She turned professional in 1978 and won five tournaments in a row as a rookie, a stretch of dominance so complete that LPGA television ratings and tour attendance spiked in ways the tour hadn't seen before, sportswriters crediting her personally with expanding the audience for women's golf. Her swing was unconventional, a looping backswing that instructors would have corrected out of most juniors, but it produced a short game and a putting touch that made the mechanical imperfection irrelevant. She played with a warmth on the course, present with galleries and press in a way that made her popularity feel earned rather than manufactured, and she sustained a run of dominance across the late seventies and eighties before childbirth and a body that had given everything back to the game slowed her results without ever dimming how audiences responded to her.

She married baseball player Ray Knight and raised three daughters, one of whom followed her into professional golf, while diabetes complicated her health in the decades after her competitive peak. Lopez has talked about the discrimination her family faced in New Mexico as formative rather than incidental, a fact she has never smoothed over in interviews about her rise. She kept playing long past the point most careers end, because the game had once told her she didn't belong in it, and she never stopped proving otherwise.