The Inlander10%
Patty Berg’s historic win at the first-ever U.S. Women’s Open in 1946 cemented Spokane’s legacy in the world of women’s golf 2%
By Madison Pearson1%
7/30/2026, 1:30:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 7 faulty reasoning types, including Attempt to Sell a Product or Service, Biased Writer Voice, and Optimism Bias, with In-Group Bias as the most egregious example at 4.7% saturation with 182 hits. Analysis detected 638 faulty-reasoning hits from 3,856 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 8.3% and a BS Rank of 2% (24,727 of 25,180 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 98.20% of the article peer group.
It was Sunday, July 20, 1975.
Sandra Palmer, a then 10-time LPGA Tour winner, woke up after a restful night of sleep, knowing she had a chance to win the 30th U.S.
Women’s Open at Atlantic City Country Club.
After carding scores of 78, 74 and 71 in the first three rounds of the tournament and heading into the final round tied for the lead, she was ready to face the three other women putting up a fight in New Jersey that week: Sandra Post, the first Canadian to play on the LPGA Tour; Kirkland, Washington’s JoAnne “Big Mama” Carner; and a budding 18-year-old amateur from New Mexico, Nancy Lopez.
The U.S.
Open is a grueling test of golf.
Both the men’s and women’s editions of the tournament are notorious for narrow fairways, thick, overgrown rough, and fast greens — all challenges the victor must conquer in order to hoist the trophy come Sunday.
On the Monday before the 1975 U.S.
Women’s Open began, during primetime for players to practice and get a feel for the course, a rainstorm hit the area, making the 18-hole track play much harder and longer than expected.
That same morning, from the window of the cabin Palmer was staying in on the club’s property, she spotted a golfer and her caddie standing on the driving range.
The caddie had an umbrella out, and the golfer herself was in full rain gear, pounding ball after ball before the sun had even fully risen for the day.
“I thought, ‘Well, I better get out there,’” Palmer says.
“So I got my rainsuit on, took my place on the range with her and started my own practice for the day ahead of me.
Then I realized who it was.”
The mysterious golfer getting in some early morning practice was Patty Berg, a 60-time LPGA Tour winner, 15-time major winner and first president of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA).
At the time of the 30th U.S.
Women’s Open, Berg was 57 years old and hadn’t won a tournament in over 12 years.
But that didn’t stop her from honing her game at every opportunity.
“I thought, ‘If she could do it, then I could do it, too,’” Palmer says.
So the two of them stood in the pouring rain, working through every club in their bags, warming up physically and mentally for the start of the tournament on Thursday.
Berg would miss the 36-hole cut by two shots after carding two consecutive rounds of 80 on Thursday and Friday and wouldn’t compete for the remainder of the tournament.
But Berg’s Monday morning range session partner went on to win the U.S.
Women’s Open that Sunday by a margin of four strokes with a total score of +7.
Palmer credits Patty Berg for giving her the motivation on that fateful, soggy Monday morning.
In 1946, 29 years before Palmer’s win in New Jersey, Berg won a U.S.
Women’s Open of her own... in Spokane, Washington.
Despite still holding the record for most major championships in LPGA history, it was in the Lilac City where she would win her only U.S.
Open title.
Now, Berg is being celebrated in Spokane once again with a weekend-long event at Kalispel Country Club, the same course where she reigned victorious 80 years ago.
Jerid Keefer, board member of the Sunshine Club, a sports organization dedicated to raising awareness and funds for women and children in need through golf, came up with the idea for an anniversary event after pausing to look at a framed photo of Berg he’s passed many times in the Kalispel clubhouse.
That moment of pause led him to learn that the first U.S.
Women’s Open was held at the course he’s a member of, and how Spokane played a part in the storied history of women’s golf.
“It’s an opportunity for our community to kind of thump its chest a little bit,” Keefer says.
“Spokane has a way of doing remarkable things, and what this 80th anniversary allows us to do is honor our history, the legacy of the Athletic Round Table, and women in sports.”
