It's important to know about Joanie Birkland.

Few people have ever come close to accomplishing what she's accomplished.

It is very hard to excel in one sport.

For her to excel in tennis, and golf, and basketball, it's just amazing.

She was a friend and an advocate and a mentor for any woman that she met that was involved in sport.

Joanie wanted women to realize that they could do anything they put their mind to.

As strong and enduring as the Rocky Mountains, they stood beside, as visionary as the views of the Grand Plains they looked across.

The women inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame are trailblazers, whose work has improved and enriched our lives.

They are teachers, scientists, ranchers, leaders in business, education, religion, and the arts.

Women who have been recognized for their many contributions to our state our country, and the world.

I'm Reynelda Muse, and these are the stories of great Colorado women.

Joanie's legacy, for the most part, will be her athletic accomplishments, because that's what's so easy to quantify.

Joanie the golfer was exceptional.

She won a lot of state championships.

At the same time, she was winning tennis state championships.

It wasn't just tennis and golf.

It was basketball and flag football.

This was pre Title 9 before there was any law that promoted women in sports or forced administrators to offer sports for women.

When she went to C U she was so good at basketball.

So she played on the AAU basketball team.

It was quite a wonderful women's basketball team was called Denver Viner Chevrolet.

In those days women's basketball, you could only play a half a court.

It made her mad that women were not allowed to compete at the same level that boys did.

There was all sorts of rules that only one person could be on the other side of the court at any given time.

She said, why can't we play basketball like the boys play basketball.

And I think that molded her determination to empower women.

she carried the prominence of her athletic career into this just incredible commitment to trying to raise up women athletes.

As far as I'm concerned, her greatest accomplishment was probably the Sports Women of Colorado.

A friend of mine called me and said, what would you think of sort of a Hall of Fame or something for female athletes?

And I said, wow, that'd be great.

She was such a good example of a woman who had a lot of respect for herself and for women.

I think Aunt Jo was a pioneer in advocating for women's sports because she did it.

She played and she forced her way into playing at a time when it was not popular to do so.

It's hard to say all the reasons that she was special.

If you were lucky enough to know her, she made your life better.

Joanie was a third generation Coloradoan.

She was born in 1928.

Her Dad's side immigrated from Connecticut in the late 1800's.

He was one of the first pediatric orthopedists west of the Mississippi.

She had two sisters.

Carol, and her sister, Evelyn, or babe, as everyone calls her.

They all grew up in a house right across from City Park.

Of course, Aunt Joe was the athlete, and I think she was always playing games.

She lived the life of an athlete from when she was a little girl.

She lived by the park and she was always playing baseball, football, whatever there was to play.

As a young girl, you know, she just was competing with all the boys.

She would go over and play with them because she threw the ball better than any of them.

So she would play quarterback.

The time that she grew up was not a time of women's sports.

Girls didn't have those opportunities to participate.

Early on they didn't have anything for women.

If Aunt Joe had the opportunity that young women have today in high school, organized sports, in clubs, in coaching, in training.

If she lived in the modern age there's no doubt in my mind that she would have been a high- level professional athlete.

I talked to her one time and she was talking about Title 9 and she said, oh my gosh, if what would it have been like if Title 9 would have been around when I was a kid?

Because there were so many good women athletes that just never got a chance.

She picked sports where you actually could play, you know, more than you could in other things.

She searched out sports that she wanted to play in, and became proficient at them.

There were tennis courts at City Park and she learned to sort of pick up the game there.

Aunt Jo's tennis career started in high school.

It was one of the few individual sports women could play.

And she was really good at it.

She really got serious coming out of college.

I remember going over and watching her play at the Denver Tennis Club a lot because it was close to our house.

That became kind of her platform to start competing.

Back then, if you wanted to get in the Denver tennis club, you had to be ranked.

The way you get ranked is to play in tournaments.

At the end of the season, they come out with these numbers depending on your tournament record.

Since she won everything, she was pretty much up there at the top.

She had better hands than anybody I'd ever played tennis with.

She could just move the ball wherever she wanted.

She had a great forehand.

She had a slice backhand.

The thing that drove everybody crazy is she had a drop shot lob combination.

And her very favorite thing to do was to lob over your head and force you to run back and forth and sideways all over the court.

She was very well respected as one of the certainly the top tennis player in Colorado.

She loved playing doubles, and she started playing doubles with Phyllis Lockwood.

