Nancy Lopez

1957-

American golfer

When Nancy Lopez burst onto the scene of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) Tour during her rookie year in 1978 by winning a record five consecutive tournaments, she gave new life to the women's tour. Then-LPGA's director of publicity, Chip Campbell, told Golf World, "Thank the dear Lord, along came Nancy Lopez. She was a savior. What did Winston Churchill say, Comes the moment, comes the man? Well, comes the moment, comes the woman." With good distance off the tee and excellent putting skills, Lopez was an exceptional golfer. Also known on tour for her warmth and kindness, she embraced the fans who returned her affection tenfold.

Nationally Ranked Amateur

Nancy Lopez was born on January 6, 1957, in Torrance, California, but was raised, along with her older sister, in Roswell, New Mexico, by her parents, Domingo and Marina Lopez. Of Mexican descent, Lopez grew up in a traditional Catholic household. Her father owned an auto repair business, and her mother tended the house and the children.

Lopez began to play golf with her family in 1964 at the age of eight, using old clubs with shortened shafts. Her natural ability was quickly apparent to her father, who began coaching her. Lopez won her first tournament when she was nine years old, finishing 110 strokes better than her nearest opponent. By the age of eleven Lopez was beating both her parents on the course, and her father became committed to developing his daughter's game. The family skimped and sacrificed to afford to finance Lopez's golf.

Lopez won the first of her three New Mexico Women's Amateur Championships when she was just twelve years old, but the pressure of competition was taking its toll. "I was so scared I always threw up," she admitted to Sports Illustrated. "I carried a trash can with me. My dad told me, 'If you're going to play golf, you've got to get over being sick.' I didn't want to quit so I decided to get over it." She did and kept winning.

A nationally ranked amateur during high school, Lopez led her otherwise all-male high school golf team to a state championship. She won the U.S. Girls Junior championship in both 1972 and 1974. Lopez had her first brush with fame the following year as a high school senior when, as an amateur, she finished second at the 1975 U.S. Women's Open. Lopez enrolled at the University of Tulsa in 1975 on a golf scholarship. As a freshman she won the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women golf championship and was named the University of Tulsa's Female Athlete of the Year. In need of new challenges, Lopez turned professional after her sophomore year.

Sensational Rookie Year

Although she joined the LPGA during 1977, Lopez's first full season, and official rookie year, was 1978. "When I first came out, I pretty much felt like I was the worst player on the tour," she later explained to Golf World. "I felt like you're supposed to start at the bottom of the barrel and work your way to the top. I'd watch the other players and think, 'Gosh, my game's not even close to theirs.' My goal was to hopefully win one tournament that first year." Lopez would quickly surpass her conservative expectations to help transform women's golf into a nationally recognized spectator sport.

Chronology

1957	Born in Torrance, California
1964	Begins playing golf at the age of eight
1975	Plays as an amateur in first U.S. Women's Open, finishing second
1975-77	Attends University of Tulsa for two years on a golf scholarship
1977	Turns professional, joins Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour in midseason
1978	Posts record five consecutive wins during rookie year
1981	Marries sportscaster Tim Melton
1983	Divorces from Melton; marries baseball player Ray Knight
1997	Wins forty-eighth tournament, the last win of her career
1999	Undergoes knee surgery
2002	Retires after the end of the season

In February 1978, Lopez won her first professional tournament by sinking a 15-foot birdie putt on the seventeen hole to claim the lead at the Bent Tree Classic in Sarasota, Florida. She dedicated her first title to her mother, who had passed away the previous fall. A week later Lopez won the Sunstar Classic in California. Then, in April she began an unbroken record of five straight tournament wins that nearly single-handedly raised the LPGA into its highest realms of popularity and profitability. Lopez won in Baltimore, Maryland, and then twice in New York, took a week off, and won her first major, the LPGA Championship in Kings Island, Ohio, in front of a national television audience. The phenomenon of her unprecedented success provoked NBC to cut into its baseball broadcast the following week to cover her fifth consecutive win at the Bankers Trust Classic in Rochester, New York.