The event, happening Aug. 7 and 8, features a junior clinic, an 18-hole tournament, a legends breakfast and a women’s leadership summit.
At the legends breakfast, attendees can brush elbows with World Golf Hall of Famers Nancy Lopez and Sandra Palmer.
Becky Calder, the first female pilot to graduate from the U.S.
Navy’s Top Gun flight program, will speak at the women’s leadership summit.
The Golf Channel’s School of Golf host Blair O’Neal will also share tips and tricks for young golfers at the junior clinic.
Keefer says the main goal of the event is to celebrate Spokane’s historic role, while also furthering the impact that golf can have on our community.
“We don’t currently have golf as a part of middle school curriculum here,” he says.
“I know golf is different than other sports — there are barriers to participation — but if there are youth in our community that want to pick up the game, we want to provide them with that opportunity.”
LAYING THE GROUNDWORK
Before Berg’s historic win at the 1946 tourney, there was no national open championship for women golfers.
Unlike the men’s game, which offered four major championships by that time, one of which was the U.S.
Open, the only opportunity women had to compete on a national stage was in the U.S.
Women’s Amateur.
“The lack of an open championship for women tracks with this notion that we didn’t really see women professionals in full force until the ’30s and ’40s,” says Elizabeth Beeck, exhibitions curator for the USGA Golf Museum and World Golf Hall of Fame.
“When the Women’s Professional Golfers Association (WPGA) was founded in 1944, one of their calls to action was to create an open championship of sorts.”
In 1944, the same year the WPGA was founded, the 26th edition of the PGA Championship (one of four men’s major tournaments) was held in Spokane at Manito Country Club.
The event was sponsored by the Athletic Round Table, a Spokane-based sports booster club headed by local attorney Joe Albi.
Just two years later, the WPGA and the Athletic Round Table came together to put on the inaugural U.S.
Women’s Open in 1946.
Held at the Spokane Country Club (now Kalispel Country Club), the tournament was contested from Aug. 26 to Sept. 1 and featured most, if not all, of the top women’s professional and amateur golfers at the time.
There would be four more U.S.
Women’s Opens held before the LPGA was founded in 1950 and six more before the USGA began conducting the event annually.
It’s the only event to have been recognized as a major since the founding of the LPGA.
It’s garnered notable champions such as World Golf Hall of Famer Mickey Wright, former world No.
1 Annika Sörenstam, Michelle Wie West (the youngest player to ever make the cut at a U.S.
Women’s Open) and, most recently, current world No.
1 Nelly Korda.
The Spokane Daily Chronicle reported the first U.S.
Women’s Open was initially set to be played at Manito Country Club in 1945, but was postponed as a result of a “transportation directive by the Office of Defense preventing players from making the trip” due to the Second World War.
“There is no record available that I can find detailing why the event was held in Spokane,” Beeck says.
“But it could be that the Athletic Round Table of Spokane was so willing to help sponsor it.”
LOCAL RULES
It’s no secret to those living in the area, but Spokane is a bit of a hidden gem when it comes to golf.
With about 15 courses within an hour of the city center, it’s a golfer’s paradise around here.
Having taught lessons at Manito Country Club and North Idaho’s The Golf Club at Black Rock, former LPGA player and teaching professional Wendy Ward always praises the Inland Northwest’s golf scene.
“Most people don’t know how to pronounce Spokane, let alone find it on a map,” Ward says.
“I have played some pretty incredible courses all over the world, and I liken the city and county courses to country clubs in other parts of the world.
There is so much variety in the golf around here.
There are tree-lined courses, links-y desert courses.
There’s a world of golf that I don’t think too many people realize exists up here.”
Ward, a three-time Solheim Cup player and four-time LPGA Tour winner, thinks most golfers in the region probably don’t realize Spokane’s historic impact on the game.
