Jan Stephenson - Career

Career

Stephenson was born in Sydney, Australia. While a teenager, she won five consecutive New South Wales Schoolgirl Championships in Australia, beginning in 1964, and followed that up with three straight wins in the New South Wales Junior Championship. She turned professional in 1973 and won the Wills Australian Ladies Open that year. Stephenson joined the LPGA Tour in 1974 and was named LPGA Rookie of the Year.

Stephenson's first LPGA victory was the 1976 Sarah Coventry Naples Classic. Her most productive period was the early 1980s, when she won all of her majors in consecutive years: 1981 Peter Jackson Classic, the 1982 LPGA Championship and the 1983 U.S. Women's Open.

Stephenson was one of the first LPGA stars to openly embrace and champion a sex-sells approach to marketing. Stephenson became as famous for her sex appeal as her golf during the early to mid-1980s, when she posed in a bathtub - covered up only by the golf balls filling the tub - and later in a pinup calendar. She urged the LPGA Tour to fully embrace her approach to marketing.

On the golf course, Stephenson won three times each in 1981, 1983 and 1987, those wins in 1987 being her final ones on the LPGA. Stephenson continued playing LPGA events throughout the 1990s, but was hampered by an injury incurred during a mugging in Miami in 1990. Her left ring finger was broken in two places, an injury that still bothers her play in cold or wet weather.

Stephenson went on to win on the Women's Senior Golf Tour, a tour she helped found. In 2003, she became the first woman to play on the Champions Tour, missing the cut. Stephenson is among the few women in the course design business, and produced an exercise video for people with arthritis. Her many charitable efforts include being an honorary chairman of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.