BACK TO YOU, JUDY

The golfing prodigy, Judy Torluemke, burst onto the national junior golf season as an 8 year old, winning the National Pee Wee. She embarked on a professional playing career at age 16, eventually won 26 times on the LPGA Tour and was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2000.

Judy Rankin & Dottie Pepper at the 1996 Solheim Cup

Today we all know her as Judy Rankin.

She was, in many ways, Wonder Woman: wife, mother, and servant of her association while breaking many a record along the way as an elite athlete.

When Judy Rankin put competitive golf behind her and picked up a microphone at the 1984 U.S. Women’s Open for ABC Sports, she was so close to a nervous breakdown that she could not stand up and talk in front of people. She was convinced there was a very good chance nothing would come out of her mouth when she spoke into a microphone that week.

Oh, how wrong she was!

This week, Judy will call her final regular event on television, the Ascendant LPGA in Dallas. We have been blessed with nearly 40 years of Mrs. Rankin in golf television, as a breaker of both glass and grass ceilings; someone who made difficult situations on the air seem smooth with her grace and guidance, never making a call about herself but rather the experience she had playing or talking about the game. It was never about the men’s game or women’s game either... it was just about the game of golf.

And when she spoke, no words were wasted. “Say as much as you can in as few words possible” was always the mantra, and when you get nervous, well, Judy would simply say to “talk about what you know.” It was the same sort of comforting advice to her Solheim Cup teams as a two-time winning captain: “Just go do what you already know how to do.”

Judy, I will miss you on the air after this weekend — we’ll all miss hearing you on a regular basis. Thank you for being a mentor and road mom to many, for giving to the game for so long… but mostly for always being genuinely Judy.