Beloved hometown celebrity Bing Crosby was a huge advocate for the game, hosting his own golf tournament called the Crosby Clambake at a number of courses on the Monterey Peninsula beginning in 1937.
The event is now a mainstay on the PGA Tour — renamed the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am — and is played each year as a signature event featuring the top 80 male golfers in the world.
Spokane once hosted a PGA Tour event called the Esmeralda Open at Indian Canyon Golf Course back in 1945 and 1947.
The event was also sponsored by the Athletic Round Table, and its professional winners included 1946 Masters winner Herman Keiser and Byron Nelson, the latter of whom is widely regarded as one of the best to ever pick up a club.
And from 2021 to 2023, Idaho’s Circling Raven Golf Club held the Circling Raven Championship, an event on the LPGA’s developmental Epson Tour.
“I’ve always thought that Spokane would be a great spot for a Legends Tour event or an LPGA tour stop,” Ward says.
“I know this community would love to support and see women’s golf like that.
It started here 80 years ago, and it would be neat to grow and build that into something special in the future.”
Patty Berg also spoke highly of Spokane’s golf courses.
In 1997, she returned to Spokane Country Club to help kick off the Washington Senior Women’s Tournament.
In an article published in the Spokesman-Review, she said of the venue: “I think all the girls who played with me never forgot this course.
It is one of the most beautiful I ever played on.”
WHO RUN THE WORLD?
(GIRLS)
In 1934, New York-born Helen Hicks became the first female professional golfer, signing with the Wilson Sporting Goods Company to promote their equipment.
Berg followed in her footsteps, turning professional in 1940 after winning 29 amateur titles and signing with Wilson.
Ten years after turning professional, Berg was one of 13 women to found the LPGA (alongside Hicks) and served as its first president until 1952.
“This was a really exciting time for women’s golf,” Beeck says.
“We were seeing these women become professionals, getting paid to become golfers, which was not, for lack of a better word, fashionable before then.”
Ahead of the inaugural U.S.
Women’s Open, storylines were already being created by golf fans and media about how the tournament would play out.
“Everybody was talking about Patty Berg and Babe Didrikson Zaharias,” Beeck says.
“They wanted a head-to-head battle between the best professional and America’s first female golf celebrity.”
Zaharias was an extremely gifted athlete.
Some labeled her as the best female athlete of all time, as she competed in boxing, track and field, basketball, baseball, and softball.
But she couldn’t make a living playing those sports, as there were no professional sports leagues for women at the time.
So she began playing competitive golf in 1935 at age 24 and formally went professional in 1947 after winning the British Ladies Amateur that year.
Berg and Zaharias had played in exhibition matches together quite frequently, but this was the first time they’d play in a competitive national tournament together, each hoping to capture the title for herself.
And luck was certainly on Patty Berg’s side that week in Spokane during the 1946 U.S.
Women’s Open.
CHANGING THE COURSE
The tournament followed a similar format to that of the men’s PGA Championship.
On the Monday and Tuesday before the event, the field of 39 women was reduced to 32 players through a 36-hole stroke play qualifier.
Put simply, the 32 best scores after playing Spokane Country Club twice through moved on to qualify for tournament play and a chance to win a portion of the purse: $19,700 in war bonds.
The rest of the tournament, however, would be contested in match play, a format in which golfers compete head-to-head for individual holes rather than counting total strokes.
For every hole players complete in fewer strokes than their opponent, they receive a point.
If the two players tie, the hole is halved and the score remains unchanged.
The game ends when one player leads by more holes than there are holes left to play on the course.
For example, if a player is “4 up with 3 holes to play,” the match is over, and they win “4&3.”
Paired with amateur Margaret Spear for the first 18-hole match of round one, Berg won 7&6.
Zaharias, on the other hand, was knocked out in the first round, losing to amateur Grace Lenczyk, who was three up with two holes to play.
The most impressive win of the day went to Betty Jameson, who won her match against Barbara Smith 9&8, having won nine of her first 10 holes and leaving nearly half of the course to be played another day.
