At long last! The women get their turn at a major at Pebble Beach

The first time Patty Sheehan met Juli Inkster was in the 1970s at the California Women’s Amateur at Pebble Beach Golf Links. Back then, tournament founder Helen Lengfeld, a legend in California golf circles, handed each contestant a lucky penny when she checked in. Winners received a piece of silver from her personal collection. Sheehan and Inkster combined for three titles from 1977 to 1981 and cherished each memory made along American golf’s most iconic coast.

“It’s just the most spectacular place on the face of the earth,” said Sheehan, who always wanted to live somewhere along 17-Mile Drive but never felt that she could afford it.

The first time NCAA champion Rachel Heck played Pebble Beach was on her first visit to Stanford. Her parents surprised her with a tee time for her 15th birthday.

“I legitimately shed tears on the 18th hole walking down that fairway,” said Heck. “It’s breathtaking. It’s more than you can imagine.”

This Fourth of July, the best women in the world will tee it up at Pebble Beach Golf Links for the first time at the 78th U.S. Women’s Open. It will mark the 14th USGA championship at Pebble.

LPGA founder Betty Jameson won the 1940 U.S. Women’s Amateur title at Pebble and Grace Lenczyk won there in 1948. But the best female professionals from all the over the world have never before had the chance to do what Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Tom Kite, Tiger Woods, Graeme McDowell and Gary Woodland have done over the past five decades – win a U.S. Open there.

“It was a long time coming,” said Inkster, a two-time U.S. Women’s Open champion. “It’s such an iconic venue for golf, and for us to not have played there. … I just didn’t think that was right.”

Inkster, 63, played in what’s now the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am as an amateur with PGA Tour pros Bob Mann and Barry Jaeckel. Contestants back then were given tee prizes, little mementos of Pebble filled with liqueur, and Inkster lost those cherished items in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

“That was when Bing Crosby had his clambake and women weren’t allowed,” said Inkster. “(Husband) Brian and my dad went, and they loved it.”

Two years ago, Inkster signed up for U.S. Women’s Open qualifying when the championship was being held at San Francisco’s’ Olympic Club for the first time. Inkster estimated that she’d played the course 50n times and said she would’ve been disappointed in herself if she didn’t try.

She did not, however, sign up for the 36-hole qualifier this year.

Sheehan, 66, said it will take a smart, patient player who understands what the ocean does to a golf ball to win at Pebble. It’s also important not to lose focus, she said, while gazing at the views.

“There’s not necessarily a religious feel to it,” said Sheehan, “but it’s almost like you feel like you’re in God’s country of golf.”

Juli Inkster holds the U.S. Women’s Open trophy after winning the 2002 U.S. Women’s Open Championship at Prarie Dunes Country Club in Hutchinson, Kan., July, 2002. (Copyright USGA/J.D. Cuban)

Friends Sheehan and Inkster, both San Jose State grads, met on a Monday at Oakmont Country Club for an 18-hole playoff at the 1992 U.S. Women’s Open. It was the first of Sheehan’s two U.S. Open titles.

Morgan Pressel, former LPGA player turned Golf Channel lead analyst, likes a game like Lydia Ko’s around Pebble. Ko recently moved to the Bay Area where husband Jun Chung works in finance for Hyundai.

“Just thinking about her success around greens with Poa annua, like Lake Merced,” said Pressel, “potentially cooler weather, very small greens that require a tremendous short game. She just keeps popping back.”

Judy Rankin has played Pebble Beach only one time, at a Team USA Olympic fundraiser the week before the 1992 U.S. Open. Rankin said it takes a certain kind of discipline to win at Pebble.

“I don’t think you’ll win at Pebble,” said Rankin, “if you’re kind of one who shoots from the hip.”

The pioneering Rankin worked the television broadcast in 1992 and remembers Nick Faldo changing clubs about eight times on the par-3 seventh because the wind was so fierce. Faldo doubled the hole, and Kite followed with that memorable chip-in that spurred him to victory.

Now the women will have a chance to add to that rich history.

“I really do think it is a nod to the fact that they have arrived both in a commercial sense,” said Rankin, “but they have arrived also in the way they play. Their games are just so extraordinarily good.”

1993: Patty Sheehan won the U.S. Women’s Open in 1992 and 1994, the LPGA Championship in 1995, and the Nabisco Dinah Shore (now known as the ANA Inspiration) in 1996. She finished in the Top 10 on the LPGA money list every year from 1982 to 1993.

Past champions will gather for a dinner on Monday night at Pebble for the first time since 2014. Players will stay at the Lodge there in the heart of it all, and those who aren’t in the field that week will have the chance to play Cypress Point on Tuesday.

Inkster, a NorCal native, has played Cypress several times and usually hits 3-wood on the famed par-3 16th.

“I’ve hit a bunch of drivers too,” she said, “and believe me, not all on the green, either.”

Sheehan plans to take selfies at the dinner and tour her wife and daughter and her daughter’s golf-crazed boyfriend around her favorite patch of earth.

The great champions of the game will talk about old memories and make plenty of new ones.

Like in 1975, when the heavens opened early at the Women’s Open at Atlantic City Country Club in Northfield, New Jersey, and Sandra Palmer hunkered down in a cabana on the range. She looked out and saw one person practicing in a rain suit, her caddie standing nearby with an umbrella. Palmer thought to herself, well, if she can do it, and grabbed her clubs.

“You’ll never guess in a million years who it was,” she said. “Patty Berg.”

Palmer went on to win that championship, beating JoAnne Carner, Nancy Lopez and Sandra Post by four strokes.

Those are the stories they’ll tell at Pebble Beach, while raising a glass to those like Berg, who won in 1946 and paved the way.

At long last, their time has come.