Farah O’Keefe, a rising sophomore at the University of Texas, won the 124th Women’s Western Amateur on Saturday at the Onwentsia Club in Lake Forest, Illinois. She did it in a dominant fashion.
O’Keefe took a share of the first-round lead with a 5-under 67, then backed that up with a 3-under 69 in the second round to clinch the medalist honor at 8-under-par 280. She breezed through match play, never seeing the 18th hole until the final against Elise Lee.
O’Keefe won the first hole of the final match and never trailed, closing out Lee on the final hole to win, 2-up, and claim the fourth of the five events in this year’s inaugural Elite Amateur Golf Series.
“The adrenaline is still going pretty good right now,” O'Keefe said after an emotional scene behind the 18th green. “They say it's the curse of the medalist, so I was trying to prove that wrong. That was just the excitement of the whole week coming out.”
O’Keefe, an Austin, Texas, resident who came into the week at No. 34 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, was named the Big 12 Conference’s player and freshman of the year after a standout season that included a victory at the Darius Rucker Intercollegiate. She also competed for the winning American team in the recent Arnold Palmer Cup.
In winning at Onwentsia – the site of the first Women’s Western Amateur in 1901 – O’Keefe became the first medalist to win the W.A. Alexander Cup since Marissa Wenzler in 2021. She joins a list of champions that includes legends such as Patty Berg, Louise Suggs and Nancy Lopez, as well as modern standouts Cristie Kerr, Brittany Lang, Stacy Lewis and Ariya Jutanugarn.
RESULTS
Jim Nugent