50. He won eight tournaments and more than $9 million in earnings. And he seemed to have no regrets.
“I wouldn’t trade anything, particularly the amateur career,” Sigel told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2009. Betty Sigel said that he “loved the fact that he was able to get married, have a job and have a family, and still be able to play golf.”
Robert Jay Sigel was born on Nov. 13, 1943, in Bryn Mawr, Pa., on Philadelphia’s Main Line, and grew up in the borough of Narberth. His father, Robert Jacob Sigel, started an engineering firm. His mother, Elizabeth (Kriebel) Sigel, ran the household. Both his parents played golf.
Jay began caddying for his father when he was 10. By 11, he realized that he’d rather use the clubs than carry them.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by three daughters, Jennifer Sigel, Amy Sigel Melconian and Megan Sigel Yates; a sister, Carolyn Sigel Nusbickel; and six grandchildren. He and his wife lived in Berwyn, Pa., and also had a home in Boynton Beach, Fla.
After being named the nation’s top junior golfer while at Lower Merion High School in suburban Philadelphia, Sigel briefly attended the University of Houston before transferring to Wake Forest. When he awakened after the surgery on his hand, he told The Daily News of Philadelphia in 1983, doctors told him that he would never play golf again.
At the height of Sigel’s amateur career, another group of doctors told him that they could further repair his hand with the latest surgical techniques, Betty Sigel said. He declined.
“We’re not messing with it,” he replied. “It’s working.”