Playoffs again, anyone? Megan Khang and Jin Young Ko faced off in the eighth playoff of the LPGA season after both finished at nine-under par Shaughnessy Golf & Country Club in Vancouver to settle the CPKC Canadian Women’s Open. Here is how the Massachusetts native walked away after a closing two-over 74 with her first career victory in a one-hole playoff to earn the $375,000 winner’s cheque.

Leaderboard
Khang (-9), Ko (-9)
Ruoning Yin (-7)
Sei Young Kim (-6)
Hannah Green (-6)

Quotable
“I think it crosses a lot of people’s minds,” Khang said of whether she’d ever win on the LPGA. “I know my game is kind of trending and it’s kind of matured over the past few years, and so I was more so like it’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of time.”

What it means
In her 191st start in her eight-year career, Khang, 25, finally earns her elusive first LPGA title. The talented American’s 34th career top 10, and fourth in 2023, lands Khang in the winner’s circle, punctuating the end of the US Solheim team’s qualifying period with another victory for an American.
Khang also surpassed $1 million in earnings this season, one of 18 players to do so, totalling $1,228,340.

How it happened
Khang, 25, held the first 54-hole lead of her career, three strokes over 13-time winner Sei Young Kim, with World No. 4 Jin Young Ko looming five strokes off.
That lead melted quickly as Ko, a two-time winner this year, went out with a bogey-free two-under opening nine to cut Khang’s lead to one.
Khang went birdie-free on her two-over front nine. Khang lost her lead on the 10th with her third bogey of the day to fall into a tie with Ko, setting up a roller-coaster finish between the two. Kim sat a stroke behind.
Ko gave a gift on the par-5 11th, the easiest hole of the final round, missing into the penalty area on the left to settle for her first bogey of the day, and only the fifth one the 11th gave up on Sunday. With the lead back in hand, Khang reached the green in two to post her first birdie of the day and keep Kim a stroke back.
Ko, again on a par 5, made a crucial mistake from the fairway on the 15th. From 80 yards away, she missed the green long, settling for an up-and-down par. She reached the front of the par 5 in two but could not extend the lead after missing an eight-foot birdie. Khang walked to the 16th with a one-shot lead over Ko and Kim, which wouldn’t last. Before Khang could tee off on the 16th, Ko birdied the par 4 to tie the lead again at nine-under.
Khang missed the 16th long from the fairway yet still crucially got up and down to salvage a key par and remain tied for the lead.
The par-3 17th proved challenging Sunday as only 30.4 per cent of the field hit the green in regulation. Ko found the putting surface and two-putted for par, a score Khang failed to match with a missed downhill five-foot par putt that spun out. The 15-time LPGA winner held the outright lead for the first time on Sunday with one to play.
It felt like Ko’s eight-foot par putt for a closing three-under 69 would be enough for her third win of the season on the 18th, forcing Khang to have to birdie the last to get into a playoff, walking it in with a fist pump. After all, the South Korean earned her par on the most difficult scoring hole on the course Sunday.
Khang sat at three-over for her final round in the left centre of the 18th fairway. Instead of Ko overcoming a five-stroke deficit to earn her second career Canadian Open victory, Khang answered, nestling her approach to five feet and jarring the biggest putt of her life to force a playoff with a birdie on the 72nd hole, posting a two-over 74 Sunday to go to extras.
They returned to the 18th for the playoff. Ko missed wide left off the tee and had to take an unplayable lie from the bushes. Khang watched in the middle of the fairway as Ko thwacked it out of the bushes into the front greenside bunker. Khang’s approach narrowly trickled off the left-hand side of the green.
Khang had extended viewing time again as Ko’s fourth from the bunker still had her outside Khang. Ko’s last-gasp 30-foot bogey putt just ran past the cup, allowing Khang three putts to win. It only took two for her to start celebrating her first career win.

Best of the rest
Andrea Lee, entering the week needing a T-13 finish to take the final US Solheim points spot, finished precisely where she needed to. Despite going four-over through the first 14 holes of the tournament, she recovered to a two-under performance for the Canadian Open to earn a T-13 finish, paying off a three-tournament run of a T-9 at the Women’s Scottish Open, a T-9 at the AIG Women’s Open, and this week to take the final US Solheim Cup points spot from Lexi Thompson.
Lee knew where she needed to finish going into the tournament thanks to scrolling Twitter on Saturday.
“I saw Grant’s [Boone, Golf Channel commentator] tweet last night, so thanks, Grant,” Lee joked.
Ruoning Yin’s six-under 66 was the day’s low round, moving the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship winner from T-11 to third place. The adjustment? Slowing down her tempo and taking her coach’s newfound nickname for Yin to heart.
“I feel like sometimes my swing tempo is a bit too fast, and today just right before the round he [Yin’s coach] text me, like, have a good day,” Yin explained. “Just be the tempo queen. I was like, okay. So today I just focus on my tempo and didn’t think about anything else.”
The swing change resulted in Yin’s fifth top 5 of her breakout sophomore campaign.

Biggest disappointment
Lydia Ko’s third-round 10-over 82 pushed her to last place. While the Kiwi expressed appreciation for the fans’ passion for her on Instagram after her closing 73, she’s projected to fall to 90th on the tour’s CME points list, putting Ko in a perilous position to not qualify for the LPGA’s CME Group Tour Championship in November for the first time since 2013, as only the top 60 in CME points qualify.

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1. The right “approach” pays off

Hyo-Joo Kim and Xiyu Lin shared the Day 1 lead with matching four-under 68s. Kim and Lin were also first (4.48) and third (3.77), respectively, in SG/putting. Only Nasa Hataoka (eighth) of the six players at T-3 is in the top 10 of SG/putting.

However, the majority of players in the top 10 on the leaderboard are also in top 12 in SG/approach with amateur Aine Donegan in first (4.35), Allisen Corpuz in fourth (3.78), Bailey Tardy in fifth (3.58), Hae Ran Ryu in sixth (3.58), Leona Maguire in eighth (3.28), and Hataoka in 12th (3.05). Surprisingly, the leaders trail by a decent margin, with Kim in 25th (1.9) and Lin in 38th (1.43).

2. Annika Sorenstam’s still got it … around the green

Ezra Shaw

Posting an 80, even for Sorenstam at 52, seems inconceivable for one of the game’s all-time greats. Sorenstam finished in last in SG/off the tee, making sense, given she only hit one fairway. A lone bright spot was ending up with 2.51 SG/around the green, the sixth-best in the field. While her capabilities on a major venue are different from what they were in her prime, the 72-time winner needed no data to know the best part of her game Thursday.

“I’m disappointed in that [80], but I fought really hard,” Sorenstam said. “I thought I made some great saves. It sounds funny when you have this score, but I did.”

3. An amateur leads the field in this SG stat

Donegan, an amateur from Ireland who plays college golf at LSU, posted a 69 despite her clubs not arriving until Tuesday. That makes her 4.35 SG/approach stat even more impressive, particularly too considering she hit only 12 greens in regulation. The Irishwoman bested defending US Women’s Open champion Minjee Lee in the category, with the Australian sitting at 4.05 SG/approach.

Donegan’s driver clubhead also arrived smashed to Pebble Beach, but she raved about the replacement one she put into her bag this week, saying it fueled her ability to play well into the greens by outperforming the field from the tee box as well. Donegan sits in second in SG/off the tee (1.58).

4. One of the most consistent US Women’s Open performers leads SG/off the tee

Harry How

Megan Khang has rattled off three consecutive top-10s at the US Women’s Open and is lurking at five shots off the pace after the first round. Her secret sauce might lie in her ability from the tee, as finding 13 of 14 fairways contributed to her leading 1.84 SG/off the tee. That’s .26 ahead of Donegan. In a reminder of how distinct SG/off the tee is, compared to driving distance, the longest player in the field Thursday, Amelia Garvey, sits in 114th in SG/off the tee at -.39.

5. Michelle Wie West didn’t lie—she doesn’t like putting drills

Entering Wie West’s final competitive start, she shared the thing she won’t miss the most.

“The putting drills that I’m doing, you’d best believe I’m not going to do another putting drill for the rest of my life if I don’t need to,” Wie West said.

Fitting, then, that the 2014 US Women’s Open winner finished last in the field in SG/putting at -4.18. Wie West carded a 79, sitting T-126. Impressively, she kept her touch, finishing 11th in SG/around the green (2.01).

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“Finally,” Kang said, “I’m getting loose.”

If anything tells the story of what has changed for Sorenstam since the last time she competed in a major championship 14 years ago, this might be it.

Now 51, the 72-time LPGA winner and 10-time major champ — three of them US Women’s Opens — opted to return for her 16th Open start but first since 2008 for a few reasons. One is the simple fact that she earned an exemption by winning the US Senior Women’s Open last summer. Additionally, Pine Needles is where the second of three Women’s Open wins came, in 1996, when she lapped the field by six strokes, and the memories are still special.

She’s also here for her family; her two children, Ava and Will, have never seen her compete in an LPGA major (though both watched her win at last summer’s US Senior Women’s Open). And even her husband, Mike McGee, didn’t become her husband until after her retirement.

Finally, there’s the influence of Peggy Kirk Bell, the LPGA pioneer who was instrumental in bringing the US Women’s Open to Pine Needles in the 1990s, and struck up a strong friendship with Sorenstam during her playing days. (Kirk Bell, who was also a pilot and would fly to various tour stops, passed away in 2016 at 95.)

“You know, Peggy was here then,” Sorenstam said of her win in ’96, “and she screamed, ‘Heineken’ when I finished … not knowing my name or remembering or being able to say my name, so I became Heineken.”

MORE: Michelle Wie West prepares for long goodbye

Needless to say, Sorenstam’s age — and the stiffness of her muscles — aren’t the only change since she won in 1996. That year, the championship’s entire purse was $1.2 million. This year, the winner alone will take home $1.8 million.

Sorenstam is trying to prepare like the old days, too. Earlier on Tuesday, Lydia Ko joked about seeing Annika ramp up the practice recently at their home in Lake Nona.

“I can’t hide,” Sorenstam jokes. “And I’ve seen her too, let’s put it that way. No, I’ve seen a few of them out there…I have been practising. My coach, Henry [Reis], came to town last week and wanted to fine-tune it a little bit. I know to play well here I have to really max out my game.”

Having retired from competitive golf in 2008, Sorenstam made a return to the LPGA ahead of last summer’s Senior Women’s Open for the Gainbridge in February 2021. She made the cut, she flagged over the weekend, finishing 79-76 to end in 74th place. Since then, she’s been grinding on the range, but lately she’s made sure to transition into playing too (from the blue tees, to simulate the difficulty she’ll encounter this week), knowing too well the difference between practising this sport and actually competing.

“My goal is obviously to play the best I can,” Sorenstam said. “I know what I’m capable of. I can hit fairways and greens. I can make putts. That’s my goal this week. Obviously, I’m in a different position now than in ’96 where I was probably one of the longest off the tees and would hit last into the greens. Now it’s the reverse.”

After playing a practice round on Monday night, Sorenstam took a side trip to a strange destination — the maintenance shed. She knew that Pine Needles had brought on a large, mostly female crew for the championship, and she wanted to stop by, chat with some of them and say thank you.

Everywhere she looks this week, Sorenstam will be able to see the growth in her sport that was inspired at least in part by her own career. But Ko is one of the few who knows how seriously she’s taking this event, and on Tuesday morning she had a message for the rest of the field:

“Be careful — the GOAT is coming up.”

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The post Annika Sorenstam might be the GOAT, but this week at US Women’s Open, she’s enjoying just being a player appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Brian Wacker
HOUSTON—Megan Khang enters this weekend at the U.S. Women’s Open in a tie for third and just four strokes off the lead of Japan’s Hinako Shibuno. A victory would be the first of her career after she turned pro five years ago.

That’s hardly the most incredible part of her story.

To say that the 23-year-old’s road to professional golf is different than the other 154 competitors in the field would be something of an understatement. Her path was marked in blood.

Though Khang was born in Massachusetts and learned the game from her father, Lee, and at the age of 14 qualified for the 2012 U.S. Women’s Open, she wouldn’t be here at all if not for her family’s treacherous escape from Laos and communist death squads targeting the Hmong during the Vietnam War.

“I know I wouldn’t be here without the sacrifices my family has made,” Khang told GolfChannel.com in 2017, recounting the harrowing journey her family took across the Mekong River to Thailand in 1975. “It’s us against the world. That’s kind of how I look at it.”

Then there’s how Khang came to be introduced to the game.

Her father, who eventually reached the U.S. at age 8, taught himself to play golf—at the age of 32—by reading the pages of Golf Digest and watching videos on YouTube. He never took a lesson, quit his job as a mechanic and is the only coach Megan has ever had.

There are weeks such as this when all the sacrifices and work are more than worth it.

A day after Khang got off to a torrid start in the first round with four birdies in her first five holes, but made a disastrous double-bogey at 18, the 5-foot-1 dynamo bounced back with a bogey-free 69 on Friday.

That she couldn’t even remember which holes she birdied (answer: the par-4 second and 15th), didn’t really matter. Nor does it that she’s never won a professional tournament (though she did contend in two majors last year, the Evian Championship and Women’s PGA Championship).

And as for her strategy the rest of the weekend?

“Kind of stay where we are and just keep doing what we’ve been doing and just kind of stay in the moment,” she said. “I want to enjoy—it’s the 75th U.S. Women’s Open, and you don’t get a lot of them.”

Amen.

The post Megan Khang’s fascinating journey continues as she contends in another major appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

Altomare has had a strong season, finishing in the top 15 five times on the LPGA Tour in 2019. Park won her first LPGA title in 2018, the ShopRite Classic, and has had three top-10 finishes in 2019. Yin, one of the longest hitters on tour, will once again be the youngest player on Team USA at age 20.

While Altomare and Yin looked like they’d likely secured spots on the team as the tournament played out outside Toronto, the last position was more uncertain. Before the CP Women’s Open, Austin Ernst was ahead of Park. But after Ernst missed the cut in Canada, Park moved ahead of her on the World Ranking list by advancing to the weekend.

Seven golfers had already locked up places on the 2019 U.S. Solheim Cup team prior to the CP Women’s Open: Lexi Thompson, Danielle Kang, Nelly Korda, Jessica Korda, Lizette Salas, Marina Alex and Megan Khang.

Two spots on the U.S. team remain to be filled. Inkster will announce her captain’s picks on Monday. There are several veteran players for Inkster to choose from, notably Cristie Kerr, Stacy Lewis, Paula Creamer, Morgan Pressel and Gerina Piller. Arguments could be made for all of them.

“I am really happy with my 10 players right now,” Inkster said on Sunday. “The problem is I have more players who deserve to be on the team than I have spots available.”

The European Team has already been finalised. Captain Catriona Matthew will bring the following players to Gleneagles in Scotland:

Celine Boutier (rookie)
Carlota Ciganda
Georgia Hall
Caroline Hedwall
Charley Hull
Bronte Law (rookie)
Caroline Masson
Azahara Munoz
Anna Nordqvist
Suzann Pettersen
Jodi Ewart Shadoff
Anne Van Dam (rookie)

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