Remembering Joan Joyce: LPGA Record-Setter and Multi-Sport Legend
Joyce on tour in the ‘70’s
The sports world lost one of its gnarliest on March 26th, and as is the case with many women athletes, it’s likely you’ve never heard of her. When it comes to honoring multi-sport athletes, people usually mention Jim Thorpe, Jackie Robinson, Michael Jordan, Deion Sanders, maybe Sammy Byrd, and if they’re vaguely aware of women’s sports, Babe Didrikson or Althea Gibson. But according to some, the spot at the top of that list should go to Joan Joyce.
Born in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1940, Joyce’s athletic abilities were apparent early on. Her father introduced her to softball and basketball when she was a child, and by her teen years, she was playing international professional softball with the local Raybestos Brakettes (yes, Raybestos was a brake company), routinely pitching no-hitters. She left the team to attend Chapman College in California, playing for the Orange Lionettes, then returned home to rejoin the Brakettes after graduating in 1966. Ten years later, Joyce partnered with golf star Jane Blalock, tennis great Billie Jean King, and sports entrepreneur Dennis Murphy to found the International Women’s Professional Softball League. It went bankrupt after four seasons, but it rocked the world, especially countries like Japan and China, which have always seemed to support women’s sports more than the United States has.
Although it proved difficult for Joyce and her partners to establish a solid professional women’s softball league, she still found ways to inform men ball players of how badass women ball players can be, striking out not only Red Sox legend Ted Williams at an exhibition game in 1961, but also Hank Aaron, a.k.a. the first player to break Babe Ruth’s home run record, at another exhibition in 1978. Both men were newly retired and a few years older than Joyce, but she struck them out fairly and squarely, much to their surprise.
By the end of her nineteen seasons playing softball, Joyce had achieved a 753-42 win-loss record, a beyond respectable career batting average of .327, an astoundingly low lifetime earned-run average of .090, 150 no-hitters, 50 perfect games, and several long strings of consecutive scoreless innings, including 123 in 1971 and 229 from 1975 to 1976. Tell me she’s not the G.O.A.T.
Joyce pitching in the Women’s Softball World Championship in 1974
A legendary softball career wasn’t enough for Joyce, however, so she played forward for the U.S. women's national basketball team in 1964 and 1965, and for a couple teams in the Women’s Basketball Association and the Amateur Athletic Union, earning all-American honors multiple times. She set the A.A.U. record for points scored during a single game (sixty-seven) and was voted an A.A.U. All-Star three times. According to the New York Times, Joyce “had a career scoring average of thirty points per game (and this was before the three-point shot was introduced).” And don’t forget: her softball career was just taking off at that point.
Finding herself restless again, Joyce tried her hand at volleyball. After starting her own team, the Connecticut Clippers, she competed in the United States Volleyball Association’s national championship from 1969 to 1974 and was selected for an All-East Regional team.
In addition to softball, basketball, and volleyball, Joyce excelled in bowling. A few weeks after the game fell into her lap, she won the Connecticut state championship. She reported being paid to practice and play at a particular bowling alley, but decided against going professional. Like, girl, we get it! But also keep going.
That leaves golf. Joyce picked up the game at thirty-five and qualified for the LPGA within two years. At forty-two, she set a professional golf record for fewest putts in a single round: seventeen. Seventeen!!! While also playing and coaching other sports!!! The record has only been tied by Bob Brue during a PGA Champions Tour event. Joyce remained a pro golfer for nineteen years, retiring at fifty-five. She never won an LPGA event, but she tied for sixth at both the 1981 Corning Classic and 1984 S&H Green Stamp Classic, posting a career best of 66 during the latter. When asked to describe her approach to golf, Joyce said: “I was always a visualizer when I did stuff; so, I just visualized the way I wanted the golf ball to go.” She went on to apply the skills she acquired on tour to a position head coaching women’s golf at Florida Atlantic University (while also head coaching women’s softball at the school until her death).
Joyce never made any money as a woman athlete for reasons plenty familiar to the kind of person who’d be reading this, so she worked various jobs to make ends meet, “teaching, refereeing, serving part-time as a community college athletic director, and running a travel agency,” according to the New York Times, telling the paper in 1975: “A lot of people feel I should be bitter about not being able to get the big-time money that a man with talents comparable to mine would receive. I don’t care about the money, I enjoy the game, and that’s the most important thing. I’d play [softball] even if it meant being broke the rest of my life.” And it’s perhaps this play-’til-you’re-broke-or-dead kind of dedication that sets Joyce apart from other multi-sport legends, making her the one true G.O.A.T.
According to Joyce, she remembered Ted Williams being asked who his toughest opponent was and responding, “Believe it or not, it was a teenage girl.”
I used to be a teenage girl so I believe it.
Photos by Joan Chandler