And they went on to win numerous state championships together.

Joanie was competing with the best in the world at the time.

Althea Gibson would be a good example.

It was in 1957 and Althea Gibson was the world champion.

And there was a tournament called the Colorado Open.

That was a very well attended and big tournament at the time.

She played Althea Gibson and gave her a good game.

It was a very sunny day, and Althea on one side of the court was struggling with the sun.

The first set was very competitive.

I think it was 6-4.

Her friends in between sets said, start lobbing her, because she's really struggling with the sun.

And my aunt said, I told them, no, that's not that's not sporting.

I'm not going to do that.

She was ahead of Athea Gibson in the first set, and it looked like she was out playing Althea Gibson at that point.

She ended up losing 8-6,6-4, which was a very close match.

But, it became very famous in the tennis community.

She was a legend in my mind before I ever even met her.

I was really honored The first time I got fixed up with her, and I was like this, you know, I hope I can hit the ball.

But we just hit it off.

that was the beginning of it.

She was the only one then that I played with that belonged to the Denver Country Club.

I first met Joanie at Denver Country Club, where we were both members.

And I met her, of course, on the golf course, and we became friends.

She did not play when she was young, but she picked up golf because Orm played.

She met Orm, her husband at the very young age of 19. and I think he's the one that encouraged her to take up the game.

Orm was a Navy pilot in World War II came back and swept Aunt Jo off of her feet.

she learned to play golf to have something to do with Orm and ended up obviously being very good at that.

So basically anything that she would pick up, she would thrive at.

Joanie was a good athlete.

You know, Joanie didn't have the fluid swing that you'd see on professionals today.

She was just an athlete.

And She made the ball go the way she wanted to just by working on it and practicing and learning how how to make her game work.

It was in the late 50s, early 60s that she began winning tournaments.

Joanie the golfer was exceptional.

In Colorado, nobody could beat her for a long, long time.

Her playing record is just incredible.

I think in the '60s, she won like 70 state championships stroke play match play.

She just took her Godgiven talents and equipment and put it to good use and dominated everybody in Colorado for a long time.

So one of the most amazing things about Joanie is that she won the Club championship at Denver Country Club for 30 years consecutively.

And if you've ever won anything for one year, you know how hard it is to show up the next year with a target on your back.

So imagine that for 30 years, she had a target on her back.

If nobody can beat her, you become a legend.

She won a lot of state championships, at the same time, she was winning tennis state championships.

It was in 1960, 1962, and 1966.

She won all three, the state tennis and the state Golf Championship in the same year.

It's the one fact that if I mention that to any of my friends they say, what?

Are you kidding me?

And I, no, it actually happened.

And if you just think about it, to be that good in both sports, to win your state championship is a, I think, an incredible feat.

There evidently was a newspaper article that was written about her after that, that talked about her being a legend.

And I'm going to tell you that what happened is, all her friends grabbed that and ran with it.

And from then on, she wasn't a legend to us.

She was the legend.

Joanie was really competitive, and she loved nothing more than winning.

She had a game face, and I could always tell when she all of a sudden was not fun and, you know, laughing, yucking it up.

Aunt Jo and she became the competitor.

She would change.

Her body language would change.

Her face would change.

She wasn't always the strongest player.

You know, there were other people that maybe were better players at that time, but she was always better mentally.

And a lot of times for an athlete, it's not just your athleticism, it's also your will to win.

So she had that ability to get focused and really be competitive and turn around and be as gracious as you possibly could.

She taught a lot of women how to compete graciously.

And what I mean by that is We've all played sports with people that are rooting against us.

Joanie never rooted against anybody that she was playing with because she celebrated excellence.

She really encouraged her opponents anyone she played with, for them to play the best they absolutely could.

She just wanted to beat them at that best.

And she usually did.

She was a truly passionate person about the game of golf.

And about playing the game properly, in other words, by the rules, honorably.

The etiquette of the game is one of the things that a lot of people aren't taught when they learn the game.

That's where Joanie excelled, because she brought all the etiquette and the nuances of the game to somebody that was new to the sport.

Respect for the game meant a lot to her.

She'd yell at you if you called bunkers sand traps.

It's not a sand trap.

It is a bunker.

She was trying to teach me how to look like I knew how to play golf.

And she was trying to say, now, it's not a sand trap, it's a bunker, and it's not a flag, it's this or that, you know.

