When Patty Sheehan was 16 years old, she played nine holes with future World Golf Hall of Fame member Susie Berning and 1969 Masters champion and NCGA Hall of Famer George Archer. Sheehan met Berning, a three-time U.S. Women’s Open champion, at Hidden Valley Country Club, her home course in Reno, and would sit behind her and watch her hit balls. After their round together, both Berning and Archer shared a common piece of advice: She’d never accomplish anything in golf until she changed her grip.
Sheehan rushed off to tell her pro at the time, Ed Jones, that she had to weaken her grip. For the next six months, she practiced her grip – from the steering wheel of her car to her ski pole when she went skiing – she concentrated on getting comfortable with how she held the club. It took 15 months but it changed everything.
“It was probably the single-most important piece of advice that I ever got,” Sheehan says. “I worked hard at it but that was the deal and then I learned how to hit the ball both ways.”
Did she ever. She blossomed into a member of the LPGA and World Golf Hall of Fame (and NCGA’s too), winning six majors among her 35 LPGA Tour victories in a career that doesn’t get enough respect.
Sheehan started swinging a golf club at the tender age of 3-years-old when her father put a sawed-off two-iron in her hands, and she and her three older brothers traipsed after their parents at the course.
"It just happened because my parents couldn't afford to have babysitters come and take care of us,” Sheehan says. “My parents went out to play golf, so we went with them."
But growing up, she seemed destined for greatness as a skier. Her father, Butch, owned a ski shop in Vermont and coached the Middlebury College team as well as serving as an Olympic ski team coach in 1956. His hobby was woodwork and he made skis for Sheehan and her brothers, who all picked up the sport quickly. By age 13, Sheehan was ranked as the No. 1 downhill skier for her age in the country. But shortly after the family moved to California – first to Tahoe for a job her father took at Alpine Meadows Ski Resort and then across the Nevada border to Reno, Sheehan gave up her dream of being an Olympic ski racer to pursue golf at the age of 14. Keeping up with her brothers set a high bar. High school happened to coincide with Title IX being passed in 1972 and she and some girlfriends decided to form their own golf team. En route to winning three state high school titles in Nevada (1972-74) and then dominating the Nevada Women’s Amateur (1975-78), Sheehan’s competitive juices began flowing but she still didn’t think she was very good until she tested her game against the talent in neighboring California.
“So I went down to Pebble Beach for the 1977 Cal Women’s Amateur and I didn’t know anybody and nobody had a clue who I was either. They were wondering where this girl from Nevada came from. It was pretty funny,” she says. “I was totally under the radar.”
But not for long. This is where Sheehan met Juli (Simpson) Inkster for the first time as opponents in a match that required 19 holes before Sheehan pulled it out. [She’d win the title in 1977 and ’78.] But their personalities meshed that day and became entwined a couple of years later when they spent a year as college teammates at San Jose State after Sheehan transferred from University of Nevada-Reno. They pushed each other to get better and after Sheehan won the individual title at the 1980 AIAW National Championship, Sheehan asked Inkster if she should turn pro.
“Yeah, you should,” Inkster said. “What else are you going to do?”
As pros, they remained close. They weren’t seated together at the third game of the 1989 World Series at Candlestick Park in San Francisco but when Northern California was rocked by a devastating earthquake and Sheehan and partner Rebecca weren’t able to get home, they spent the night at the Inksters’ place. Sheehan lost her home in Santa Cruz, her trophies and other worldly possessions and nearly all of her life savings. When she moved back to Reno and closed out her bank accounts in November 1989, she discovered she had only $2,000 to her name.
However, when you grow up as a downhill skier, you learn how to pick yourself up. Thanks to a mild winter in Reno, she practiced more than three hours a day for the following LPGA season. The golf course was her salvation, the one place where her mind was at ease. With bills to pay, she won the first tournament of the 1990 season in Jamaica and five times in all, earning more than $732,000 that season, enough to pay off her debts and buy a new house in Reno. After falling short in heartbreaking fashion multiple times at the U.S. Women Open, including squandering an 11-stroke lead in 1990, Sheehan defeated Inkster of all people in an 18-hole playoff at Oakmont in 1992 to win the title she so desperately wanted, and made her final victory as a pro a major at the 1996 Nabisco Dinah Shore.
“I always respected Patty Sheehan for the beautiful swing that she has. Her swing is like one piece,” says fellow LPGA great Nancy Lopez. “When she takes the club back, it’s just so smooth and compact really. She doesn’t overswing. When she takes a good turn, you see a tight coil in her swing and then when she drives through the ball the leg use that she has – people don’t realize that legs are a big part of the swing and help people hit the ball a lot farther.”
Sheehan retired from the LPGA in 2001, and she and Rebecca adopted two children, Bryce and Blake.
“I became an instant parent and that became my full-time job,” Sheehan says. “I didn’t deal with retirement very well the first five or six years. I kept thinking I really want to be out there playing but I can’t because I have this responsibility. I had to do a lot of self-talk to get through that but then it was just so much fun. You don’t get these opportunities to be with your kids for very long so you’d better make the best of it, and I did.
“We lived on about five acres and I did a lot of the work. I had a 1,000-square-foot vegetable garden and I loved growing vegetables and the kids would come and help me. They didn’t like to eat the vegetables but they would come dig in the dirt and stuff. They grew up fast. [Both are in their mid-to-late 20s.] We’ve got great kids and they call every day. It’s the best thing I ever did.”
Sheehan bounces around these days from her main home in Santa Barbara, a condo in Palm Springs and still keeps a cabin in Tahoe for the summertime. She compares it to always being on vacation except she gets to sleep in her own bed. “I’m a quiet person, I guess,” she says. “I kind of hang out a lot at home.”
She serves as honorary chairperson of the First Tee Reno and supports scholarships to the University of Nevada Women’s team – “they’re so much better than I ever was,” she says of the girls – but still makes time to practice four times a week and play at least twice. She prefers to play at municipal courses where she finds it’s more likely she won’t be recognized as Sheehan, the Hall of Fame golfer, and can blend in and just play golf.
“I don’t have any desire to compete but I still love to play golf and I love to make birdies and shoot good scores, which doesn’t happen all that often anymore,” she says.
Much as she did in her junior days after receiving the most important piece of advice from two NorCal legends, Sheehan has got a good grip on life and she looks back at her career as a professional golfer with gratitude for all the friends she made along the way.
“That’s what I miss about the Tour — I miss the people. I miss playing really well, too, that I do miss, but I’m proud of the friends that I’ve made and good people that come out of golf. They’re really wonderful folks, and they try to help other people, especially the ones that teach golf, it’s their passion. They want to help people play better. It’s just a really wholesome, wonderful group of people and I’m proud to have been part of it.”