Dale Reid, record-breaking golfer who led Europe to victory in the Solheim Cup – obituary

Dale Reid, who has died of cancer aged 64, was one of the most successful and charismatic golfers on the Ladies European Tour, with 21 tournament wins; she was also a veteran of the Solheim Cup, the women’s equivalent of the Ryder Cup, appearing in four tournaments then twice leading the team as non-playing captain.

She held the record for the most top-10 finishes on Tour, with 135 between 1979 and 2005, and shared with Laura Davies, Nancy Lopez and Beth Daniel the then world record 20-under-par winning score, which she achieved in the 1987 La Manga Club European Open at Ferndown in Dorset.

That was her most successful season: she had four victories, including the Ladies Scottish Open at Cawder, and topped the Order of Merit (repeating her achievement of 1984). Her lowest round on the Tour was 58, achieved in the final round en route to winning the 1991 Bloor Homes Eastleigh Classic.

The previous year she had played the mixed-sex Sunningdale Foursomes with her professional and personal partner, the Australian player Corinne Dibnah. They won the event by such an overwhelming margin that the ladies’ handicap allowance was subsequently reduced.

Dale Reid was born on March 20 1959 in Ladybank, a village in Fife, and took up golf when she was four. Aged 15, she reached the final of the Scottish Girls Championship and made the first of four appearances in the Girls Home Internationals.

She turned professional in 1979 and the following year won her first title, at the Carlsberg Coventry tournament. With her open and honest personality she became a popular figure on the Tour, and in 1990 she took part in the inaugural Solheim Cup in Florida, which pitted Europe against the US. That was an easy victory for the Americans, but two years later, at Dalmahoy Country Club near Edinburgh, she won two games and halved another as Europe prevailed by a five-point margin.

Dale Reid – who in 1991 was elected an honorary member of the Ladies European Tour after winning her 20th title – appeared in two more Solheims, both American victories, then qualified for the LPGA Tour on the other side of the Atlantic, playing for a couple of seasons, though without a tournament win.

In 2000 she returned to the Solheim Cup as non-playing captain, leading Europe to victory by three points at Loch Lomond in her firm but supportive style. But as she was shouldered off the course by her players, stitches from a recent operation burst; she had not told the team that she had just had a hysterectomy: “All week, I had been in terrible pain, but I had to keep it from the players. It wouldn’t have done any good for people to know.”

The victory brought Dale Reid the OBE, but it came at great cost: three further operations and an infection kept her out of the game for several years, though she was non-playing captain in the Solheim Cup again in 2002, a narrow defeat to the US.

Her partner Corinne Dibnah, the former British Women’s Open champion, gave up playing in order to nurse her, and when the couple began to suffer money problems they moved in with Dale’s mother; Corinne worked in a fruit factory while Dale took a job in the North Eden House nursing home in Cupar, Fife.

“Even winning at golf doesn’t beat the smile you get when you’ve done something for someone at the North Eden,” said Dale Reid.

The couple moved to Queensland, where Reid spent the last years of her life. In 2010 the truck in which she was a passenger collided with a car two of whose occupants, the driver and an eight-year-old boy, were killed. Despite being soaked in diesel, Dale Reid left her vehicle to try to help them, and though she suffered only cuts and bruises herself, she subsequently suffered flashbacks.

Corinne Dibnah survives her.

Dale Reid, born March 20 1959, died November 8 2023