As Tiger Woods, LeBron James, Tom Brady, Serena Williams depart for their respective GOAT farms upstate, their respective sports are in desperate search of phenoms to replace them. Tiger’s departure from golf’s summit has cleared the way for a new generation to take the reins. On Sunday, in her first tournament as a pro, Rose Zhang, 20, defeated former major champion Jennifer Kupcho in a sudden death playoff at the Mizuho Americas Open, making her the first player since 1951 to win an LPGA tournament in her professional debut.
Rose Zhang’s path to the LPGA
Zhang didn’t come out of nowhere though. She’s spent the last two years tracing the outline of Tiger’s three-decade-old ascent. During her freshman at Stanford, Zhang shattered the NCAA’s single-season scoring record, posting a 69.98 scoring average every time she teed up on the course. She broke her own record as a sophomore and announced her intentions to go pro on May 26. Two weeks after becoming the first women’s golfer to win the individual NCAA Championship, and one week after turning pro, Zhang waltzed onto the LPGA Tour like she already owned the place.
The LPGA has become a factory for phenoms and on-hit wonders. The problem has been turning those theoretical talents into marketable champions. A decade and a half ago, Michelle Wie’s attempts to make the cut on the PGA Tour served as a springboard for her career. Since then, however, Wie has won only five LPGA tournaments. In 2014, Lexi Thompson became the second-youngest LPGA golfer to win a major. She hasn’t won one since. Since then, a troika of 18-year-olds, Lydia Ko, Brooke Henderson, and Morgan Pressel have won majors. Those phenoms have gotten lost in the parity goop that has consumed golf. Zhang is the latest, but none of the LPGA’s budding stars has actually risen above the crowded field. Her pedigree makes her unique. Most of the LPGA’s top stars in recent years have gone pro as teenagers.
Before the weekend, Zhang’s record-breaking pace could be passed off as a byproduct of her being one of the few top women’s golfers to take the circuitous NCAA route. Those reservations were dispelled on Sunday. In the process, she also became the first player to capture the NCAA individual national title and win on the LPGA Tour in the same season, much less in a month.
The next Annika Sorenstam?
In individual sports, identifiable champions create easy access for laymen to buy into. It’s why Serena Williams’ final matches were the most watched tennis events in ESPN’s history. Woods’ appearances on a gimpy leg still have a cult following on the PGA Tour. Golf is so desperate for an audience in the post-Tiger world, the PGA tour is resorting to primetime stadium golf. The LPGA is in even more dire straits since the retirement of their GOAT.
The LPGA’s active major championship winners are South Korean Inbee Park and Taiwan’s Yani Tseng, who haven’t added one to their respective totals since 2015 and 2011 respectively. Eighteen players have won the last 20 major championships. It’s been 27 years since Woods won the NCAA title at 20, then won his major as a pro by 12 strokes. Zhang will have her first chance to tee off as a pro in a major at the KPMG PGA Championship on June 22.
There’s no Tiger around anymore to suck the oxygen out of the room like there was when Annika Sorenstam retired at the top of her game as the benchmark for women’s golf. These days, the golf conversation revolves as much around the LIV-PGA Tour skirmish as it does around Brooks Koepka. There is an opening for Zhang to be a generational force of nature on the LPGA Tour. Or she can fizzle out like the last decade of Annika replacements have done. The comparisons are lofty, but, Zhang is the next great hope in golf on the men’s or women’s tours.
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