She’s Found Her Game in Deep Rough

On Tuesday, January 23 of this year, in the parking lot of the Miami Arena, one of the great heists of the season took place. A mugger made off with about $200,000.

Oh, he didn’t get it all. He got $1,300 in cash, a watch and a ring.

The catch is, his victim was Jan Stephenson, the golfer. So far as the Miami Police are concerned, it was a $1,300 purse-snatching.

The LPGA would beg to differ. So would Stephenson.

What happened, you see, is that the thug, not content with (or maybe not realizing) the cash jackpot he was getting in the purse, stopped to try to snatch rings off Stephenson’s fingers. The rings stuck. The thief wrenched, then angrily threw Stephenson to the ground and twisted her ring finger into a pulp. Into a spiral fracture. He tore at the whole hand.

When he left--he was later captured and still is awaiting trial two months later--he had not only destroyed one of the purest golf swings on the tour but its most glamorous attraction. If they make Jan Stephenson’s life into a movie, Jamie Lee Curtis gets the part.

What the mugger had done was maim the whole right hand to the point where Jan could hardly hold a cup of coffee, let alone a one-iron.

What he had also done was maim the whole golf tour. Jan Stephenson has always led the ladies’ tour in pulchritude. She had a figure that looked as if it had stepped right out of a chorus line, big blue eyes, straight even teeth, burnished brown locks.

Stephenson looks so good in peignoirs and lingerie, she posed for a magazine centerfold a couple of years back and almost set off a locker room revolution. The subscribers didn’t care. Her fellow golfers, none of whom looked as good in a nightgown as she did, cared plenty.

“She’s cheapening the profession!” was the cry of a lot of women pros who knew they’d never be asked to pose for anything in their underwear, except maybe a “before” ad for a diet supplement.

If Stephenson only looked good on a golf course, that probably wouldn’t have been enough. But she looked good on the scoreboard, too. Jan’s figures were not only 5-feet-5 and 36-22-34, she was also 65-66-68-67. Jan could play.

She won 16 tournaments and $1,801,035 in 16 years on the LPGA Tour, which put her eighth lifetime on the money list. Stephenson earned more than $200,000 in two of her past three years on the tour and more than $100,000 for eight consecutive years. She earned $236,739 in 1988 and $227,303 in ’87.

So, it is entirely conceivable the mugger cost Stephenson $200,000 or more in potential purses. A lucrative appearance-money tour of Japan was wiped out.

The damage to the tour was incalculable. Promoters of tour events never had much trouble getting Jan’s picture in the paper to call attention to their tournaments. Like Jane Fonda, Jan Stephenson had no trouble marketing a highly successful exercise video of her own. She also looked good in a leotard.

Stephenson not only had a knack for getting her picture in the papers, her name on the leader boards and her figure in the centerfolds, she also titillated the supermarket tabloid readers. Her marital capers would have filled out a Doris Day movie. As meticulous and focused as Jan was on a golf course, she had trouble finding the fairway off it. Romance turned out to be a double bogey. Two marriages failed. Her stormy relationships had her ducking tournaments because they came with process servers and with her getting an injunction against one husband--the marriage was later annulled--barring him from even watching her play golf. Her marital life made “War of the Roses” look like a documentary.

“Jan kept hooking up with guys who were unplayable lies,” was the comment of one tour friend. Jan got golf in places it didn’t expect to be--the Enquirer. People magazine.

This was to have been the year when it all came together for Stephenson.

A plucky Australian who learned to play with hand-me-down clubs and a canvas bag made out of a city bus destination roller, Jan was so sure she would make it here, she sold the return half of her round-trip ticket, bought a book on Babe Didriksen, some eye shadow and thumbed her way to the golf course.

Now 38, she particularly wanted to win the Nabisco Dinah Shore, which starts here at Mission Hills this week. It is the only major she has never won.

That went a-glimmering that night in the parking lot. The mugger--”He looked like a power forward,” she recalls--put an end to all that.

A basketball fan, Stephenson had gone that night to get tickets to see her favorite team, the Phoenix Suns, play the Miami Heat.

Her injuries haven’t healed, and the doctors are not sure when they will. “They had to put two screws in just to reconstruct the finger, and the other fingers were all mashed and the soft tissue damaged,” she says. “I had hoped they would be healed in time for the Dinah Shore this week, but all I can do is putt. I can’t really grip a club.”

As a result, Stephenson will be just a (decorative) part of the gallery at the tournament she hoped it would be her turn to win.

No act could afford to lose a star performer who looks like a cross between Jamie Lee Curtis and a Vogue cover girl and who plays golf like a cross between Ben Hogan and Tom Kite.

“They tried to tell us the tour shouldn’t try to sell sex appeal,” notes Stephenson. “But it can always use it. You mean the men’s tour doesn’t rely on sex appeal? Look at Greg Norman.”

You expect to lose a tournament in a parking lot. But only if you slice a tee shot or hit a trap shot into it. Jan Stephenson may have lost more than a tournament there, she may have lost a career. The LPGA hopes not. So does every photog and art editor in the game.