After the first day of tournament play, 16 women remained, including future LPGA co-founder Helen Dettweiler and 20-year-old Spokane amateur golfer Betty Jean Rucker.
In round two, Berg beat Mary Mozel 5&3.
Hometown hero Rucker kicked Dettweiler out of competition, and Jameson won her match against Ann Casey 5&4.
The quarterfinals saw a battle of the Bettys with Rucker defeating professional Betty Hicks 5&4.
Berg and Jameson continued their dominance, with Berg beating fellow professional Jackie Pung 6&5 and Jameson defeating her opponent 8&6.
During the semi-finals, Jameson and Dot Kielty went tit-for-tat until Jameson went one up on the last hole to secure her spot in the finals.
Rucker, who the Spokane Daily Chronicle said “couldn’t be more the talk of the town if she were running for mayor,” faced off with Berg in the 36-hole semifinal round.
According to newspaper reports from that day, the gallery was full and locals were buzzing at the fact that the Spokane-grown golfer had a chance at beating the best in the world.
The pair went shot-for-shot to halve the first four holes with pars.
Then, Rucker began showing signs of struggling with her irons, overshooting greens and hitting a wayward shot into the trees on hole 13.
At the lunchtime halt, Rucker was two down and by the 28th hole, Berg was six up.
Rucker won the 30th, 31st and 33rd holes to cut the lead to 3&2, but Berg only needed to halve the 34th hole in order to win the match.
Rucker two-putted for a 5, and Berg hit a recovery shot from the rough and one-putted for a 4, securing herself a spot in the final matchup with her fellow professional and future LPGA Tour co-founder Jameson.
After playing golf for six days straight, Berg and Jameson stepped up to the first tee at Spokane Country Club on Sunday, Sept.
1.
At the end of the day, one of them would claim the very first U.S.
Women’s Open title and cement themself in golf history forever.
Berg trailed early, but her putter got hot and things were all square at the first turn.
She would be 4 up after 27 holes.
After the noon intermission, she never lost her lead and won 5&4 on the 32nd hole.
Berg made the long journey home to Minneapolis after a grueling week in Spokane, victorious and with $5,600 in war bonds in her pocket.
The winner’s share at the U.S.
Women’s Open was substantially less in the following years and wasn’t exceeded until 26 years later, in 1972.
At the tournament’s most recent playing, however, winner Nelly Korda took home $2.5 million after conquering Riviera Country Club and a field of the best players in the world.
“They never really played for a lot of money back then,” Palmer says.
“They played for the love of the game of golf.”
THE LONG GAME
Berg’s win was historic and marked a new era of women’s golf, but the work wasn’t over yet.
In 1950, Berg and 12 of her fellow pros came together to create the LPGA after the Women’s Professional Golf Association ceased all operations in 1949.
The State of New York issued a Certificate of Incorporation to the LPGA with five women signing the original charter: Patty Berg, Helen Dettweiler, Sally Sessions, Betty Jameson and Helen Hicks.
Finally, women professional golfers had a steady tour and a way to make a living playing golf.
The 13 founding members caravanned to tournaments together, appeared on television, and held clinics to spur interest in the tour and get more women on the course.
“They just did what they thought needed to be done to further the game,” says Debbie Waitkus, founder of Golf for Cause, a consultancy company which seeks to empower businesswomen through golf.
“And these were things that typically you wouldn’t think that a woman was capable of doing in those days.
You know, they were expected to be home, making babies and running households and things like that.”
Over the past six years, according to the National Golf Foundation, there’s been a 45% rise in the number of on-course female golfers.
Today, women and girls also make up a higher proportion of new golfers, including beginners and returning players.
In 2025, the National Golf Foundation reported that a record 28% of all on-course golfers were women and that over the six-year period the total number of women golfers increased to 8.1 million, the highest count on record.
Meanwhile, the male golfer population rose just 12% over that time — an increase of 2.3 million players.
