Around the wider world of golf: Thomas Pieters won the KLM Open (that's the Dutch Open) on the ET; Annie Park won the Prairie Band Casino & Resort Charity Classic on the Symetra Tour; Henrik Norlander won the Hotel Fitness Championship on the Web.com Tour (with a 10-under 62!); C.T. Pan won the Cape Breton Celtic Classic on the Mackenzie Tour–PGA TOUR Canada; Ricardo Celia won the All You Need is Ecuador Open on the PGA TOUR Latinoamérica; Eugene Wong won the Ping An Bank Open on the PGA TOUR China; and Teresa Lu won the Konica Minolta Cup on the JLPGA (bangkokbobby has details).
Oh yeah, and the GB&I team won the Walker Cup 16.5 to 9.5. Don't want to forget that!
The Kobra strikes again -- this time, she put the bite on the field at a major. She did it by shooting a bogey-free final round of 8-under 63 when the best score all week had been 65. And at the tender age of 18 years, 4 months and 20 days she has become the youngest-ever major winner.
Yeah, I know they say Young Tom Morris was only 17 when he won the 1868 Open Championship. According to Wikipedia there were only a dozen players in that field and Young Tom won with three rounds of 51-54-49. (I'm reasonably sure that means they weren't playing 18-hole rounds.) For some reason I don't really see how that's more impressive. But in the interest of historical accuracy I guess I should say that Lydia's the youngest-ever female major winner.
At any rate this puts Lydia in a class of her own and, as Paige Mackenzie said on Golf Central, she will likely be the standard for generations of players to come. Let's ignore her amateur wins for the time being (although I'll mention that, among others, she won the 2012 US Women's Amateur). With the Evian she now has 13 professional wins (nine on the LPGA) -- four won as an amateur, with one of those being a successful title defense -- and one of them a major. She has a 3-0 record in pro playoffs -- yeah, Lydia's record is perfect there. She's also the youngest player, male or female, to become World #1.
I guess that means -- for the fields she plays against, anyway -- that seeing her name on a leaderboard will be as unsettling as seeing Jack's, Tiger's and Annika's were. What else can I say?
Probably nothing, so I'm not even going to try. Instead, I'm just going to give a Limerick Summary to the LPGA's newest major champion... and my condolences to the fields that have to face her going forward:
She made not one final round blunder;The photo came from the photos page at LPGA.com, but you'll have to hunt to find it once the next tournament starts.
Thus far, her career is a wonder.
When Lyd’s game is humming
And the field hears her coming,
Her footsteps must rumble like thunder!
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