Skip to footer

Golf’s 13 greatest achievements: Let the debate begin

4. LPGA rookie Nancy Lopez wins five consecutive tournaments in 1978

LENNY IGNELZI/AP
Nancy Lopez blasts out of the sand during the Dinah Shore Winners Circle Golf Championship at Palm Springs, Calif., on April 7, 1979.

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

Seldom does an athlete in any sport capture both Rookie of the Year and Player of the Year honors during the same calendar year. Lopez did it largely on the strength of her five-tournament winning streak, which set an LPGA record that has since been tied by Annika Sorenstam, who equaled it in 2004 and 2005. Neither player’s streak occurred in consecutive events, but that may have added difficulty by jeopardizing the week-to-week rhythm and momentum golfers can benefit from. 

Playing at the University of Tulsa, Lopez had won the collegiate championship in 1976, and before that notched two Junior titles and finished second in the 1975 US Women’s Open. Her personal background as a Mexican-American whose father owned an auto-body shop in New Mexico, made her rise one of the year’s top sports stories. Sports Illustrated put her on its cover with the headline “The Name of the Game.” Altogether she won nine times in 1978, the most ever in a career in which she gained a reputation as one of the nicest persons in pro sports.

4 of 13
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.