“We understand how difficult that is,” Rankin added, “and there are so few individuals who have accomplished it.”
Mickey Wright (4), Jack Nicklaus (4), Betsy Rawls (4), Ben Hogan (4), Willie Anderson (4), Bobby Jones (4), Babe Zaharias (3), Tiger Woods (3), Annika Sorenstam (3), Hollis Stacy (3), Hale Irwin (3), and Susie Maxwell Berning (3) are among the dozen players who have won three or more US Opens (3).
All 12 will be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame on Wednesday evening, with Woods and Maxwell Berning joining the class of 2021. Marion Hollins, a pioneering architect, and Tim Finchem, a former PGA Tour commissioner, will join them.
Maxwell Berning is maybe the most underappreciated inductee in recent memory. Maxwell Berning, a four-time major champion and mother of two, won four of her 11 LPGA titles after giving birth to her first child in 1970, including two US Opens.
The LPGA didn’t start providing daycare for its members until decades later.
“I had to pull out of a tournament in San Diego because I couldn’t get a babysitter,” recalled Maxwell Berning, who started playing the tour part-time after his eldest daughter Robin started school in 1977.
Maxwell Berning got his start in golf thanks to a horse. Joker, a nine-month-old colt, became loose while being walked around a bridal path in Oklahoma City and bolted across the fairways and greens of Lincoln Park Golf Course.
Maintenance staff threatened to call the cops on Maxwell Berning, 13, but the head pro eventually agreed that if she taught his two small children to ride, they’d forget about it.
Maxwell Berning began by picking up U.C. Ferguson’s children every Saturday to teach them to bike. Ferguson persuaded Maxwell Berning to tie up her horse behind the pro shop and stroll down the hill to where a group of golfers were having a good time in a semi-circle.
She recalls, “It was Patty Berg delivering a clinic.” “They were having a blast.”
That was the final straw. When Maxwell Berning first picked up a golf club, she was 14 and a half years old. Ferguson, who was elected into the Oklahoma Golf Hall of Fame in 2012, would occasionally stop by on the range and offer her a five-minute tip.
Maxwell Berning, then 16 years old, sold her two horses for $150 to buy a car so she could drive to the golf course.
Maxwell Berning, a three-time winner of the Oklahoma City Women’s Amateur, was the first woman to gain a golf scholarship at Oklahoma City University, where she played on the men’s team.
“Is it Steve or Sam?” an opponent coach asked Abe Lemons about S. Maxwell. “Sam will do,” Lemons said.
“During my undergraduate days, I played under Sam Maxwell,” Susie remarked, admitting that she feels sorry for the young lads she played against, despite the fact that she didn’t win many matches.
Maxwell Berning wasn’t sure what she wanted to do after college, but after seeing Betsy Cullan and Betsy Rawls succeed on the LPGA, she decided to give it a try because she’d defeated both players in state amateur events.
“I’m not sure what you did to get pro in 1964,” she said. “How did you know who to call in the first place?”
She managed to figure it out and won $450 in her first LPGA event, the Muskogee Civitan Open, in her home state of Oklahoma.
Maxwell Berning, a 5-foot-2 player who took pride in making pars, won four championships with to her short game and perseverance.
“There’s something to be said about those who have played a lot of difficult courses well,” Rankin said, adding that she will introduce her buddy during the World Golf Hall of Fame induction ceremony on Wednesday night. “Those people have always held a particular place in my heart.”
Maxwell Berning won her first major victory at the 1965 Women’s Western Open at Beverly Country Club in Chicago, defeating Marlene Hagge.
In 1968, she won her second major title at the Moselem Spring Golf Club, defeating Mickey Wright by three shots. Maxwell Berning admitted that the first time she was set to play with Wright, she overslept and almost missed her tee time.
Her husband had to wake her up at noon on Sunday after she won the 1973 USWO at the Country Club of Rochester. Nothing appeared to bother her.
“I grew up on a public golf course, so when I entered the Open and they shouted ‘Play away, please’ in their expensive blazers, it gave me a feeling of formality, and for some reason, I took every shot a bit more seriously,” Maxwell Berning explained. I wish I could have brought that mindset to every competition I’ve ever competed in.”
The most challenging thing about raising a family on tour back then, according to Rankin, whose son Tuey grew up with Robin on the LPGA circuit, was getting trustworthy daycare. Players would phone ahead to competitions in the hopes of receiving assistance.
“I’m sure it deterred some individuals from playing professional golf at the start,” Rankin said, “but it’s grown so terrific for players as time has gone on.” … I’m not saying we strolled to the golf course barefoot in the snow, but it was a completely different experience.”
Maxwell Berning’s daughter Cindy was born seven years after Robin, and during the summers, Tuesday afternoons and Wednesdays were days when the Berning family would do something together. Their favorite stops included a chocolate factory tour in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C.
One of the most memorable family travel mishaps occurred when a 12-year-old Robin and a 5-year-old Cindy, traveling alone, boarded a plane bound for Columbus, Ohio, instead of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
When everyone arrived in Tulsa, Maxwell Berning quipped that the sisters should fly to London or somewhere more interesting the next time they get on the wrong airline.
“I tell you what, they grow up fast,” Maxwell Berning said of life on the road.
Robin began golf at the age of 14 and played on the boys team in high school on the Big Island of Hawaii before enrolling at San Jose State University. However, the competition was so fierce there that she switched to Ohio State to play for Therese Hession, a former LPGA player.
At the Konica San Jose Classic in 1989, Susie and Robin became the first mother-daughter team to compete in the same LPGA event.
Robin wasn’t prepared for the amount of press that followed her and her mother that week after she qualified for the Rochester Invitational on Monday, where Cindy caddied for her.
“That was my starting point for trying to think of anything else to accomplish,” Robin explained.
Maxwell Berning has worked as an instructor at The Reserve Club in Palm Springs, California, for the past 20 years, and roughly 10 members, including her two daughters and two grandchildren, are making the cross-country trek to Ponte Vedra for the induction ceremony.
Robin wasn’t sure what to make of her mother’s inclusion in the same Hall of Fame class as Tiger Woods at first.
“To be honest, I believe it’s an honor,” Robin stated. “That people outside of our tiny group of acquaintances believe what she’s accomplished in her life validates, that it stands tall enough in the eyes of others that she belongs standing next to Tiger.”
