Hall of Fame
Golf (1977-78)
A three-time high school state champion at Wooster High School in Reno, Patty Sheehan was a one-woman golf team at the University of Nevada, practicing with the men’s team and representing the Wolf Pack before the school had an official women’s golf team. An accomplished amateur, she won three straight Nevada State Amateurs (1975-78) and two straight California Amateurs (1977-78) before finishing second at the 1979 U.S. Women’s Amateur. For the Wolf Pack, she finished in the top 10 at the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) championship twice before transferring to San Jose State. She won the AIAW crown in 1980 and was named the Broderick Award winner that year as the top collegiate women’s golfer.
Sheehan turned pro and joined the LPGA Tour in 1980 where she promptly won LPGA Rookie of the Year honors in 1981 with her first professional victory coming at the Mazda Japan Classic that year. She won four tournaments in both 1983 and 1984, capturing the LPGA Championship both years, and was named the LPGA Tour Player of the Year in 1983. An LPGA Tour Hall of Fame inductee, she won 35 tournaments in her LPGA career, including six majors. In 1992, she won both the U.S. Women’s Open and the Women’s British Open, the first golfer to win both in the same year. She finished in the Top 10 on the LPGA money list every year from 1982 to 1993. Sheehan also played on the U.S. Solheim Cup team five times (1990, 1992, 1994, 1996, 2002) and captained the team in 2002 and 2003.
Sheehan became one of the first LPGA players to publicly announce that she was a lesbian, and in June of 2020, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first LGBTQ Pride parade, Queerty named her among the fifty heroes “leading the nation toward equality, acceptance, and dignity for all people.”
In addition to the Nevada Athletics and the LPGA Tour Hall of Fame, Sheehan has also been inducted in the World Golf Hall of Fame, the Collegiate Golf Hall of Fame and the National High School Hall of Fame.
