Q&A: Patty Sheehan on the best advice she was ever given, winning the U.S. Women's Open (at last) and victory cartwheels

Patty Sheehan was my favorite female golfer growing up, and it wasn’t even close. Somewhere in a box of childhood treasures I still have the autograph she signed for me at the LPGA’s JAL Big Apple Classic but I don’t need it handy to remember the way it made me feel when she smiled and thanked me for coming out and told me to keep swinging.

Like Payne Stewart, she wore knickers, played with a swagger that let you know she would kill to get her hands on that week’s trophy and boy, could she putt. Sheehan, 67, won six majors and 35 LPGA tournaments during a Hall of Fame career.

Thirty years ago, she won the second of her two U.S. Women's Open titles, which might be all the proof required that she was a gritty competitor. I might be a tad biased as a longtime member of her fan club but she’s become the Rodney Dangerfield of the women’s game – like the comedian before her, she gets no respect.

For whatever reason, the stars of her era – fellow Hall of Fame members Betsy King, Beth Daniel, Pat Bradley, Amy Alcott among them – don’t get the love they deserve perhaps because their career win totals are so similar, or maybe due to limited media coverage, or the fact that Nancy Lopez was America's sweetheart. (Lopez did win 13 more times than Sheehan but her three majors are half of Sheehan's six.) 

Regardless, Sheehan doesn’t seem to be losing much sleep over it; indeed, I sensed she prefers being under the radar. She knows she had her days in the sun and how great she was and that’s all that matters to her. One of the most telling answers in this wide-ranging Q&A happened to be at the end when she was asked what she’s most proud of from her career.

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It wasn’t her U.S. Women’s Open titles, although she’s quite proud of them, but rather the people she met along the way, the friendships she made in the game that left the largest impression. Patty Sheehan left a big impression on me, too.

GWK: How did a multiple U.S. Women's Open champ influence your career?

PS: I met Susie Berning at my course in Reno at Hidden Valley Country Club, and she had just won her third U.S. Open, and she lived up at Lake Tahoe. So she would come down during the wintertime a little bit and practice at my club. I would watch her a lot. I would sit behind her and watch her hit balls. Then I'd watch her putt. She was intriguing to me because she was so tiny. I don't think I'm any bigger than she is. I really kind of was relating to her, what she had done, to me and how great she was. She was really an inspiring figure in my life.  At 16 I got to play with her and George Archer at Hidden Valley. I played nine holes with them.  After the round they both came up to me and talking to me about what I could do to probably make my game better, and they said, you know you'll never do anything in golf until you change your grip because I had a really strong grip. I went straight to my pro, Ed Jones, and I told him, I've got to change my grip. I can't play golf like this anymore. I have to change my grip. So he changed it for me.  For like the next six months or so, I would do everything practicing my grip. I would drive a car and grip the steering wheel with this new grip. I would go skiing, and I'd practice my new grip with my ski poles. Everything that I did, I seemed to concentrate on trying to make this new grip comfortable, which was really uncomfortable for me. It took a long time, but eventually I got there.  It was probably the single most important piece of advice that I ever got. 

GWK: All these years later, is winning the U.S. Women's Open at Oakmont what you consider the pinnacle of your career?  

PS: It certainly was something that I'd always wanted to do is to win the U.S. (Women's) Open, and it was always so difficult because it's the hardest golf course we play all year long. I'm not typically a very straight driver of the ball.  I don't think I had the best short game, but I worked on it very hard a lot at home, and I would try to find the most difficult shots around the golf course and try to hit them. Tried to feel a little more comfortable with my short game, and it started getting better. It really was amazing how much better it got. Honestly, that's probably one of the reasons why I won at Oakmont because I was not hitting a lot of greens in regulation and having easy pars. That just doesn't happen at Oakmont.

When I got to Oakmont on that Monday of tournament week, my caddie, Carl Leib, had already been there for like two weeks trying to figure out the golf course and watching members play. He really did his homework. It was one of those weeks where we had a lot of rain. A lot of rain at Oakmont makes it just miserable because you've got thick rough, high rough, and now they can't get in there and mow it. It was getting harder day by day. Carl said, this is the deal. It's supposed to rain here this week, and we're going to hit a lot of 3-woods off the tees, try to stay in the fairway and try to hit as many greens as we can. This is a beast of a golf course. He really had it mapped out for me, and I was really impressed with his homework. It was a combination of working pretty hard on my short game for years and then getting Carl as my caddie and him doing all of his pregame work. It all came together that week.  I was pretty happy that it did because two years before that I lost the Open. I shouldn't have lost it, but I did. I got hypoglycemic on Sunday, and we were playing 36 holes in Atlanta. July is never fun.  It's hot and humid and horrible. So I got pretty sick that Sunday.  At one point, I was up by 12 shots, and I ended up losing. So it hurt quite a bit, and I learned a lot from that. So coming back a couple years later and being able to get it open under my belt was probably the biggest turning point in getting to the Hall of Fame.  I think the Hall of Fame is probably the pinnacle of my career, but winning the U.S. Open was definitely a turning point for me. I felt like, after I got an Open under my belt, that I could probably get into the Hall of Fame because at that point I'd had quite a few tournament wins. 

