This article first appeared in the September 2026 issue of NCGA GOLF Magazine
By Adam Schupak
NCGA Hall of Famer Juli Inkster's career was built on championships, but the foundation was much simpler. Born in Santa Cruz, Inkster grew up with sports in her blood.
She was the youngest of four children born to Jack and Carole Simpson. Her father was a firefighter—and a professional baseball player in the 1950s. Her two older brothers, Danny and Mike, were talented athletes, too. Juli followed them everywhere.
“Whatever they did, I did,” she would later say.
Growing up near Pasatiempo Golf Course, Juli lived close enough to the course that the fourteenth hole was practically part of her backyard. And yet no one in her family really played. As the Associated Press golf writer Doug Ferguson once astutely observed, “Imagine living on the North Shore of Oahu and never going to the beach.”
Inkster’s father was always encouraging her to go outside and hit golf balls with him, but as a kid, golf wasn't Juli's first love. She preferred basketball, baseball and just about any other sport she could play.
Then, at 15, something changed.
One day, Juli rode her bicycle up to Pasatiempo looking for a job. She was hired to pick up range balls and recharge golf carts, earning $3.25 an hour. It wasn't glamorous work. But it put her on a golf course every day.
And that was where she fell in love with the game.
Her first clubs were straight out of the lost-and-found bin. She began working on the practice tee and taking lessons from the club professional, Brian Inkster. Brian would eventually become her husband, but at first he was simply the golf professional who was trying to teach a young athlete how to swing a club.
Juli developed a swing that would become her signature—a powerful, controlled motion built from countless hours on the range.
“I call it my church when I'm out there hitting balls when no one is out there,” she said.
She played before school, after school and whenever she could find the time.
Harbor High School golf coach Floyd Slider saw something special. He picked up a rotary phone and called Juli's parents, inviting their daughter to try out for the boys' golf team.
Juli didn't hesitate.
She played on the junior varsity team as a sophomore, then earned a place on varsity as a junior and senior. At a time when girls playing competitive sports alongside boys was far from ordinary, Juli simply treated it like another challenge.
She earned a golf scholarship to San Jose State University and became a collegiate All-American all four years. But even before college, Juli had already discovered that she belonged on a much bigger stage.
In 1978, while still an amateur, she found a sign-up sheet for the U.S. Women's Open in the locker room at Pasatiempo. She took it home to her parents. There was a qualifier in Fresno, two and a half hours away. Her father had the day off, so Jack volunteered to caddie for her. Juli played the best round of golf she had ever played, shooting a 72. She made the U.S. Women's Open.
Her parents were so surprised that they initially weren't even sure what to make of it. On the drive home, they thought Juli had fallen asleep in the back seat. Carole looked at Jack.
“What are we going to do now, Jack?”
They were about to find out.
In 1981, Juli won the California Women’s Amateur at Pebble Beach. Then, shortly afterward, she and Brian tied the knot on July 26. Juli was twenty years old and newly married. She was also about to become a national champion.
At the U.S. Women's Amateur at Prairie Dunes in Kansas, Juli faced Patti Rizzo in the final. Rizzo was regarded as the best female amateur golfer in the world. Juli remembered the feeling of standing across from her. Rizzo seemed to look at her as if to ask, Where did you come from?
Juli beat her, 2-up.
“This is the first thing I ever won in my life,” the newlywed said afterward.
Brian had flown in to watch the final round. Juli later acknowledged that she hadn't even particularly wanted to make the trip, sensing her game was too rusty from her layoff during their honeymoon in Western Canada. But her parents had sent in her entry two months before the wedding bells rang.
“Brian, my husband, said, ‘Juli, your parents will kill me if you don't go to the Amateur. Do the best you can and go from there.’ I didn't care if I shot 90,” she said. “I was just very happy to be married.”
She came anyway. And she conquered.
The only thing Juli lost that week was her wedding ring. Fortunately, they found it in a parking lot.
The next year, she returned to the U.S. Women's Amateur and won again. In 1982, she won for a third consecutive time, becoming the first woman since 1934 to accomplish the feat. Only nine players had ever won the title twice, and only Juli among the modern players would go on to win three straight.
“She was Tiger before there was Tiger,” Beth Daniel once said. “I don’t think she gets enough credit for that.”
She had become one of the greatest amateur golfers in the world.
So, turning professional should have been easy.
At least, that's what Juli thought.
In 1983, she entered qualifying school to earn her LPGA Tour card. She arrived as a three-time national amateur champion, expecting to prove that she belonged among the professionals.
Instead, she didn't even make the cut.
“It was a humiliating experience,” she remembered. “Here I thought I was one of the world's great golfers and I couldn't even play with the big girls.”
For the first time, Juli had failed spectacularly at something she thought she understood. But champions learn to look forward.
She studied what had gone wrong. She understood that qualifying school was an unforgiving test—150 women competing for only 12 cards. Nine months later, she came back. This time, she didn't just qualify. She shot the low score.
The girl who had grown up beside the fourteenth fairway at Pasatiempo, who had picked up range balls for $3.25 an hour, who had played on a boys' high school team, who had once been surprised simply to make the U.S. Women's Open, had found her way onto the LPGA Tour.
Brian remained beside her, both as her husband and as one of the people who had helped shape her golf game. Years earlier, he had joked to a reporter that Juli had been a poor employee when she worked for him at Pasatiempo, especially when it came to scooping up shag balls.
Juli immediately interrupted him.
“I was the best employee he ever had.”
That was Juli – competitive, confident, unafraid to answer back.
The qualities that had made her chase after her brothers as a child became the qualities that carried her through professional golf.
Over the course of her career, Inkster won 31 times on the LPGA Tour, including seven major championships. She built a reputation not simply as a great golfer, but as one of the toughest competitors the game had ever produced. And it all began on a Pasatiempo practice tee, where a teenage girl discovered that golf could become more than just another sport.