“I still love to hunt for golf balls,” she says. “Sam Snead loved to look for balls, too.”
She is the youngest of five children, all of them still alive. Her oldest sister, Helen Sherry of Maple Valley, describes JoAnne as “very active” as a toddler and child.
Was it an advantage to be the youngest?
“You bet,” says Carner, laughing. “I was spoiled rotten.”
Carner recalls that the local kids would sneak out on the Juanita course after dark, with as many as 10 kids at at time playing after the sun went down.
“We played a lot of moonlight golf,” she says. “When the moon was in your face, you had to tell by feel whether the ball hooked or sliced. It was wonderful training.”
Carner flashed golf talent early, and the Sand Point Country Club helped her develop. The club allowed her father, Gustav, to pay for her tournament travel and lessons with head pro John Hoetmer by doing necessary carpentry work around the club, and made the teenage Carner an honorary member — a necessity to play in club tournaments throughout the region. It’s a fact she remains grateful for to this day.
Those lessons helped her win the U.S. Junior Girls championship in the summer of 1956 and finish second in the U.S. Women’s Amateur. Despite being one of the top amateur golfers in the country, however, she was barred from competing on the Lake Washington High School golf team — the school offered no girls’ golf program, and girls were not allowed to compete with the boys.
The Kangaroos, however, did appreciate what a gifted athlete they had in Carner. When she showed up for her senior year after that headline-grabbing summer, she was awarded a letterman’s sweater, even if she couldn’t compete.
Carner was a giant in amateur golf in the 1960s, winning just about everything she entered. She won five U.S. Amateurs (during a time when fellow Western Washington golfers Anne Quast Sander, who would make the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1959, won three, while Pat Lesser Harbottle won one), and won the LPGA’s Burdine’s Invitational in 1969. She was the last amateur to win an LPGA event until New Zealand’s 15-year-old phenom Lydia Ko did it in 2012 in a tournament in British Columbia.
Pittsburgh golf writer Marino Parascezo wrote that Carner won the 1968 U.S. Women’s Amateur — her fifth in 11 years — without even practicing. She was having fun dominating the amateur scene, and as she notes, the LPGA purses weren’t anything to write home about at that time anyway. Another year of dominance later, though, her future husband, Don, finally told her, “You need some new goals.”
So, in 1970 — at the age of 30 — she finally turned pro, with Don as her business manager. He didn’t serve as instructor, but was present at every lesson she took from the likes of Snead and Gardner Dickinson, so he’d know what to watch for on the road, and could point it out.
It wasn’t long before Carner had earned a reputation as a character the likes of which the Tour had never seen. She rode a motorcycle, fished her way from event to event (and especially on off weeks), and traveled from tournament to tournament towing an Airstream trailer.
“I play better golf living in our trailer,” she once said.
Another bonus: Don was a good cook.
“I did most of the cooking, but he was a better cook,” she says.
She was called “The Great Gundy” (maiden name Gunderson) before marrying Don in 1963. It was her other nickname, though, that would truly become legend.
Following 72 holes at the 1976 U.S. Open, Carner was tied with Sandra Palmer, who stepped to the podium to assess her chances.
“Well, I’m going against ‘Big Momma,’” Palmer said, referring mostly to Carner’s long drives instead of her physical size. Carner was, at the time, a nothing-exceptional 5-foot-7 and wore a size 8 dress. However, Palmer was only 5-1 1/2.
Carner won the playoff, and the “Big Momma” nickname stuck.
In the ensuing years, “Big Momma” became more than just a reference to Carner’s prodigious power, but to the way she treated her fellow players. At a time when there weren’t nearly as many professional women’s sports role models as there are today, Carner became a true mother figure to the younger players on Tour, taking them under her wing and helping them navigate the waters of professional women’s golf.
In 1979, Carner wrecked her motorcycle and took several months off, before returning for the Wheeling Classic in the hills of West Virginia. As she sat chatting in the lodge, fellow players began walking in from their practice rounds.
Parascezo writes: “They would come through the door, headed wherever, then spot Carner and veer over to the couch and shake hands or pat her shoulder, and say, ‘Welcome back, Momma,’ and so forth. Clearly, they were more than just happy to see her. They were relieved.
“And this was a little bit crazy,” he continues. “JoAnne Carner — ‘Big Momma,’ the mother-figure, sister-figure and great pal who, by the way, was always ready to beat them to the money.”
Carner was popular with crowds, too. She talked to galleries to stay relaxed on the course and showed humor in situations where other golfers would have steam coming out of their ears. She once drove her first two tee shots into a parking lot, then turned to the gallery and said, “Well, that lot is full. Let’s see if I can park this baby somewhere else.”
Carner’s game didn’t have a weakness and she considers two of her strengths to be bunker shots and trouble shots. She was a powerful but sometimes errant driver.
“The ground shakes when she hits it,” Palmer once said.
Sometimes, she needed help finding her ball, which usually avoided the side of the fairway with the most danger but nonetheless required a search. The fans would often find it for her, and she’d banter with them before taking her shot.
“They’d ask what I was going to try to do and I’d tell them,” she says. “If I didn’t do it, I’d just say I had changed my mind.”
Her biggest victories were the two U.S. Opens, in 1971 and 1976. She lost the 1987 U.S. Open in a playoff to Laura Davies. In 1985, she won her final LPGA Tour event — appropriately, on Northwest soil, at the SAFECO Classic at Meridian Valley Country Club in Kent.