A New Star Lights Women's Golf

Despite a quirky swing, Nancy Lopez is the pro to beat

It began as a frolic in the grass for seven-year-old Nancy Lopez, tagging along behind her parents on weekend outings at the Roswell, N. Mex., public golf course. After a year of child's play, Nancy borrowed one of her mother's clubs and started to swipe at the ball. While her father, a self-taught 3-handicap golfer, trudged up the fairways, Nancy stayed behind, as she recalls, "hitting and hitting and hitting, struggling to stay ahead of the next group of grownups." Tournament golf knows no pressure greater than that on a skinny eight-year-old girl sandwiched between adults on a busy public links. The tough training paid off. "Pretty soon, Daddy saw my ball rolling past his feet. He told my mother, 'Maybe Nancy can really play.' "

No longer is there any maybe about it. At 21, Nancy Lopez is the hottest young golfer in the pro ranks. In eleven tournaments on the Ladies Professional Golf Association circuit, she has finished in the top ten seven times, beginning with a runner-up mark in her first competition, the 1977 U.S. Open. This spring she won two tournaments in a row before finishing second last week to South Africa's Sally Little in a sudden-death play-off at the Kathryn Crosby-Honda Civic Classic in San Diego. Long off the tee, extraordinarily accurate around the green and a superb putter, Lopez is the young season's leading money winner--$47,317--and is the favorite in this weekend's Colgate-Dinah Shore Winners Circle tournament, the L.P.G.A.'s richest ($240,000) event.

Lopez is only one star in a burgeoning galaxy of young players--such as Hollis Stacy, 24; Amy Alcott, 22; and last year's Rookie of the Year, Debbie Massey, 27--who have flocked to the recently rejuvenated L.P.G.A. tour. The traditional lack of college athletic scholarships for women and new infusions of prize money--purses have doubled since 1975 to $3.4 million this year--tend to make top women amateur golfers into pros earlier than their male counterparts. The rising stars have done their growing up on the professional circuit and in the process have honed themselves into nerveless competitors while still in their teens and early 20s. The result is an aggressive, charging style of play that threatens to leave some of the tour's conservative veterans by the wayside. Says one longtime observer: "When I watched the L.P.G.A. ten years ago, it seemed that almost everyone played long putts short and safe. Now with the young ones, when they miss a putt, the ball is on the other side of the hole. They're trying for birdies."

Despite the presence of such galvanizing players as Babe Zaharias, Mickey Wright, Patty Berg, Betsy Rawls and Kathy Whitworth, the L.P.G.A. struggled for 25 years as the stepsister of professional sports. The players themselves tended to details like preparing the course for tournament play and dividing purses. Hall of Fame Golfer Rawls, now tournament director of the L.P.G.A., recalled: "When I turned pro in 1951, there were just 15 or 20 of us. We had to do everything ourselves. I used to go out the day before a tournament, mark the ground under repair, set the tees, stake and rope off the course. The next day I went out and played golf." In 1975, with the L.P.G.A. near bankruptcy and its system of self-government under attack in the courts on conflict-of-interest charges, its management passed to professional marketing and public relations experts, who have put the sport into the big time.

The emergence of Nancy Lopez parallels the L.P.G.A.'s slow climb to respectability. Daughter of a onetime farm laborer, she learned the game without benefit of professional advice. Like Lee Trevino, her swing is nonclassic but smooth; she compensates for an untutored backswing by adjusting the club face during the downswing. Sacrilege, but it works. She entered her first tournament, an upstart public-links player in a country-club sport, at the age of nine and made the other kids look like kids. Her father, then in the auto repair business, worked overtime to finance her tournament trips.

With her winning game and winsome smile ("That's what I do when I get excited--I smile"), Nancy became a terror to other amateurs and a favorite of the galleries. She won eight major amateur titles before entering Tulsa University on a golf scholarship. While a collegian, Lopez won the N.C.A.A. title and played on America's Curtis Cup and World Amateur teams. Still there were snubs: "Because I was a Mexican, there were a lot of Anglos in Roswell who weren't ready to accept the kind of golf I was playing. Now a lot of them like to say they are my friends. But I don't feel I owe them my friendship because they didn't give me theirs when I was young. My parents gave me all the chances I ever needed."

Shortly after Lopez's brilliant debut last summer, her mother died of complications following an appendectomy, and the golfer withdrew from the tour. She returned at year's end and started a string of under-par rounds that dazzled galleries often swollen by proud crowds of Mexican Americans. With a full touring schedule ahead of her--30 weeks of strange cities--she is postponing marriage to Fiance Ron Benedetti, a former Tulsa University baseball star. Her father and her sister Delma occasionally join Lopez for big tournaments, but most of the time she travels alone now, eating in her room and getting to sleep early when she is scheduled to play the next day. And when, in the pros' parlance, a golfer can ''play the game" like Nancy Lopez, sleepless nights are for the competition.

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