In July 1956, a 23-year-old rookie pro named Kathy Cornelius shot a 75 in an 18-hole playoff to beat amateur Barbara McIntire by seven strokes and win the U.S. Women's Open in her very first attempt. Cornelius, who went on to play the LPGA Tour for nearly three decades and later taught golf in Arizona for years afterward, died September 28, 2026, in Chandler, Arizona, according to Dignity Memorial. She was 93.

Born Katharine McKinnon on October 27, 1932, she split her childhood between Scituate, Massachusetts, and southeastern Kentucky, the only child of a father who had served in both world wars. She took up golf at 13, working with pro Vic Bass in Lake Worth, Florida, and by 1952 had won the Southern Amateur Championship. At Florida Southern College in Lakeland, where she enrolled as a journalism major, she played on the men's golf team because the school had no team for women.

She turned professional and married golf professional Bill Cornelius in 1953, then joined the LPGA Tour in 1956. That rookie season brought two wins, the St. Petersburg Open and the U.S. Women's Open at Northland Country Club in Duluth, Minnesota. Over the next 17 years she added five more LPGA Tour titles: the Cosmopolitan Open in 1959, the Tippecanoe Open in 1961, the Bluegrass Invitational in 1972 and the Sealy-Faberge Classic in 1973, which at the time carried the richest purse in women's golf. She later said her approach under pressure was to play for birdies rather than play it safe to avoid bogeys.

In 1981, her daughter Kay won the U.S. Girls' Junior Championship, making Kathy and Kay Cornelius the only mother-daughter pair to each win an individual USGA championship, a record Global Golf Post reported had stood unbroken for more than four decades. "I don't know why that record still stands with all the girls now entering the game," Kay said.

Cornelius moved her family to Arizona in the early 1970s, where she and Bill opened a driving range and both gave lessons. In 1986 the couple founded Magique Golf, a custom club manufacturer based in Chandler. "When Bill and Kathy, who was a former U.S. Women's Open champ, owned the company, it was financially sound," Sean Sheppard, who bought Magique in 2004, told the East Valley Tribune. She went on to teach golf part time at Rio Salado Golf Course in Tempe, and in 2017 the Arizona Golf Hall of Fame inducted her.

What Cornelius left in Arizona golf was practical as much as competitive: a club company she and Bill built by hand in Chandler, years of lessons given at a public course in Tempe, and a record with her daughter that no other mother and daughter in USGA history have matched. It began with one nervy Sunday playoff in Duluth that a 23-year-old rookie decided to win rather than simply survive.