The week following her record five straight wins, Lopez played in the Lady Keystone Open in Hershey, Pennsylvania, traditionally a smaller LPGA event, but made into an all-out media affair by Lopez's presence. Overwhelmed by press interviews, television appearances, and sponsor-backed events, she played terribly, shooting over par all three rounds. Yet Lopez, who had developed a wonderfully friendly relationship with the media, also had a special rapport with the fans. As she walked to the eighteenth green she was fifteen strokes behind eventual winner Pat Brady, but still the gallery roared. Cynthia Anzolut, who ran the Lady Keystone Open, told Golf World, "I think they still thought she could win it. She walked on water as far as they were concerned.… The people just loved her."

Exhaustion wasn't the only thing distracting Lopez in Pennsylvania. One of her hundreds of interviews during the week was with a young sportscaster named Tim Melton. By the third round, Lopez was deeply in love, and the two were married six months later. Lopez was on the top of the world. "I couldn't think ahead," she recalled in Sports Illustrated. "I was just so excited. I was being interviewed by so many people, and all of a sudden I was making so much money. I was in awe, and I was enjoying it all so much." After ending her five-tournament winning streak, Lopez followed with seven top ten finishes, winning two more tournaments before the season's end. In all, during 1979 she won nine tournaments and took home over $200,000, setting a record for LPGA earnings.

She was named as both the LPGA Rookie of the Year and the LPGA Player of the Year and, with a per-round average of 71.76, won the Vare Trophy, given annually to the player with the lowest scoring average. She was also named the Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year. Lopez continued her storybook career into her second year on the tour, winning a remarkable eight of nineteen tournaments. She was once again named the LPGA Player of the Year and again won the Vare Trophy.

Slumps Then Rebounds

By 1981 Lopez's life, namely her marriage, was crumbling around her. Her relationship with Melton was not withstanding the demands of travel and her celebrity status. She gained weight, and at just five-feet, four-inches, she ended up at over 160 pounds. After three years of marriage, Lopez and Melton divorced in 1983. During these difficult times, she found a friend in her future husband, baseball player Ray Knight.

Lopez first met Knight while on tour in Japan at the same time that Knight was playing in a goodwill exhibition game. Later, after Melton took a job in Cincinnati, he and Knight, who then played for the Cincinnati Reds, became friends. In an odd coincidence, Melton was hired by a station in Houston about the same time that Knight was traded to the Houston Astros. Eventually Lopez and Knight, who was working through his own painful divorce, became close companions. "We started talking about my problems with my marriage, and we realized that we were alike," Lopez explained to People Weekly. "He had been devastated. So was I. I was playing poorly, and Ray could relate to that because he went into a hitting slump when he got his divorce. I really needed somebody because my family wasn't there. The only thing I could rely on was Ray as my friend, helping me through tough times." Friendship eventually turned to romance, and the two were married in October 1983.

Although she won a dozen tournaments between 1980 and 1984, Lopez's megastar status faded. Her naturally smooth swing abandoned her, and suddenly her game was not coming easy. Lopez's unhappiness prior to her divorce was being played out every weekend on the golf course. The tides turned for Lopez after her marriage to Knight and the birth of their first daughter in 1984. In 1985, she won five tournaments including the LPGA Championship and won Player of the Year honors as well as the Vare Trophy for the third time in her career. Sitting out all but four tournaments in 1986 to have her second child, Lopez returned to the tour full-time in 1987.

Related Biography: Baseball Player Ray Knight

Ray Knight was born and raised in Albany, Georgia, in a close-knit family. His father, who supervised the recreational facilities for the parks department, began playing baseball with him when he was just two years old. Knight joined the Cincinnati Reds farm system after attending Albany Junior College. Replacing Pete Rose at third base in 1979, he was named the team's most valuable player.

