Catching Up With Judy Rankin, LPGA Hall of Famer and 1961 SI Cover Subject—at Age 16

The 26-time winner, later a broadcaster, was a teen phenom on a break from golf when her home phone rang.

James Drake/Sports Illustrated

Sports Illustrated turns 70 this month and the SI Golf crew is looking back at some of our favorite covers, and also sharing stories about some of those cover shots, including this one featuring Judy Rankin from Aug. 21, 1961.

The 16-year-old prodigy had declared herself done with golf. Gone fishing, literally, when the Torluemke home phone rang.

Sports Illustrated wanted to know if she would be playing in the upcoming U.S. Women’s Open at Baltusrol, and if so, would she be interested in being on a magazine cover?

So much for the fishing.

Judy Rankin, née Torluemke (pronounced torr-LUM-key), won 26 times on the LPGA Tour en route to induction in the LPGA and World Golf Halls of Fame, and then had a nearly 40-year career as a broadcaster. It's no stretch to say she’s one of most universally beloved people in the game.

But in the summer of 1961, a lifetime in golf was the last thing on her mind. After winning low amateur honors at the 1960 U.S. Women’s Open, at 15, Torluemke played in the 1961 British Women’s Amateur with far less success. In the match-play bracket she drew a bye in the first round and was eliminated in the second round “by a girl who had been playing for a year and a half,” she recalls.

“We’re on the plane home … my dad was a taskmaster in some ways, in other ways not. He always put an arm around you when you lost. He said ‘I understand if you don’t want to play golf anymore,’ I said ‘I don’t’ and he said ‘we’ll go fishing.’

“I said, ‘good.’”

Two weeks later, her father answered a call (“when phones were still connected to the wall,” she says) from SI. The magazine is 70 years old this year, it was seven in the summer of 1961. And it was interested in putting Judy Torluemke of St. Louis on the cover.

Judy Torluemke turned pro in 1962, one year after this cover. / James Drake/Sports Illustrated

“With that call, I started playing golf again,” says Rankin, now 79. “It was just a big deal, a huge deal. I think I would have gotten into it again, but it wasn’t going to happen immediately.”

Rankin went to Baltusrol, the classic New Jersey course with teeing grounds more immaculate than the greens she played on at home. She missed the cut but made six birdies in one round, which was rather remarkable for a 16-year-old in a U.S. Women’s Open (younger players are far more common today).

And she instantly became a known commodity with the cover. She turned pro the following year, at age 17, and “THE BEST GIRL GOLFER” (as the cover tagline read) was on her way to a career in the game that had infuriated her not long before she posed with her putter.

“I’m not sure I lived up to what that cover said at the time, but at some point in my career, I did,” she says. “Much if what happened to me and in my life may not have been without that cover. I was such an unlikely candidate.

“I kid, but I don’t totally kid, it felt like divine intervention that it was something I was supposed to do.”