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Many things have surprised Bianca Pagdanganan recently. The warm reception rookies like her receive from LPGA Tour veterans. The quality of the golf courses on tour, especially at places like Aronimink. The honking boats on Lake Oconee in Georgia during the Drive On Championship. Those are just a few. But the biggest eye-opener has been all the requests, all the questions and all the attention she has received. The 23-year-old Philippines native out of the University of Arizona did not expect to be the “it girl” of the LPGA Tour. She didn’t expect to be overwhelmed with interview requests. And she certainly didn’t set out to start a revolution.
“So many texts and requests,” she said by phone last week from her American base in San Diego, California. “It’s kind of crazy. I’m seeing my face all over social media and I’m like, ‘What is going on?’ ”
Like most young people who exude “cool,” this daughter of a Filipino civil engineer doesn’t realize she has something special. “I don’t think about myself that way at all,” she said outside the clubhouse of the Great Waters Course at Reynolds Lake Oconee a couple of weeks ago after playing herself into the final threesome at the Drive On Championship. “I’m just being myself. I just go play.”
“I’m the least mechanical and technical person you’ve ever seen. People talk to me about clubs and how the swing works and I’m like, ‘Oh, interesting.’ Because I just grip and rip it.”
Bianca Pagdanganan
“She comes across as someone you want to hang out with, someone who has crossover appeal,” said major champion and Golf Channel analyst Karen Stupples, who watched Pagdanganan up close in Georgia. “She’s a cool kid, loves video games, and just has a kind of laid-back charisma. That makes her appealing.”
Consecutive top-10 finishes at the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship, where she struggled on Sunday but finished T9, and the Drive On Championship, where she finished two shots behind winner Ally McDonald in third place, add to that appeal. But that’s not why “Bianca P,” as she’s known by many LPGA fans who haven’t quite mastered the phonetics of Pagdanganan, has generated a near cult following after only six professional starts. Yes, she admits to playing Call of Duty for hours on end. And she loves ultimate frisbee (think lacrosse with a disc instead of a ball and sticks), which she played throughout high school. Cool stuff, all.
But people aren’t drawn to Pagdanganan to see her skip-pass to an ultimate teammate. They want to watch her bomb tee shots in ways that rarely have been seen in women’s golf. And they are not disappointed. Year to date, she leads the LPGA Tour in driving distance at 288.762 yards. That’s a little misleading because it doesn’t take into account the drives she hits in the rough, sometimes intentionally, that are well north of 300.
The final hole at Great Waters is a good example. A par-5 with water on the left, it required that most players had to negotiate tee shots between the water and a bunker on the right at 240 yards. That bunker was Pagdanganan’s target. On Saturday, playing in the final group, she hit it 313 in the rough but had an 8-iron into the green where other players, including Danielle Kang, were taking off headcovers for their approach. On Sunday, again in the final group, she hit it over the bunker again, this time 303. She made relatively easy birdies both days.
“I truly didn’t know I was long until I was in college,” she said. “I started at Gonzaga and we had an indoor facility. I would hit into that screen and try to get my swing speed up as fast as possible.”
She showed up on campus swinging her driver faster than 100 mph. Her top speed was 118.
“I didn’t grow up with a lot of girlfriends,” she said. “It was my guy friends that I played with. I didn’t practice with a lot of other junior golfers. My dad always made sure I practiced with a purpose. So, since I didn’t have other girls that I played with, I didn’t have a baseline. But when I would play with guys, they would try to keep up with me. And I’m so competitive, I was like, ‘You’re not going to hit it past me.’ ”
“She wants to be the first woman (in LPGA history) to average over 300 yards,” Pagdanganan’s father, Sam, said.
“That would be really cool,” Bianca said in response.
“She could well do it,” Stupples said. “There’s just an element of fearlessness about the way she plays. That could be the future of women’s golf. None of this, take iron off the tee and keep it in the wide part of the fairway. No, she pulls driver and tries to squeeze it as far down there as possible. If it’s in the rough, so what? She has a much shorter club in her hands.”
If that sounds familiar, it’s exactly what is happening on the PGA Tour with the bomb-and-gouge game. Bianca Pagdanganan is Bryson DeChambeau without the protein shakes and weirdness.
She laughed at that analogy.
“I’m the least mechanical and technical person you’ve ever seen,” Pagdanganan said. “People talk to me about clubs and how the swing works and I’m like, ‘Oh, interesting.’ Because I just grip and rip it.
“I feel like I should know more about that stuff, but I just don’t. My swing is all feel. Like I haven’t seen (my instructor in the Philippines) since like January. So, I don’t really know how to respond when people say, ‘You hit it a long way.’ I’m just like, ‘Thank you.’ ”
She’ll be saying that a lot in the future.
“There’s definitely this changing mindset among the younger generation of players,” Stupples said. “You see it in Brooke Henderson, who doesn’t lay up to numbers or hit irons off the tee into positions. She takes driver and hits it hard.
“Bianca takes that to another level. She is going to be fun to watch, hopefully for a long time.”
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