Before Brooke Henderson became Canada’s winningest golfer, then-teenager Sandra Post blazed the trail

Brooke Henderson might be the winningest Canadian golfer, but Sandra Post was the first female athlete from Canada to make a living playing a sport. Post became the first Canadian to join the LPGA in 1968 at age 19 and promptly became the first Canadian — male or female — to win a major championship that same year when she defeated Kathy Whitworth in an 18-hole playoff at the LPGA Championship. “It was really quite shocking,” recalled 76-year-old Post, who still plays regularly and gives lessons just outside Toronto.

No one was likely more shocked than Post, who received a pep talk from the great Mickey Wright the night before.“We didn’t have that team around us to shelter us,” said Post of traveling solo those early years. “We had each other.” This week, the CPKC Women’s Open celebrates 50 years of a tournament that, for many years, was known as the Canadian Women’s Open. A former major championship, the event has inspired generations of Canadians, including Henderson. For many years, the Henderson family had a photo of the tournament trophy hanging in the hallway near their bedrooms in Smiths Falls, Ontario. Every day sisters Brooke and Brittany would walk by it.

“It was really powerful,” said Henderson, “and definitely motivation to be competing in this championship, and not only just competing, but to try to win it someday.” That day, of course, came in 2018 when Henderson became the first Canadian to win the CP Women’s Open since Jocelyne Bourassa won the first edition in 1973. She’s won 13 times on the LPGA, including two majors. Needless to say, there are new photos up on the walls of the Henderson home. Post won eight times on the LPGA, but never this event.

“I came close a couple of times,” she said, “but, you know, you just try too hard sometimes.” The low Canadian at this week’s CPKC Women’s Open — there are 17 in the field of 156 — will receive the Sandra Post Medal. Henderson was in elementary school the first time she met Morgan Pressel at a clinic in Ottawa and later followed her around at the Canadian Women’s Open as a fan. Outside of her older sister Brittany, Pressel was Henderson’s biggest role model growing up. Post tells a similar story from watching her first LPGA event in Florida in 1953 at the age of 5. It was LPGA founder Marilynn Smith who caught her attention that week. Post began writing her letters and Smith wrote back.

At age 13, Post played in an exhibition with an LPGA rookie named Whitworth and couldn’t have imagined that seven years later she’d be squaring off against another one of her idols for a major title. Post thought that after becoming the first player from Canada to win a major that she might be in line for female athlete of the year in her home country. But 1968 was an Olympic year, and Post came in fifth in the voting. She did, however, win LPGA Rookie of the Year honors. “It was actually quite good for me,” said Post, who thought “boy, do I have a lot of work to do.”

After such a successful rookie campaign, Post struggled to find the winner’s circle again in the ensuing years. On a flight to Melbourne, Australia, in December of 1974, she left seatmate Judy Rankin to go sit with Whitworth and ask a simple question: “How do you win?” Whitworth, who won 88 times on the LPGA, noted all the occasions that Post had come up just short of late and said, “You think it’s always something you did wrong, but it was something they did a little bit better than you.” Post went on to win that week at the Colgate Far East Open, and while it wasn’t an LPGA-sanctioned event, she’d go on to win seven more times from 1978 to 1981. She was finally named Canada’s Female Athlete of the Year in 1979.

Post nearly comes to tears when she talks about the LPGA pioneers who helped shape her career. She still marvels at their genuine kindness. “They knew we were out there alone,” she said. “They never hovered over us or told us what to do, but we could always go to them if we needed help.” Post won the Colgate-Dinah Shore Winner’s Circle twice (1978, 1979) before it became a major, just as her good friend Judy Rankin did in 1976. Over this past winter, Post was the range at Mission Hills in Rancho Mirage, California, working on her game next to Rankin, as they’d done for so many decades. “I said Jude, in 1972, if I would’ve come over to you on this range, and said ‘Judy, in 2024, you and I would still be out here pounding balls,’ would you believe it?”

Rankin laughed.

There’s probably a lot they wouldn’t have believed.