INKSTER,

BY DOUG FERGUSON

IT WAS ONLY ONE MOMENT among a million in golf for Juli Inkster, and yet it captured so much of who she is.

Inkster was in the twilight of her career—a term used loosely for someone with her endless passion to compete—when at age 47 she was in the thick of contention on the back nine. At stake was a chance to become the LPGA Tour’s oldest winner. She was battling with Paula Creamer, slightly older than Inkster’s own daughter. The real opponent was her putter. So when Inkster left a 30-foot birdie attempt some 5 feet short of the hole, she wandered offthe side of the green, turned her back and appeared to be engaged in an animated conversation with a tree.

At the back of the green stood her caddie, Worth Blackwelder, watching this unfold with a grim expression.

“My player wants it so bad that she’s trying too hard,” Blackwelder whispered in his rich Carolina accent. “I told her back on the tee, ‘Juli, this is easy. Think of something hard you’ve done in your life, like having two kids.’ She looked at me and said, ‘Worth, I’d rather be in labor right now.’ ”

The grind. The high standards. The competition. The children. Above all, her children.

That Sunday at Cedar Ridge in Tulsa, Oklahoma, did not end favorably for Inkster. She poured in an 18-foot birdie putt on the finalhole to force a playoff,only for Creamer to beat her with a birdie on the second playoffhole. As it turned out, the last of her 31 titles on the LPGA came two years earlier, adding to her seven major championships, the career Grand Slam, a spot in the World Golf Hall of Fame and the Bob Jones Award, the USGA’s highest honor.

All the while, she gave equal time, equal effort,equal intensity to being the wife of a PGA professional and the mother of two daughters. Which is why she was making French toast for Hayley and Cori on the Sunday morning of the 1999 LPGA Championship before going out to DuPont Country Club and producing an eagle-birdie-birdie finis to pull away and become only the fourth woman at the time with the career Grand Slam.

There was that time Cori’s fever spiked in Portland. Inkster took her to the emergency room, and her temperature finallycame down about three hours before her 8:30 a.m. tee time. Inkster doesn’t remember what she shot that day. Odds are it was one of the few times it didn’t matter to her.

The best American LPGA player of her generation or a Hall of Fame mother?

The latter is what made Inkster’s voice crack when she was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame and said, “The pride of our lives is not the Grand Slam or the trophies. It’s our two daughters. We never thought we could love two people as much as we love them. I want to thank them for letting me be their mother and letting me do what I love to do. And that’s play a little golf.”

What made it so personal, and at times so conflicing, was her background. Her father was a firemanwho worked other jobs on his days away from the station. Her mom stayed at home, raising Inkster and two brothers. They were never apart. Being a tour professional doesn’t allow for such a lifestyle, and Inkster was determined as ever to make it work. And she did.

“I take more pride in traveling and playing and having kids. And not only having kids, being able to share it with them,” she said. “They were old enough to know what I did. They saw a lot of my wins and Solheim Cups. They knew how much golf meant and how hard I worked. And it rubbed offon them. They’re super hard workers. They’re great with people. I just figuredif I was going to do this, I was going to do it as a mom, and be a viable mom.”

Away from the LPGA Tour, she coached basketball (remarkably getting only one technical foul for arguing with refs). She volunteered in the school library. She had hot meals on the table and hosted sleepovers. She was a chaperone on field trips

“I didn’t want to be Juli the golfer,” she said. “I wanted to be Hayley’s and Cori’s mom.”

And she could play a little golf. For her excellence on the course and contributions offit, Inkster has been chosen Honoree for the 49th edition of the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday. The award seems quite appropos considering that Workday is presenting sponsor of an award in Inkster’s name—the Juli Inkster Award, given to the topranked female golfer who has completed her fourth year of eligibility.

As to her accomplishments juggling mom and golf duties, Inkster won 13 times and three majors before Hayley was born. She won twice in the four years until Cori was born, and then she won 16 times and four more majors to finishout a remarkable career.

“She really had two differentcareers,” said her husband

Although Juli Inkster didn’t take up golf until she was 15 years old, she earned a spot on her high school’s boy’s golf team and was given a scholarship to San Jose State University.

Brian, the head professional at Los Altos Country Club in California.

That golf was not in her DNA from the start is only shocking because of the location. Inkster, who was into just about every sport, grew up in a house along the 14th fairway at Pasatiempo Golf Club, the magnificentAlister Mackenzie design in Santa Cruz, California. And yet no one in the house played golf. Imagine living on the North Shore of Oahu and never going to the beach. Even picking up a club for the first time required a twist of fate.

“At 15 we had to get jobs,” Inkster said. “My oldest brother worked in a liquor store stocking shelves, and my other brother got a job working in golf course maintenance. One of my friends worked up there at the club, and that’s how I got into golf.”

She also saw enough cute guys that she figuredit would be a good place to hang out and earn some cash by parking carts and picking the range.

“The pro shop was pretty close, and so I got some clubs from the back room,” Inkster recalls. “They were nice enough to give me some lessons. I improved pretty quickly, and that was it.”

She makes it all sound so simple. The golf took a lot of work. As for those cute guys? “I married one of them,” Inkster said with a laugh.

Brian Inkster gave PGA TOUR Q-school one shot. He went to work as an assistant pro at a club that made it feel like a thankless job. He tried the insurance business and was miserable. Golf was his passion, and as he left his brief stint in insurance, one of his colleagues (a scratch player) recommended he meet with English swing instructor Leslie King.

Brian took a two-month sabbatical to visit him before taking over at Pasatiempo. And then he started working with the girl who would become his wife. She was good enough to be invited to play on the boy’s golf team at Harbor High School and earn a scholarship to San Jose State. She was 20 when they married in 1980, and the honeymoon was going great except for the mention of golf.

