In April 2024, Jan Stephenson was told the cancer had come back and had spread to her brain. But just as she fought off the breast cancer that was diagnosed 15 months earlier, she didn’t surrender.
She had an MRI a few weeks ago. The cancer is gone.
“I practised yesterday for three or four hours,” Stephenson, 74, the famous Australian golfer who now resides just outside Tampa, Florida, said during a recent interview. “I’m still pursuing the perfect golf swing.”
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Tampa is only a few hours from Naples, where 50 years ago this month Stephenson captured her first of 16 LPGA Tour victories, including three majors, in the Sarah Coventry tournament, prevailing by a stroke over Sandra Haynie and Judy Meister.
Elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2019, Stephenson remembers the 1976 triumph as if it were 50 days ago. She got little sleep the night before, opening the curtains every couple of hours to check out the rain. It was cold, she said and “I always hated playing in cold weather.”
Good thing the pro shop at Lely County Club, which normally didn’t offer beanies, had one for sale. Might still be the best purchase she ever made.
The pressure was on. Months before, Ray Volpe, the tour’s commissioner, had told Stephenson he had big marketing plans for her … on one condition. “If you could just win” Volpe said. “Then I could really promote you and they wouldn’t be able to say ‘she’s just a pretty face.’”
She was paired with Judy Rankin in the final round in Naples. When Rankin made a double bogey on No 9, Stephenson recalled, “from then on I felt like the tournament was mine.” She won despite a final round 76 in the 54-hole event.
Lo and behold, Volpe called while she was in the press room. “This is perfect” he told her. “You are now the face of the LPGA Tour.”
[Photo: Stephen Munday] Jan Stephenson hits a drive during the 1991 Women’s British Open.
Stephenson felt confident the victory would change her life and she was right. More than she could ever imagine. “Every Sunday” she said “I’d get a message in my locker on where to go to meet sponsors. We signed so many contracts.”
Along with Laura Baugh, Stephenson became a tour sex symbol. Most memorably, in 1986, she was photographed in a bathtub covered by nothing but dozens of golf balls. A number of her peers were supportive of the attention she received, grateful for any exposure that the LPGA may get. Others not so much. They felt it was degrading to women athletes.
Nancy Lopez is one of the supportive ones. “It brought people to the gates” Lopez says now. As for the critics, she went on, “There could have been a few players who were jealous because they didn’t look as good as Jan.”
Stephenson, however, paid a price for the exposure.
There were many tournaments where, instead of playing practise rounds or working on her game, she said, “I’d be doing things on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The pro-am had to be my practice time. And how many times in my career I didn’t finish off because I was exhausted.” On a personal level “I would have had more friends. It would have been a fun time.”
When she did work on her game, she spared no effort. During a tournament in Florida, Lopez saw Stephenson on the putting green from her hotel room window practising until dark. “I’d rank her in the top three of hardest working players on tour”, Lopez recalled. “She was always working on something.”
The highlight of her career came in 1983 when she captured the US Women’s Open at Cedar Ridge Country Club in Oklahoma by a stroke over JoAnne Carner and Patty Sheehan. She won with borrowed clubs after her set went missing from the boot of a friend’s stolen car.
In the gallery was her father, Frank. One day, when she was in her early teens, he woke her up to go for the usual practice session. Except it was cold and she told him she wasn’t going. He put a water bottle on her feet.
“If you get up now and practise”, he said, “one day you might win the US Open.”
“You probably don’t remember me telling you that”, he said on that magical day in Oklahoma.
“Are you kidding?” she replied. “I’ll never forget it. It was my goal.”
Sadly, there is another day that stands out. For much different reasons.
Stephenson was headed to a Miami Heat basketball game in January 1990 when an assailant grabbed her purse as she was putting it in the boot of her car. Stephenson broke her finger in seven different places. “He was trying to get my wedding ring off with all the diamonds on it”, she said. (He pushed her down and ran off. An off-duty Miami police officer chased the guy and caught him a few blocks away.)
She would never be the same again. “I lost probably 30 yards in distance”, she said, and could only hold on to the club in her right hand with her thumb and forefinger.
[Photo: Don Feria] Jan Stephenson addresses the audience at the World Golf Hall of Fame Induction reception in 2019.
Though Stephenson wouldn’t win on the LPGA again, she went on to score three victories between 2000 and 2007 on the 50-and-over Legends of the LPGA tour. In 2003, she challenged the men by playing in the PGA Tour Champions Turtle Bay Championship, finishing last.
Which leads to her biggest challenge yet.
Stephenson was playing in a celebrity event in Atlantic City two years ago when she suddenly couldn’t sign her name. And when she got on the range, she couldn’t hit her driver more than 50 yards. She thought she was having a stroke.
When she got to a hospital in Florida and underwent a few tests, the doctors told her about the cancer in her brain. She was told she needed full brain radiation. Immediately. “You’re not touching me,” she told them.
Working with Dr David Wenk, an oncologist, Stephenson has been on a couple of therapies (trastuzumab and tucatinib) and has changed her diet, taking dozens of supplements every day. “Everything I do is organic, even my soap and shampoo”, she said. Every two or three weeks, she also takes a high dose of Vitamin C and undergoes intravenous Ozone therapy.
Whether it’s been conventional therapies, her holistic methods, or both, it’s worked. “She’s in that 10 percent or so that’s getting a phenomenal response” Dr Wenk said. “She’s doing tremendous.”
Lopez isn’t surprised one bit. “Jan Stephenson is a fighter”, she said.