“The Charlie Rymer Golf Show” with Nancy Lopez, Part 1

In the first of a two-part episode, World Golf Hall of Famer Nancy Lopez chats with Charlie about the power of positivity in golf – how it was instilled in her by her father, how it helped her to long-running LPGA Tour success, and how she now tries to share it with others.

Charlie Rymer:
I’m Charlie Rymer. And this is the Charlie Rymer Golf Show powered by PlayGolfMyrtleBeach.com.

So I’m thrilled now to be joined by World Golf Hall of Fame member, 48-time LPGA winner, and more important than that, my friend Nancy Lopez. Nancy, thank you for coming on today. Where are you and your husband Ed … Where are y’all holed up during this whole quarantine situation?

Nancy Lopez:
Hi, Charlie. We’re in Palm City, Florida, and fortunately, we’re still able to play some golf. We belong to Piper’s Landing and so it’s great to be able to still play some golf. It was funny because when this all started, I had trigger finger in both of my thumbs and I decided, “Well, I’m going to go ahead and get that surgery done.” Because it really hurt. And then I said, “That way when I get to start working and traveling again, I can do that.” Well, now I can do my surgery on both my thumbs. I can’t play golf for four to five weeks.

Charlie Rymer:
Oh no.

Nancy Lopez:
So I’m like, that was stupid, because now I had dead time and had nothing to do and it was pretty crazy.

Charlie Rymer:
Yeah, I’m sure. This situation and one of the main reasons I wanted to talk with you, it is very frustrating for a lot of people. And you are one of the most positive people that I know, even talking about not being able to get out and play golf. You’re smiling about it, you’re laughing about it and that’s contagious. Where did you get this unbelievable outlook that you have as being literally one of the most positive people I’ve ever been around in my life?

Nancy Lopez:
Well, my Dad was very positive. He just lived his life that way. He owned an auto body repair shop and I would work there in the summertime at a young age, answering his phone, which was East Second Body Shop which was my Dad’s … The name of his shop. And the way he was with people, and he painted their cars, fixed dents. If they didn’t like it, he said, “I’ll do it again.” And he was always positive in that respect, too.

But as I started playing golf, he watched me grow up and he saw the negatives that were, getting mad as a young person and wanting to do better. He always had an anecdote for something and he was this cute little guy, Hispanic man, strong Spanish accent. I mean, for example, he would say to me, when he would see … I was not at club thrower or at least he wouldn’t have let me be one.

And I remember slamming my club on the ground one day and he came at me with his golf club because we were walking. We didn’t ride carts back then. And he shook that club on my face. He said, “If you ever do that again, I’m going to hit you with this golf club.” Well, I never did it again.

And he was just positive. He saw when I would get a little mad that I didn’t play better. For example, one day he looked at me. He said, “Nancy, you want to shoot 39 or you want to shoot 40?” I said, “Dad, I want to shoot 39.” Even though it was just one shot, he said, “Well, when you get mad, you shoot 40.” And I was like, “Wow, that makes sense.”

So things like that, he would say to me. And he was such a great mentor, golf dad, everything, because I remember playing in the U.S. Open in Philadelphia and that golf course kicked my butt. I mean, I just didn’t play well. I was still an amateur and very disappointed because after Friday’s round, I was probably 12 over par, knew I was going to miss the cut and walked off the green. My dad was there with me and I had tears in my eyes and I walked up to my dad and I was crying. I said, “Dad, I’m so sorry I didn’t play better.” And he hugged me and he said, “It’s okay, honey. I didn’t want to see you at 25 over par anyway.”

And I went from crying to laughing because I thought it was the cutest thing. And as a young person, your parents are your best friends, even if they aggravate you and tell you things and have rules that you don’t like, but they’re really your best friend. And you always look to them to give you positive acknowledgement of anything that you do. And my dad and my mom were always like that.

Charlie Rymer:
Well, if there was a hall of fame for professional athletes and the criteria was how they treat their fellow professionals, how they’re respected by their fellow professionals, how they deal with fans. I think you and Arnold Palmer would be the first to the top of the class to go into that type of hall of fame. What kind of lessons did you learn from your dad in how to deal with people?

Nancy Lopez:
Well, like I said, just watching him in his auto body repair shop. He was always friendly to people. These people always came back because my dad treated them with respect, and the customer was always right. And I think with that, my dad like that in our family life, he was just always positive. I remember him saying to me that there’s a lot of negative in the world, but there’s always something positive you can make out of a negative. And you really can, if you really think about it instead of being negative. I see people say things that are negative and their whole life becomes negative. And I remember, and I don’t know how much time we have, but I have a story to tell.

Charlie Rymer:
Please. We’ve got all the way until mid-July before we have anything else to do around here.