The U.S. Women’s Amateur was at Prairie Dunes. Inkster was happily married and willing to sit this one out.

“We drove up to western Canada, went from Vancouver to Banff,a two-week drive,” Brian said. “We didn’t play any golf. She was going to leave for the Amateur and she said, ‘I don’t feel ready.’ She stunned me by saying that. I said,

Juli met her future husband Brian at Pasatiempo Golf Club, and the couple wed when she was 20 years old.

‘Don’t you dare. Your parents will kill me.’ They had sent the entry in two months before we got married. I said, ‘Juli, you have to play.’ ”

She practiced for a few days when they got home— by then, Brian had left Pasatiempo and was the head pro at Los Altos—and then Inkster headed to Kansas. She was a bundle of nerves, and not only because of the golf.

“I hadn’t been married a month, and I already lost my wedding ring,” she said.

Luckily, the ring was found in the parking lot. She worked her way through qualifying, getting a little better in each of the matches and beat Carole Semple Thompson in the semifinals, but not before needing treatment on the back nine for an insect bite while retrieving her ball from a plum bush. In the final against the hottest amateur in the summer of 1980, she took down Patti Rizzo.

And then she won another U.S. Women’s Amateur. And another. No one had ever won three straight U.S. Amateurs, male or female. Not Bob Jones. Not Jack Nicklaus. Tiger Woods famously won three in a row. He was only 6 when Inkster got her hat trick of Amateurs.

“She was Tiger before there was Tiger,” Beth Daniel said. “I don’t think she gets enough credit for that.”

Meg Mallon recalls being at Pumpkin Ridge in 1997 for the U.S Women’s Open, the site of Woods’ third straight U.S. Amateur win.

“They had a plaque that says, ‘Tiger Woods, the only player to win three U.S. Amateurs in a row.’ I get a sheet of paper and I write, ‘Male.’ And then I wrote that Juli Inkster won three Amateurs in a row,” Mallon said. “I put that over the plaque. The next day [the plaque] was gone.”

Inkster had made a name for herself. Along with those three straight U.S. Women’s Amateurs, she won the California Amateur and went 4-0 in the Curtis Cup (in which none of her matches went 18 holes). Still, she was a relative newcomer. She had started playing only seven years earlier, remarkable in its own right.

And then there was LPGA Q-school. The LPGA had two of editions in 1983, Florida in January and Texas in August. Inkster, despite coming offa third straight U.S. Amateur, didn’t make it past the firstattempt amid challenging conditions and a youthful mistake. She didn’t lose her wedding ring, only her contact lens.

“Brutal week,” said Brian, who caddied for her. “Who changes their contact lens when the wind is blowing? We looked for it a little bit. She didn’t have another one in the bag, so I gave the bag to someone in the gallery.”

He rushed back to their hotel and got a ticket for speeding. What a week. And the recovery wasn’t easy. This was the most celebrated amateur in women’s golf, and she couldn’t make it out of Q-school. Inkster eventually gathered herself, determined as always, and headed to Texas to try again in August. She was co-medalist.

Five starts later, she won her firstLPGA tournament in the Safeco Classic when Kathy Whitworth missed a 4-foot par putt on the last hole. Her firstfull season was even better. Inkster won her firstmajor at the Nabisco Dinah Shore in a playoffover Pat Bradley. The next victory of her rookie season was also a major, winning the du Maurier Classic over Ayako Okamoto. In fact, her firstfivewins were over players now in the Hall of Fame.

Inkster’s first win on the LPGA our was the 1983 Safeco Classic, shown here with the previous year’s winner, Patty Sheehan.

And then Hayley was born in early 1990. Two months after giving birth, Inkster tied for 11th in the Nabisco Dinah Shore. It wasn’t until July of the following year that she won again, and then it was a full year before the next win. Cori was born in the spring of 1994, and then Inkster wasn’t winning at all. She was a mother who had questions about how she was supposed to work and play.

“Down at the lesson tee at Los Altos, half the conversation was about Hayley and the other half was Juli’s golf swing,” Brian said.

They had pledged never to be apart for more than two weeks at a time and lived up to that, though it became tougher when the girls came along. The couple had mutual respect for the demands of their jobs.

“It was difficulat times,” Brian said. “In the summertime, it’s long days. I would say, ‘Juli, I can’t come out. It’s my nine-hole Ladies Invitation. It doesn’t sound big to you, but to those 40 women, it’s big.’ I took my job seriously, and they [Los Altos] were good to us. They let me travel with Juli. I never felt any pressure from Juli or from my membership to stay home. But I felt as a PGA pro I had to be there most of the time. That’s my job. Sitting here now, it worked.”

✶✶✶✶✶

HAYLEY AND CORI were growing, and “Jimmy Brown” was rolling.

“Because of the kids—and caddies didn’t flyaround that much—she had this big van, a brown Aerostar,” said Greg Johnston, her caddie for the majority of the second stage of her career. “We nicknamed it ‘Jimmy Brown’ because it would keep on running. I would drive this van all over the place with toys, kitchen stuff.She would stay at a Residence Inn so she could cook for the kids. I got to watch the girls grow up. They were in my wedding. They’re as close as family.”

Johnston was on the bag for 17 of her wins, including the biggest—her firstU.S. Women’s Open in 1999 at Old Waverly, a second U.S. Women’s Open when she took down Annika Sörenstam in 2002, back-to-back in the LPGA Championship and the Solheim Cups.

Cori is now 30 and living with her husband in the San Diego area. Hayley is 33, married and living in northern California.

“I’ve seen people who had children and what that did to their careers. It’s not easy to do. Any player will tell you that because all of a sudden, your mental focus is not 100 percent,”

LEFT: