For Lexi Thompson, after Sunday’s hard-luck loss on the final hole of the LPGA Tour’s season finale, the 2017 LPGA season was (with apologies to Charles Dickens) the best of times. It was the worst of times.
Lexi Thompson blew a 2-foot putt in stunning LPGA season finale loss
Lexi Thompson misses a gimme putt on the final hole of the LPGA’s 2017 season to lose the tournament but still come away with the $1 million Race to the CME bonus.
“Just going through what I have this whole year and seeing how strong I am and how I got through it all and still won two tournaments, got five, six seconds, I don’t even know, I think it just shows I just moved on,” Thompson, who missed a gimme putt and lost the tournament to Ariya Jutanugarn on the 72nd hole of last week’s CME Group Tour Championship, told reporters after the most recent heartbreaking development of her year. “I continue to work hard in my off weeks. It didn’t stop me, and this won’t either.”
Holding a one-shot edge at 15-under when she teed it up on the final hole of Sunday’s final round, Thompson appeared to have the contest wrapped up after leaving herself a two-foot putt for par on the 18th green at Tiburon Golf Club.
“It,” however, was Lexi’s shocking miss of the near tap-in that would have forced Jutanugarn to make a birdie at the last hole to get into a playoff.
The slip cost Thompson the Player of the Year honors (shared by Sung Hyun Park and So Yeon Ryu), a move to world No. 1 thanks to the 30 points the winner earned, and a shot at the tourney trophy when Jutanugarn birdied the hole to win by one stroke.
Thompson, though, is nothing if not resilient. There was the “nightmare” of the rules imbroglio that cost her the ANA Inspiration, followed by devastating personal traumas of her mother’s illness, revealed in late spring, and the death of her grandmother.
There were also the two wins following the ANA, eight other top-10 finishes (including Sunday’s), and, far more important, the relief that her mother, a breast cancer survivor, was cancer-free following treatments for uterine cancer.
That news allowed the nine-time tour winner to play last week with as light a heart as she did all season and — despite the confounding whiff on a near tap-in — it paid off big time when Lexi won the overall Race to CME and the $1 million bonus that goes with that, as well as the Vare Trophy for the season’s lowest scoring average.