We'd all call it the wrong thing, and it would just drive her crazy because she was so adamant about learning how to do it the right way.

And she wanted other people to experience that fun and that feeling of accomplishment you get when you learn a sport.

And you don't have to be really good at it.

Just participate.

She was a mentor to new players.

She was always very helpful with them and very much appreciated the fact that they loved the same game she did.

She just loved the game and she loved the people that played it.

She was interested in everyone's accomplishments, and she wanted them to do their best.

One of the most fun parts of Joanie, and we haven't really talked about how fun she was.

She had an amazing sense of humor, somewhat irreverent, I might add.

She loved to kind of strut her jockeyness sometimes.

To this day, there are people that repeat little tidbits that she would say to us on the course.

We call them Joanieisms.

If you are getting ready to hit some shot, she'd say show me what you got, princess.

If you left a putt short, she'd say, oh, baby girl.

Well, we're still saying baby girl right now, today, when we leave a putt short.

As much as Joanie loved people that played golf and all her pals at Denver Country Club that played golf.

They loved her as much back.

And they've named their big golf tournament after her.

Everyone just loves the tournament.

It's the longest running women's competition other than our club championship.

Originally, it was called the JB Compromise, and now it's the Joan Birkland Tournament.

To this day, they still have it.

And I thought, how interesting is it that most of the time people get tournaments named after them after they're gone, and she had a term named after her while she was still alive.

The club has always been appreciative and respectful of Joanie's contribution to the game and to the club.

In 1982, the Denver Country Club held the Curtis Cup match, and Joanie was appointed the local general chairman of that match.

The Curtis Cup is a biennial event between eight women that are selected the top amateur women from the United States Golf Association and eight from Great Britain and Ireland.

And they have a match every two years.

The Curtis Cup was a huge deal.

She was certainly right in the middle of all the organization of it.

It went off great.

The United States won, which made all the locals and the Denver Country club members happy.

But the members delighted in seeing these wonderful women amateur golfers from both sides of the Atlantic compete.

And so it was a wonderful event for our club.

And Joanie was the key person putting it all together.

Well, Joanie was not only a player in the game, but she gave up a lot of her time as a volunteer.

Joanie had quite a history with the Colorado Women's Golf Association.

Joanie served on the board of the CWGA.

She was a member of the Colorado Women's course rating and handicap committee, and she was on it for several years.

And then she was asked to be on the USGA Women's Committee.

Which is quite an honor, actually.

There's not that many women that have that on their resume, so to speak.

The United States Golf Association is the governing body for the game of golf in the United States and Mexico.

There's a counterpart organization based in Scotland called the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.

Together, the two organizations are responsible for writing and improving the rules of golf, providing a world handicap system, administering the rules regarding equipment, and conducting national championships.

She was a rules official, and acted as a rules official in many tournaments.

She would go to U.S. Women's Opens.

she would travel the country to be at the elite women's events that were put on by the USGA.

after the Curtis Cup, and the way that event went under her leadership, you know, she became a good candidate to get involved with the part of the organization that delivered those kinds of championships and matches.

Which would have meant she was responsible for the U.S. Women's amateur, the Women's Senior Amateur, the U.S. Women's Open.

So Joanie's responsibility as chairman of the Women's Committee was both a high honor for her and an important responsibility for the organization.

I think she would say that that's her proudest accomplishment.

That probably neck and neck with The Sportswomen of Colorado.

After her competitive days were over, It was back to this idea that said I am going to lift women athletes up, get them recognized, get them the resources that they need.

She put her heart and soul into that.

Joanie founded the Sportswomen of Colorado, and it was important to her.

The mission of Sportswomen of Colorado is to promote, honor, and empower girls and women in sport.

It was incredibly important for her to support women.

You think about it.

She started long before Title 9.

When title 9 came along she was thrilled that women now could have team sports to play in college and then all of a sudden the high schools were feeding college teams and promoting team sports.

She was thrilled about that, and did everything she could to support it and to be a voice for that.

I think she was pretty impatient with the lack of recognition that the women were getting in playing their sports, and she set up the Sportswomen in the mid 70's.

The first thing we do, which will be obvious, is to honor the top athletes in the state, but we also try to honor the contributors to athletics, the coaches, the leaders, we give awards for the most inspirational performance, the most courageous performance In so doing, we're trying to call attention to women's athletics and get women to participate in all forms of athletics from a very young age throughout their lifetime.

