The legendary Joan Joyce Passed Away at 81

I can’t recall the date, the day, the time, but it was back in Florida when I was assistant media director and head cross country coach at Lynn University, a Division I school in Boca Raton.

Across town was another DI school, Florida Atlantic University, and I was happy it was a good day for softball for I was on my way to cover the game against Lynn.

“Do you know who’s the head coach at FAU,” asked Lynn media director Jeff Schaly, “and I answered that I sure do, it’s the great Joan Joyce.”

Yes, I was very familiar with one of America’s greatest female athletes. I never met her, but I would on this nice sunny day when I guessed that was her seated several rows below the press box with a scorebook alongside her and wearing an Owls’ jersey top. I asked someone from FAU and they confirmed that was ‘thee’ Joan Joyce.”

The teams were still in pre-game practice, so I strolled over to her, introduced myself, and she responded with a smile and a high-five. She said they always enjoyed playing us, and this was the first of a 3-game match-up that season. She said she loved coaching softball there as well as assisting with the golf team.

In 1983 she was inducted into the National Softball Hall of Fame. In 1989 she was named to the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame, and in 1999 inducted into the International Softball Federation Hall of Fame.

Yet while softball brought Joyce her greatest recognition, it was far from her only sport. She also competed on the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour for nearly two decades. She played and coached the Connecticut Clippers volleyball team and played basketball for the United States Women’s National Team, then became a 3-time Amateur Athletic Union All-America and scored a record 67 points in a tournament game. And can’t forget she also won the Connecticut state bowling championship just three weeks after taking up the sport.

Can you top this? Well, sportswriters compared her to the legendary Babe Didrikson Zaharias, an All-America basketball player, a track and field standout who won gold medals at the 1932 Olympics, played pro golf, and pitched at Major League Baseball exhibition games.

In softball, Joyce was best known as a hard-throwing right-handed pitcher, hurling 150 no-hitters and 50 perfect games in addition to striking out retired baseball Hall of Famers Ted Williams and Hank Aaron. She was one of the most intimidating players in the sport’s history, amassing a career pitching record of 753 wins and 42 losses over two decades, with a lifetime earned-run average of 0:09. Standing about 5-feet-10, she was also a ferocious hitter, with a lifetime batting average of .424.

Still employed as a softball and golf coach at Florida Atlantic, it was announced by the school this past Saturday that the legendary Joan Joyce had passed away at age 81. The school did not say where or how she died, but she had been away from the softball team this spring while undergoing a medical procedure. The sad news was felt by everyone on the campus, and by the rest of the softball world.

Instead of a traditional windmill pitching style, she used a slingshot delivery with her right hand starting high behind her back and swinging forward past her hips. A study in the mid-1960s found that she threw almost 120 miles per hour, although Joyce explained that her pitches were never timed with a speed gun and were probably in the 70s, fast enough to confound most batters, and especially since she typically played in the circle 40 feet from home plate rather than the Major League Baseball distance of 60 feet 6 inches.

She had many, many great moments and headlines after each impressive start. When she threw back-to-back shutouts to lead the Raybestos Brakettes to a softball championship in 1973, Sports Illustrated reported she dominates her sport as no athlete, male or female, has every dominated a sport. One softball general manager joked that they’d have to spike her Coke of something if they faced her and her pro team, the Connecticut Falcons, in a seven-game playoff series.

She was 20 when she first struck out Williams in August of 1961, drawing cheers from an overflow crowd of some 17,000 who filled the bleachers and spilled out onto the field at her hometown stadium in Waterbury, Conn. She also struck out Aaron that day as he and Williams were already into retirement and were enlisted to appear at the exhibition, a fundraiser for children with cancer.

In his next time up Williams did single up the middle off a rising fastball after first fanning on a curve ball. Later he asked Joyce how’d she throw that curveball, and this prompted her to demonstrate her technique.

So the “Splendid Splinter” looked at her and said that girls shouldn’t know that, and she looked back at him and said, “This girl does know that.”

No doubt she was the best in about every sport she played, but always at the top of the heap in softball.