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Most people have heard of Tiger Woods, the young golfer. But there was a golf star that caught the eye and heart of the public long before Tiger ever played his first game. Her name is Nancy Lopez.
Nancy is Mexican-American. She was born in Torrance, California, and she always liked to play golf, even when she was just a little girl. She says that her father, who owns an auto-body repair shop, always encouraged her to play the sport. All the praise that she got from him must have worked, because she won her first tournament at the age of 12. She continued to play and win all throughout her years in school.
After graduating from high school, Nancy started college at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. But she left school in 1977, well before she finished a degree. She says that she knew by then that she was serious about golf. She knew that she wanted to play professionally, and she began to enter tournaments.
Nancy finished second in her first three tournaments as a professional. She won five tournaments in her first year. That number of tournament wins by a rookie broke the record for both men and women.
That first year, a prominent sports magazine wrote that Nancy Lopez had become famous faster than any other golfer ever had. In the same article, they also called her the nicest player in golf. She was only 21 years old.
Nancy was very well-liked on the golfing circuit. She had a good reputation with the press. The other players liked her golfing skill. They also liked her attitude. Nancy is focused while she plays golf, but she is always courteous. She also has a lot of fun.
She won nine tournaments in 1978, her second year as a professional golfer. One of the wins was a championship. She won eight times the following year. She was the leading money winner in both 1978 and 1979, a very unusual occurrence for a new golfer.
Nancy did a great deal to raise the popularity of women’s golf. By the time Nancy Lopez was thirty, she had racked up 35 tour wins. She was admitted into the Hall of Fame in 1987. She was the youngest person ever to be inducted, and she had to wait for a few months before she could get her award. She hadn't yet been playing golf professionally for ten years, and ten years is the minimum time you must have played before being inducted.
She married a baseball star named Ray Knight and she tried hard to keep her career and be a mom. She did a good job at both. She won her 48th tournament in 1997 at the age of 40. That year she also recorded the best score ever by a woman golfer, but she still lost that particular game. The tournament that she was playing in at the time was the Women’s US Open.
"I'd love to win the US Open," Lopez once told a reporter. "But I've had enough good things happen in my life that I won't be shattered if I don't."
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