Open And Shut

When it was over, when she had forced her last smile, told the final fib about how happy she was just to have played so well and braved all the hollow words of encouragement, Nancy Lopez finally found a shoulder to cry on. It was late on Sunday afternoon, 90 minutes after she had let another U.S. Women's Open slip from her grasp, when Lopez grabbed hold of a friend and let go of the tears she had been guarding so resolutely. Finally, with a deep breath she said what the rest of us already knew, "This should have been the one, darn it."

The 52nd U.S. Women's Open, played at Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club outside Portland, will long be remembered not for who won it—by the way, it was Alison Nicholas in a record-setting performance—but for who didn't. Not Annika Sorenstam, who couldn't withstand the crucible of trying to become the first woman to win three straight Opens. Not Kelly Robbins or Karrie Webb, the other young lions on the LPGA tour, who finished third and fourth, respectively. Most of all, not Lopez, the 40-year-old legend who had the chance to put a cherry on top of her remarkable career, which has included everything but an Open title. Lopez shot 69-68-69-69 to become the first woman to break 70 in all four rounds of an Open, but in keeping with her star-crossed history in the national championship, she bogeyed two of the final four holes and missed a 15-foot birdie putt on 18 that would have tied Nicholas and forced an 18-hole playoff. Lopez has now finished second at the Open four times in 21 tries. "At this point," she said, "to have come this close...." She didn't finish the sentence. Nor did she have to.

If there was any consolation for Lopez, it was that Nicholas beat her by turning in one of the best performances in Open history—male or female. In 13 years as a pro, Nicholas, a 35-year-old Englishwoman, had won 11 tournaments on the Women's Professional Golf European Tour and two in the U.S., but nothing she had done hinted at the mastery she would have over a Pumpkin Ridge course that was softened by rain early in the week. Five feet tall in spikes and built like a fire hydrant, Nicholas packs a surprising wallop off the tee and is a genius on the greens. Starting with the last hole of the first round, she made only one bogey over her next 50 holes. Little wonder, then, Nicklaus, er, Nicholas became the first player of either sex to finish an Open 10 under par.

"If Alison hadn't been here, I would've won," Lopez said, with a chuckle. It's easy to be so sanguine when you're enjoying a mulligan that has lasted 18 months and counting. In January 1996 Lopez nearly quit golf, so bummed was she with a swing and a physique that had fallen badly out of shape. Her four sterling Open rounds are the most compelling evidence yet that she is a force again, and that fact more than anything tempered the disappointment of falling one stroke short. "It's been a long, long time since I've looked forward to coming to the course this much," Lopez said on the eve of the final round. A year and a half ago, "I was humiliated by my golf game. I was wasting my time."

Since her marriage in 1982 to Ray Knight, the former major league baseball star and current manager of the Cincinnati Reds, Lopez has had three daughters, Ashley (13), Erinn (11) and Torri (5). As she got older she found it increasingly difficult to leave home for tournaments and tougher still to play well when she did. She appeared in a total of 37 events in '94 and '95 without a victory, her longest drought since turning pro at the '77 U.S. Women's Open, and Lopez said she was dreading the impending '96 season. However, after much soul-searching and a series of heartfelt conversations with her peers, Lopez decided early in '96 that she owed it to herself to resurrect her game.

The first order of business was to drop 40 pounds, so she launched a fun-free diet and a brutal exercise regimen that so far has helped her melt away 28 of those pounds. This boosted both her stamina, her self-esteem and her game. Coming into the Open, she had one win and four top 10 finishes in 11 LPGA events this year, and along the way she rediscovered the key to her earlier success: her sparkle.

Growing up on the dusty flats of Roswell, N.M., Lopez got only one piece of golf instruction from her father, Domingo: "Play happy." Nancy always did, beginning with her first tournament win—at age nine, by 110 strokes—all the way to her starmaking rookie year, 1978, when she won nine events, including an LPGA-record five in a row. Tiger Woods was barely a twinkle in his father's eye when Lopez became a cross-cultural hero, owing as much to her telegenic smile and the palpable joy she found in competition as to her otherworldly golfing talents.

In April, Lopez shot 71-66 to win the rain-shortened Chick-Fil-A Charity Championship, ending the most fretted-about winless streak in women's golf history, a string that dated to the Youngstown-Warren LPGA Classic in July 1993. "A win is a win," Lopez said when asked about her victory in the abbreviated event, and there's no need to qualify that when you have 48 career triumphs. "She has renewed herself this year," says Patty Sheehan, who tied for ninth at Pumpkin Ridge. "The question with Nancy has never been her ability to play the game, only her enthusiasm for it."

There was no shortage of enthusiasm beginning last Friday, when Lopez finished her second round birdie-birdie-birdie. That left Lopez five under par and one shot behind Nicholas, the midway leader, who followed an opening-round 70 with a five-birdie, no-bogey 66. Still, Lopez's charge was barely noticed as all attention was trained on the plight of the 26-year-old Sorenstam, who had come to the Open looking primed to make history.

Sorenstam had already won four times this year, and with her swing locked and loaded, the only question was how well she would hold up in the center of a media frenzy. This is, after all, a woman so shy that as a junior golfer she would intentionally blow tournaments just so she wouldn't have to give a victory speech.