What she wanted was an arena where women who excelled in sports could be celebrated, and it has grown to be an unbelievable event.

They would have an award ceremony every year.

They would pick a a keynote speaker.

And they would honor One very special athlete got the big award, but they had many awards that they gave out.

We have been recognizing women who have been leaders for Sportsmen of Colorado In the early years These significant leaders Include people Like Joan Birkland I went to several of the dinners and they were fantastic.

And she really gathered huge crowds of people that were supporting women athletes.

But it was unbelievable the amount of skilled athletic women that were honored at that banquet.

It was very moving.

You know, have these women being recognized And I think that anybody that went to those banquets came away with a greater appreciation for women in sports.

And that's I think that's what Joanie was all about.

What Sportswomen does is it brings us all together.

And you realize that there are women that are accomplishing things that I didn't even know were possible.

The organization gave her the chance to be able to recognize and promote sports and what it does for women at all ages I think she got a real kick out of, you know, finding the 80-year-old woman that was doing some sort of an ultra marathon, that kind of thing, to be able to show that there's all kinds of opportunity for women in sport for your whole life and what it can do to help you get over obstacles.

Gives you strength to be able to, you know, find power in the rest of your life.

I think that for her was what the organization did and still does.

Joanie's later years she still really enjoyed watching sports versus being involved in them.

Women's basketball was her pet project.

She was passionate about basketball and supported the CU women's team.

She went to a lot of those games.

Joanie supported University of Colorado women's basketball in a variety of ways.

She was a friend and a mentor to Ceal Barry and to Linda Lappe and to each coach as they rolled through.

She supported players on the team by providing partial scholarships.

More than anything, she was critical.

She was enthusiastic.

She was always there.

She was a CU Buff through and through.

Joanie had challenges as she got older, some of which we knew about and some of which we didn't.

And that's okay.

She had rotator cuff surgery on both shoulders, but her real pain was in her feet.

And especially one foot.

It continued to get worse and it It was something that was painful from a friend's standpoint painful to watch sometimes because of how she had to walk.

She continued to, again, persevere.

She powered through it and didn't complain about it.

She didn't quit playing golf So for my birthday, Aunt Jo gave me a round of golf at the Denver Country Club.

This was their first time back playing after rotator cuff surgery.

I said, Aunt Jo, you want in, we're going to play a game.

You want to in?

She goes, oh, absolutely.

She drained a 30-footer to win It was classic Aunt Jo.

She's going to beat us at 79.

I know as her memory was leaving her and she was making lists of things to do, so often she would drive to the club and get in a cart and just go out to the practice tee.

She just loved to be around the club there.

People love to see her, stop by, talk to her.

It was a real privilege to see her.

She continued to take lessons, and in fact, one of the things that, to me, is the most amazing is that in the last month of her life, she had taken a lesson.

And so she was up until the very end, striving for perfection or whatever level of perfection she could achieve.

At her celebration of life, which we did at the Denver Country Club, There was a lot of women there and a lot I recognized as athletes.

Every generation, there were young women there.

All the way down to Gen Z. you know, all the people that were there just the breadth of the people that she touched, from every walk of life.

You know, it was just amazing.

She's certainly a legend among her friends, and we sure miss her.

You know, when you start talking about what's somebody's greatest accomplishment?

You know, with respect to Joanie, the first thing you would go to would be look how many Hall of Fames she's in.

Look how many state championships she won, whether it was tennis or golf.

As she looked back on her career and on her life, I know that those meant a lot to her.

She didn't talk about them much, but I know she talked about them a little bit more near the end.

She is a big name and one of the best athletes to ever come from the state.

She could have been an absolute prima donna, but she wasn't.

She was just the opposite.

We always talk about building on the shoulders of the people of the past.

She would definitely be one of the shoulders that people would look back on and say, here was this woman that grew up in a time when there weren't a lot of opportunities for women fought against that, still managed to have amazing accomplishments and then go on to lift up the next generation.

The legacy that she brought the Sportswomen Of Colorado will leave an indelible mark.

It's hard to say all the reasons that she was special.

But the core values of the first tee came to mind.

And they're honesty and integrity and respect confidence and perseverance and responsibility and courtesy and judgment.

All of those core values are how she lived her life.

Even though she was an accomplished sports woman, she also was just genuine, and loved the simple things in life, loved to laugh, love to be with their friends, and just had a big heart.

A wonderful inspiration for how to live your life in a lovely full way.