Nancy Lopez:
Well I had some golf schools at The Villages in Florida for many years, and we’d have about 30 students for three days. I felt like I always sensed people, there were people coming in. There were husbands and wives. There were women, gentlemen, everybody was coming to my golf school. Like I said, it was a three-day event. I’m watching people come in and I’m observing them, their body English, how they walk, if they were going to be confident. And I saw this husband and wife, they were walking towards me and she was this happy wife. You could just tell she was happy all the time. And then here’s her husband, he was kind of slouched over, looking down. Maybe he didn’t want to be there. Maybe I intimidated him. I’m not really sure. But as they sat down, they sat right in the front row.

And I thought to myself, he’s going to be my victim for the next three days. So we’re sitting there and I decided we’re going to play a game. I told them all, I said, “I know you all don’t know each other, but for the next three days, this is going to be a positive school, not a negative school.” So if you hear anybody saying anything negative, it’s hot, the greens are too slow, the rough is too high. I want you to look at that person and go “Waah! Waah!” Well, everybody kind of like, “Oh, that sounds like fun. That sounds like fun” and the wife was like, “I love this.” You could just see this look in her face because I think her husband was just a negative person.

So we go, we split up and we go to our different … I was in the chipping area first, so I was teaching 10 of those people and he was one of the first ones I was teaching. So I give them all a tip on what to do when they’re chipping. I watch him. He’s chipping and he’s chipping. He’s getting frustrated. He said, “I can’t do this.” And I said, “Waah! Waah!” He looked at me. He looked at me like, you really did do that to me. And I said, “Yes, you can do this. Let me show you again. You can do this.”

So he goes back to chipping and the next three days you hear a lot of “Waah! Waah!” People laughing because they realized how negative they were and the negative things that came out of their mouth on the golf course. So on the last day I play one hole with every group. I walk up to the tee and the wife sees me and she’s so happy to see me.

He sees me, he’s not as happy to see me as she was. So he hits his tee shot and he swings and he just hits it left, rough in Florida is not very high, at least not in The Villages it wasn’t high. So he swings, hits a ball, left, drops his club. And I said, “Waah! Waah!” He said, “I didn’t say anything.”

I said, “Your body English was so negative. You dropped the club.” I said, “Come up here on the tee. Do you see your ball? Yes, you can still hit it.” And my dad always said, “If you have a backswing, you have a chance. So let’s go hit this next shot.” So we get up to the second shot. He hits it right into the bunker. He goes, “Yes, I hit it in the bunker.”

And I’m like, “No, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is when you get in the bunker, you have a backswing, you can knock it in the hole.” Well, he wasn’t really happy that I did that to him. So, that school ends. We have our cocktails. We say goodbye, three months go by. Another school happens. Then six months go by. And here he and his wife come again and they’re walking towards me and she’s happy. And he’s walking straight to me making eye contact. And I’m like, “Oh my gosh, what’s he going to say to me?” And he looked at me and he walked up to me and he said, “Nancy, I am playing the best golf I’ve ever played in my life.” And I think he just changed. I think his wife probably “Waah! Waah!”-ed him to death at home, and he realized how negative he was.

Charlie Rymer:
That’s a great lesson you delivered to him, no doubt about it. And I hope a lot of folks learn from hearing that first-hand today from you. Staying on the no-complaining, happy theme on the golf course. Last time I was with you, we were at The Villages for your charity event, and we’re going to get into that in a little bit. But you handed me a tee, and it was one of the tees that’s really big on the top. And until I turned 50, I didn’t realize what that was for. It’s a little easier to tee it up with. It’s a little bigger. But as I recall on the crown of that tee in big print, it says “Play Happy.” Isn’t that what that tee says and that, and that’s sort of-

Nancy Lopez:
Yep. It was a martini tee and it says, “Play Happy.”

Charlie Rymer:
That’s a mantra for you though, isn’t it? I know you hand those out to a lot of people.

Nancy Lopez:
It is with my company, Nancy Lopez Golf Adventures. That is our mantra. And we teach my Dad’s lessons that he taught me. And many years ago, my Dad looked at me. He says, “Nancy, you play better when you play happy.” And I’m not saying that every time you hit a bad shot, you’re going to go, “I’m going to be happy.”

It’s about attitude. If you miss a shot, if you go to the next shot with an attitude that you’re going to hit it better instead of dragging the bad feeling from the last shot or the last put you missed, I guarantee you’re going to hit that shot better. Maybe not perfect, but you can hit it better than if you carry yourself with your shoulders down hitting your club all the way to the golf shot instead of shoulders back walking to it and saying, “Oh, I can’t wait to hit this. I have a backswing. I can still hit this ball in the hole.” Because you never know. Golf is that kind of game.