GWK: What did you learn about yourself the week you blew the big lead at the 1990 U.S. Women's Open? 

PS: I learned that I needed to pay attention to my nutrition. For some reason, I didn't pay much attention to my nutrition throughout my career until that point, and I know that I lost many tournaments because I was not eating properly or drinking enough on the golf course. I cleaned up my act quite a bit and started realizing that, oh, yeah, I can get through 18 holes without crashing at 13 or 14 or 15, which is basically what I would do almost every round. I never really gave it much thought. I just thought, well, shoot, I just need to work out more, I need to get in better shape. That wasn't it at all. I was in pretty good shape. Just didn't have the fuel on board to get through 18 holes. 

GWK: How did the cartwheel become your signature thing? 

PS: When I won my first tournament over in Japan in 1981, it was a cold day and I won the tournament by four shots, and the last hole I made a long putt from off the green, and I don't know what happened. I was so excited, I just did a cartwheel, and ever since then, people sort of — especially in Japan, they thought I was a gymnast or something. They kept wanting me to do cartwheels. 

But that's the only one I ever did there, and then my last tournament — so I won my first tournament in Japan and did a cartwheel and won my last tournament at the Dinah Shore and I did a round-off, and those were the only two tournaments that I did that. I did do a round-off when we won the Solheim Cup, when I was captain of the Solheim Cup in 2002, but that was after I really had stopped playing competitive golf. 

GWK: What have you poured your competitive juices into since retiring? 

PS: Well, I retired, and I adopted two children, daughter Bryce, and our son is Blake, so I became an instant parent, and that's what I poured myself into after I retired. Just being a good parent and being there for my kids. That was it. That was my full-time job. It worked out well except I didn't deal with retirement very well. I kept thinking I really want to be out there playing, but I can't because I now have this responsibility. It was a little bit difficult the first five or six years after I retired, but then it just was so much fun, and I had to do a lot of self-talk there, too, just to get through that. You don't get these opportunities to be with your kids very long, and you'd better make the best of it.  So I did.  

We've got great kids, and they call every day. They're 25 and 26 years old. They call every day, and we talk every day. It's the best thing I ever did. 

GWK: Have you discovered new hobbies in your post-golf life?  

PS: You know, it's funny, when I lived in Reno with the family, I had a thousand-square-foot vegetable garden, and I loved growing vegetables and having the kids come and help me. They didn't like to eat the vegetables, but they would come and dig in the dirt and stuff. That was probably a big hobby for me because I was able to be at home and eat some good food.

We had about five acres, so it was a lot of work to take care of this place. I didn't hire really anybody early on to help me deal with it. I did a lot of the work myself. I guess that was my new hobby — just taking care of the house and mowing the lawn and dealing with the pasture. I had irrigated water, so I had to deal with ditches and make sure they weren't clogged up with mud or whatever. It was like living on a farm. 

GWK: How often do you play golf these days?  

PS: So it depends on where I am. When I'm in Palm Springs, I like to get out and at least practice four times a week. I like to play at least two, maybe three times a week. But I don't compete anymore. 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. I did shoot 74 on the tournament course at Mission Hills here a couple days ago, so that was pretty good. 

GWK: What did it mean to you to be one of eight 'athletes that care' recipients of the 1987 Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year (in your case for helping abused girls)?

PS: That was incredible. At that time I was doing a lot with my charity in Santa Cruz, and I would go and spend some time with the girls that were in the house that I donated to the charity. So that was cool. I got to go meet President Reagan and be in the Oval Office and have a state dinner with him. Sat at his table actually. That was a big deal. 

I got to meet all those other great athletes that I was on the cover with. I didn't know any of them, so meeting all these people that have done amazing things, way more amazing than I ever did, that was really a treat for me. There aren't many people that get to be on the cover of SI, let alone for something that wasn't — it wasn't a tournament win.  It was something else and something different and something a lot bigger than me. That meant a lot to me.  

GWK: What do you feel is your strongest connection to the game these days?  

PS: I am involved in the First Tee in Reno still as an honorary board member. We're building a huge project up there, and that's going to be really amazing.  So we have a tournament up there, and we have fundraisers and things for that.  

They're taking over a golf course, and they're redesigning it and turning it into a First Tee headquarters there in Reno. They've got one of the best First Tee organizations of all of the First Tees that you could find. Now they have an opportunity to build their own course and three-tiered driving range. They're going to support the Nevada men's and women's golf teams. It's just going to be spectacular up there. So that's really a cool thing that I'm excited about. 

A friend of mine that I played high school golf with, Robin Rose, she and I support scholarship money for the Nevada women's golf team. That's fun. Spending time with the young players and watching how good they are, they're so much better than I ever was. It's just amazing to watch.  So that's cool.  

I've also got a foundation, the Patty Sheehan foundation, and we give money to various organizations and support women and children in different aspects, and we try to choose different charities every year so that we kind of spread it around a little bit. 

GWK: When you look back, what are you most proud of from your golf career? 

PS: I think I'm most proud of the friends that I've made. That's what I miss about the Tour is I miss the people. I don't miss the competition. I miss playing really well. That I do miss. But I'm proud of just the friends that I've made and the good people that come out of golf. They're really wonderful folks, and they try to help other people. They try to help — 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.