Traded to the Houston Astros in 1983, Knight struggled with injuries. While playing in the minor leagues he had been hit by pitches twice. One pitch broke his cheek bone; the other hit him in the temple and he spent four days in intensive care. By 1986 Knight had undergone five surgeries and had suffered kidney stones, a variety of pulled muscles, and bone chips in his throwing arm. To top it all off, in 1984 he began suffering bouts of vertigo. Benched then traded to the New York Mets in late 1984, Knight struggled through 1985. In 1986 a change in his stance at the plate revived his bat, and he earned comeback player of the year honors. He was also named the most valuable player of the 1986 World Series, in which he batted .371 with one homerun and five runs-batted-in.

Knight played in Baltimore in 1987 and in Detroit in 1988 before retiring. He served as the manager, albeit with little success, of the Reds for two seasons, 1996 and 1997. After his retirement he spent more time on tour with Lopez and served as her caddy for a time.

In 1987, Lopez earned her thirty-fifth tournament title at the Sarasota Classic, where she had her first career win in 1978, qualifying her for the LPGA Tour Hall of Fame. She was inducted as the Hall's eleventh member on July 20, 1987. The following year Lopez won three tournaments and was, for the fourth time in her career, named Player of the Year. She also topped $2 million in earnings, only the fourth LPGA player to do so. In 1989 she again won three tournaments and in 1990 became only the second player in LPGA history to earn more than $3 million. Sitting out most of 1991 to have her third child, Lopez returned in 1992 to win two tournaments.

Moves Toward Retirement

As Lopez moved through the 1990s, age, injuries, and shifting responsibilities began impacting her game. After winning one tournament in 1993, Lopez did not finish first again until 1997, when she posted her forty-eighth, and last, career win at the Chick-fil-A Charity Championships. One of the most celebrated women in golf, Lopez never won a U.S. Open championship, although she finished second four times in her twenty-one appearances. In 1997 she missed a fifteen-foot birdie putt on the eighteenth green in the final round and lost by one stroke to Alison Nicholas, despite being the only woman to break 70 in all four rounds, posting scores of 69-68-69-69.

Lopez underwent knee surgery in 1999 and gall bladder surgery in 2000, which limited her play through the next several years. During 2002 she failed to make a single cut. With nagging knee problems and three growing daughters at home, Lopez retired after the 2002 season. She ended her career as a perennial fan favorite, with forty-eight tournament wins and over $5 million in earnings. Lopez has been credited for the increased popularity of the LPGA, which has resulted in an astonishing increase in purses. In 1978 Lopez was awarded $22,500 for her LPGA Championship victory. Twenty years later, first place netted $195,000—approximately what Lopez made during her entire nine-win rookie year. Lopez and her family live in Albany, Georgia, her husband's hometown.

SELECTED WRITINGS BY LOPEZ:

(With Peter Schwed) The Education of the Woman Golfer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.

(With Don Wade) Nancy Lopez's The Complete Golfer. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1987.

Awards and Accomplishments

1976	Named All-American and University of Tulsa's Female Athlete of the Year
1978	Wins LPGA Championship; named LPGA Rookie of the Year
1978-79	Named LPGA Player of the Year; awarded Vare Trophy
1985	Wins LPGA Championship; named LPGA Player of the Year; awarded the Vare Trophy
1987	Inducted into the LPGA Hall of Fame
1989	Wins LPGA Championship; inducted into the Professional Golf Association (PGA) World Golf Hall of Fame
1997	Receives the Hispanic Heritage Award
2002	Receives PGA of America's PGA First Lady of Golf Award

The Complete Golfer. New York: Galahad Books, 2000.

Nancy Lopez

Nationally Ranked Amateur

Sensational Rookie Year

Chronology

Slumps Then Rebounds

Related Biography: Baseball Player Ray Knight

Moves Toward Retirement

SELECTED WRITINGS BY LOPEZ:

Awards and Accomplishments

FURTHER INFORMATION

Books

Periodicals

Other