The Women’s Open Was Never Promised a 50th Staging
The LED board on the 18th green reading ‘AIG Women’s Open – 50 Years – Never Stop Playing’ prior to the AIG Women’s Open 2026 at Royal Lytham & St. Annes on July 27, 2026 in Lytham St Annes, England. (Photo by Kate McShane /R&A/R&A via Getty Images)
There is a line in the Women’s Open record that says more about the championship than almost any winning score.
1983: No tournament.
No champion. No course. No number to place beside a name. Just a season when the championship disappeared.
That empty space is easy to skim past when looking through the list of winners, especially now. The Women’s Open arrives at Royal Lytham & St Annes this week with a $10 million purse, 34 scheduled hours of live television coverage and the standing of a major championship. The modern presentation feels permanent because major championships are supposed to feel that way.
Golf history rarely unfolds so cleanly.
The Women’s Open did not start with a famous trophy, a collection of established venues or decades of institutional weight behind it. It began in 1976 at Fulford Golf Club with £500 in prize money. The players helped fund part of the purse themselves. Jenny Lee Smith, an amateur from Northumberland who reportedly considered withdrawing because she felt unwell, won by two strokes over Mary McKenna.
That is the beginning worth remembering as the championship reaches 50 stagings. Not because £500 sounds quaint by modern standards, but because the people involved were trying to build something before anyone could promise what it might become.
The money told the story
I have spent more than 30 years working inside the golf business, and budgets have a way of revealing how much an idea is truly valued.
People can say a program, championship or initiative matters. The allocation of money, attention and opportunity usually tells the fuller story.
A £500 prize fund, partly supplied by the competitors, made the position of women’s professional golf in 1976 difficult to misunderstand. The first Women’s Open players were not arriving at an established major. They were helping create a stage that barely existed.
The inaugural championship was also not limited to professionals. Lee Smith won as an amateur, as did Janet Melville two years later. Alison Sheard of South Africa became the first non-British champion in 1979. Debbie Massey then became the first American winner in 1980 and successfully defended the championship the following year.
The event was producing international champions quickly. Stability took longer.
After Marta Figueras-Dotti won as an amateur at Royal Birkdale in 1982, the championship was not contested in 1983. The official record offers no champion and no venue for that year. It resumed in 1984 at Woburn, where Ayako Okamoto won by 11 strokes.
Anniversaries often encourage us to look backward as though every important outcome was inevitable. That missing year prevents us from doing that here.
A championship still finding its footing
The Women’s Open returned, but it continued to operate differently from the major we recognize today.
It moved among a collection of English courses and spent much of the 1990s at Woburn. The Duke’s Course hosted eight consecutive editions from 1990 through 1997, a stretch that included victories by Helen Alfredsson, Patty Sheehan, Karrie Webb and Liselotte Neumann.
Webb’s arrival was especially significant. She won in her championship debut in 1995, added another title in 1997 and became the first three-time winner at Turnberry in 2002. She and Sherri Steinhauer remain the only players to win the championship three times.
Those champions helped elevate the event before its status fully caught up with its field.
Major recognition came in 2001. The prize fund was raised to £1 million, and Se Ri Pak won at Sunningdale by two strokes over Mi Hyun Kim. The money and designation mattered, but neither created the championship’s importance from nothing. By then, the Women’s Open had been contested for a quarter-century and had already produced champions from several generations and countries.
The major label formalized what players had spent years building.
Royal Lytham gave the championship defining moments
Royal Lytham hosts the Women’s Open for the sixth time in 2026. The course’s 166 bunkers and location between the town and railway line make it one of the game’s most recognizable championship tests, but its connection to the Women’s Open is more than architectural.
Three of the championship’s most meaningful victories happened there.
Annika Sorenstam arrived in 2003 needing the Women’s Open to complete the career Grand Slam. She reached the 72nd hole battling Se Ri Pak and facing one of Lytham’s most demanding tee shots. Pak found a pot bunker. Sorenstam chose driver, found the fairway and later called it one of the best drives of her career. She made par, won the championship and completed the Grand Slam.
Six years later, Catriona Matthew won at Lytham only 11 weeks after giving birth to her second daughter, Sophie. She finished three strokes ahead of Webb and became the first Scottish woman to win a major championship in the modern era.
Georgia Hall’s 2018 victory carried a different feeling. Her father, Wayne, was on the bag as she closed with a 67 and earned her first major championship. Hall had won the Smyth Salver as the championship’s low amateur five years earlier. She returned to Lytham as a professional and left with the title.
Those victories are not interchangeable anniversary highlights. Sorenstam completed a career. Matthew returned from childbirth and produced the defining win of hers. Hall fulfilled the promise first seen when she was still an amateur.
Royal Lytham has become one of the places where the championship’s history feels personal.
What changed, and what did not
The scale of the modern Women’s Open would have been difficult to imagine at Fulford.
The championship has now produced 42 different winners from 15 countries and visited 22 venues across the United Kingdom. Its purse has grown from £500 to $10 million. Since AIG’s partnership with The R&A began in 2019, the prize fund has more than tripled.
Laura Davies has seen nearly all of that journey. She won the championship in 1986 and played it a record 43 consecutive times. Looking ahead to the 50th staging, Davies pointed back to the women who competed before the event had its current security and stature.
“They competed because they loved the game and believed women’s golf deserved a bigger stage,” Davies said. “What they achieved created opportunities for every generation that followed.”
That is a more useful way to understand this anniversary than simply comparing purses or counting famous winners.
The growth matters. So does the uncertainty that came before it.
The first players had no way of knowing the event would one day visit St Andrews, Carnoustie, Muirfield, Royal Birkdale and Royal Lytham. They could not know it would become an LPGA major or attract a worldwide television audience. They were playing and contributing because they believed the championship deserved a future.
There was even a year when that future failed to arrive.
The meaning of 50
The Women’s Open has been contested across 51 years because 1983 remains empty.
That detail should not be treated as an inconvenience in the anniversary math. It is part of the history.
The championship did not travel in a straight line from Fulford to Royal Lytham. It survived uneven funding, changing venues and a long climb toward major recognition. Its players helped finance the beginning, supplied the performances that gave it credibility and continued showing up while the rest of the golf world slowly learned to pay greater attention.
The 50th staging is not important simply because 50 is a round number.
It matters because there was a time when staging No. 8 never happened.
Everything that followed had to be earned.