Charlie Rymer:
I wish I’d had this conversation with you when I was a rookie on the PGA TOUR, because if I could get in a time machine and go back in time what you just explained to me is something I would have liked to have known and believed when I was 22, 23 years old. Because I spent a lot of time playing golf at PGA TOUR events, beating myself up and that just doesn’t help at all. And it’s surprising how many young, talented people that play this game at the highest levels just have a horrible attitude. They’re unhappy because of it.

Nancy Lopez:
Yeah. You can’t let golf control you that way. It’s a game that you should … what I thought about most of all because we’ve been talking about my charity for the handicap. This is our 40th year that I’ve been doing the tournament. And I remember days I think about all those handicapped children that some can’t talk, some can’t think, some can’t even sit up straight, some can’t walk. And I remember being on the golf course and when I was having a bad day, I’d say, “I’m so lucky to be able to walk, swing a golf club, enjoy this beautiful golf course. I think every golf course is beautiful. And yet those little kids can’t do any of that. So why am I letting this crazy game of golf do this to me?”

And I think there were days when I did that and I realized from what my Dad taught me, too, that I need to “enjoy the walk” as I always say on the golf course as a professional. Once I got inside the ropes, that was my other life. Outside of the ropes was my personal life. But inside the ropes was my professional life and I just needed to play the game, enjoy it. And if I wasn’t going to enjoy it, I needed to probably go home and hang up my golf clubs because you’re not going to hit every shot perfect. You’re not going to make every putt, but it’s the attitude that you take or the “Play Happy” attitude that you take to the next shot that’s going to take two or three shots off your golf game instead of adding two or three shots to your golf game.

Charlie Rymer:
Well, it’s amazing when we look at what golf has been able to do for charity and what our heroes have been able to do in defining what success is Mr. Palmer, with Arnold Palmer Children’s Hospital. Mr. Nicklaus with the Nicklaus Children’s Healthcare Foundation, what you’ve been able to do with AIM …

Your commitments aren’t short-term. You’ve helped out with a hospice event in Albany, Georgia, your longtime home for it’s got to be 30- or 40-plus years. You mentioned AIM, and when our heroes like you guys do that, it shows the rest of us, “Hey, there’s more than just going out and playing this game and making money. You’re in a position to help people. You got to do that.” Thank you for showing us, Nancy, what success looks like.

Nancy Lopez:
Well, thanks, Charlie. I’ve, I’ve been blessed. God gave me talent. My dad helped me with that talent. I worked hard, it opened a lot of doors for me. I have so many friends in golf and just love it. And to be able to give back, which now not all athletes do that, which I don’t understand that. They’re all role models and some don’t want to accept that responsibility, but there are little kids out there that look at you and look up to you and want to be like you. And so you’ve got to show them something positive and it’s a good thing to do that.

I have a story. I think why my life became, what it became on the LPGA Tour is because of this one PGA professional. And I’ve never told anybody who he was.

I was 15 years old and my dad took me to the Glen Campbell L.A. Open out in Los Angeles for my 15th birthday. My grandmother lived out there and there was one PGA professional that was my idol. I loved him, never met him and I wanted to get his autograph really badly. And so I’m standing with a group of people outside the club, knowing he was going to come out. There are probably about 30 people waiting. I was about the third person behind the first person that was going to encounter him when he walked out. So he walks out and that guy says to him, “Mr. So-and-so, can I have your autograph?” And he looked around and he says, “I don’t have time for this”. And, oh my gosh, I was this little 15-year-old who just worshiped him.

And when he said that to him, I felt so bad for the first man that asked him that. He had to have shrunk to two inches tall because it was devastating for me, and him not even directly telling me that. And I think from that moment on, as a 15-year-old who was playing golf and maybe had aspirations at that time to play professional golf … I was kind of young then, I was just enjoying playing amateur golf. I said to myself, “If I ever turn professional, I will never do that to someone.”

And realizing that an autograph is really special to somebody. I mean, it was really special to me and I didn’t get it and how disappointed I was. So, I think that’s why I’ve always signed all the autographs. I try and sign every one of them if I can. I usually come back, and I just realized how important it was to those people and if they wanted my autograph then I needed to give it to them.

Charlie Rymer:
Well, Nancy, thanks for sharing your unbelievable attitude. All the great vibes. It’s exactly what the doctor is ordering right now. That’s what we all need. Some great attitude. Will you stick with us a little bit longer, get into your playing career when we return?

Nancy Lopez:
Sure.

Charlie Rymer:
Perfect. Thank you, Nancy!

Charlie Rymer:
Thanks for joining us. I’m Charlie Rymer. We’ll see you next time on the Charlie Rymer Golf Show powered by PlayGolfMyrtleBeach.com.