“My husband has seen the eye rolls that happen when a woman walks up to the first tee and is paired with a group of men,” Waitkus says.
“But I know we can change one person at a time, and if we’re [convinced] about what it is that we believe in, we can make a difference.
There are so many organizations now, whether it’s Babes Golf, the Ladies Executive Golf Society, the LPGA Amateur Network or Women of Color Golf headed by Clemmie Perry — all of them are empowering women and saying, ‘You’re welcome here.’”
Waitkus was also close friends with LPGA co-founder Marilynn Smith up until Smith’s death in 2019.
She started the Marilynn Smith and Founders’ Legacy Foundation in order to share the history of the LPGA and cement its founders’ legacies in sports history.
“Their philosophy was we all play,” Waitkus says.
“We either all can stay here or none of us are staying here.
We all eat here, or none of us eat here.”
While Patty Berg’s illustrious career in professional golf is now the stuff of legend, there may not be another female golfer with a more dazzling amateur career than Nancy Lopez.
She captured the New Mexico Women’s Amateur title at age 12 in 1969 and the U.S.
Girls’ Junior in 1972 and 1974 at ages 15 and 17, respectively.
Right after graduating from Goddard High School in Roswell, she played in the 1974 and 1975 U.S.
Women’s Opens as an amateur, coming in tied for second place in 1975, the year Sandra Palmer raised the Harton S.
Semple Trophy at the U.S.
Open.
But her road to becoming a fantastic amateur and a legendary LPGA player wasn’t as smooth as one might think.
Lopez’s high school didn’t have a girls’ golf team, so she played on the junior varsity boys’ team, as there was a rule in New Mexico that barred girls from playing in body contact sports with boys.
After many discussions with a civil liberties lawyer and the board of education, during which the lawyer argued golf is not a contact sport, she was allowed to play on the boys’ varsity team.
Lopez wasn’t just the only female golfer on the team, but the only female at any school in New Mexico that the team competed against.
After turning professional in 1977, she won nine tournaments, including five consecutive, during her first full season on the LPGA Tour.
By the end of her time on tour, she’d amassed three major championships among 48 wins.
Lopez never won a U.S.
Open of her own, coming in second four times over the span of her career, but she remembers feeling Berg’s impact on the tournament throughout the years.
“Every year at the U.S.
Open, Patty would be sitting at registration and wishing every single person who was playing in the tournament good luck,” Lopez says.
“She was a special lady.”
Lopez made it a point to write letters to all of the players who meant something to her during her career, and Berg was one of them.
“I knew she was staying at a hotel across from where I was during one U.S.
Open, and I had written a letter to her to tell her thank you and let her know how much she meant to me,” Lopez says.
“I went over there and gave her the letter along with a little teddy bear wearing a patriotic vest.
When I got to her room, she read the letter and thanked me, but changed the topic immediately and asked me about how my putting was.
It was so cute, she just went right into golf because she loved it so much.
I just thought the world of Patty Berg.”
Keefer, organizer of this weekend’s 80th anniversary tournament, hopes the celebration held at the very track where Berg made history keeps the spirit of golf alive in Spokane and reminds people of “the power of one.”
“There couldn’t have been a second U.S.
Women’s Open without the first,” he says.
“And whether it’s an LPGA event in Spokane, which is what we’re working towards, or a U.S.
Open 80-plus years ago that came to fruition, I know there was a group of women that were pounding the pavement, busting their ass, trying to make something happen.
And the fact that the city of Spokane took a chance made it a little bit easier to have a second one.
“It’s hard to wrap your mind around big ideas,” he continues.
“Big ideas take believers.
Spokane took a leap of faith 80 years ago.
I hope Spokane never loses the faith that we have the ability to do great things in the world of golf and in general.”
Though Patty Berg’s illustrious career in professional golf is now the stuff of legend, there may not be another female golfer with a more dazzling amateur career than Nancy Lopez.
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