![]() “It is her golf game that draws crowds,” one newscaster said at the time. It didn’t take long for people to start pouring through the gates to watch her in action. Journalists gave the women’s game little attention, and because revenue from spectators was all but nonexistent, the money players competed for was primarily each others.īut the Sport magazine cover changed that by quickly transforming Jan into one of the most famous female athletes in the world. The men’s winner, by contrast, pocketed $42,000. Prize money was extremely low - in 1976, the year before the Sport magazine cover, the winner of the U.S. Since the tour’s start in 1950 it had essentially remained a glorified money match. The criticism came pouring in, but so did the attention - a currency the LPGA Tour had been starved of since its inception. “Sorry, it’s too late,” came the response. Jan even wrote a letter asking editor Berry Sainback to use a different picture. “Then I remembered and thought, ‘Oh, no.’ ” I was like, ‘What picture of me in the pink shirt?’” Stephenson said. “When they told me they’d be using the picture of me in a pink shirt, I was confused. The picture would be considered risqué by today’s standards, let alone for the cover of a magazine in 1977. It’s a little tough to describe viral pictures in the age before the internet, but this picture, in every sense of the word, went viral. She threw her head back and laughed, and kept her eyes locked on the camera. Jan was caught off guard, but she didn’t really mind. “Hey Jan, over here!” came the voice of a nearby photographer. Stephenson had been drafted by then-LPGA Tour Commissioner Ray Volpe to be the face of a new-look tour, a role Stephenson was more than willing to play, and the Sport magazine cover was going to be the first step towards realizing that plan.Ībout halfway through the shoot Jan was scheduled for a routine wardrobe change, so she took off her shirt and unclipped her bra, and as she looked for a new outfit, put a thin, pink linen shirt over her and tied it at the waist. It was a major coup for Stephenson, who at the time was little more than a 26-year-old Australian prospect with a handful of LPGA Tour wins to her name. It was the magazine’s special “Sex In Sports” edition, and Jan was going to be the first woman to pose for the cover. ![]() Jan Stephenson had assembled her entire wardrobe for Sport Magazine’s 1977 cover shoot, and for good reason. ![]()
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