THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS | She descends from heroes. How could she not?
For those who have never seen Lilia Vu – and unless you’re an ardent follower of LPGA golf, or a UCLA fan, that’s a high probability – seeing the Californian birdie her last two holes of regulation on Sunday at the Chevron Championship to shoot the low final round (68) on a cold, damp day at The Club at Carlton Woods might have caused you to perk up and say, “Wow, who is this?”
But then watching Vu, who hung around for an hour while the final groups finished, come back out in a playoff and drain a downhill, right-to-left 15-footer for birdie to win her first major, had more than a few people standing and applauding from their living rooms.
This young lady is a star in the making. You could see it in the intensity of her eyes.
Vu held the early second-round lead until 2020 U.S. Women’s Open champion A Lim Kim put on a late charge to enter the weekend up by a shot. But then Vu shot 73 on Saturday to fall four shots behind fellow Californian Angel Yin and Hawaii’s Allisen Corpuz.
“I was really mad at myself about how I played on Saturday,” Vu said. “I was just out of sorts.”
She put those feelings behind her quickly, though. Despite a 50-minute lightning delay on Sunday and temperatures that dropped as the day progressed, Vu put on a charge. She birdied three of her first eight holes to claw to within a shot of the lead. She stumbled with a bogey at 9, and then made seven solid pars before reaching the par-3 17th. With a hole cut near the front bunker, it seemed almost impossible to get a tee shot close. Vu hit a good shot that ran 20 feet past the flag. As she had done throughout the week, she hit her putt at a perfect speed, and found the center of the hole for birdie.
Then on 18, she hit her second shot long. After taking relief from the grandstands, she chipped down a steep hill toward the water. Her ball stopped 4 feet away, which she made to post 10-under.
Yin got to 11-under and seemed to have things on cruise control, especially after an exceptional par from the right rough at 15. But that’s when things fell apart. Pushed tee shots led to bogeys at 16 and 17. Yin had to birdie 18 to force a playoff, which she did, making a 5-footer of her own.
Others had opportunities to join. Kim needed eagle on the last hole to reach 10-under, but after a perfect tee shot, she cold-shanked a 6-iron and walked away with par. Atthaya Thitikul was 10-under in the middle of the 18th fairway with a wedge in her hand and hit it into the water. Last year’s rookie of the year made double bogey to fall into a tie for fourth.
That left Vu and Yin to traipse back to 18 for one more go.
When Yin tugged her second shot from 201 yards into the water, Vu needed to get up and down from behind the green again to win. She left her first putt terribly short, but drained her 15-footer in the cold, the wet, and the fading light.
Afterward, she relayed a story of her ancestry, and why she carries herself like an old west Texas Ranger.
“The reason I'm here is because of my grandpa,” Vu said. “When my grandpa and his kids and wife fled Vietnam, he actually went away for a couple months at a time. He was building a boat in the countryside.
“One day, he told my mom and her siblings, ‘It's time to go.’ I remember her telling me that her and her little sister were running through the forest to get to that boat. My grandpa took extra people from the village. Two days on the boat, they shot a flare, and a U.S. boat came by. Their boat had a leak, so they really needed to find someone to help them.
“Even today, I was getting really upset on the course, and I just had to remind myself, ‘Grandpa is with you. He'd be really disappointed if you were getting upset like this and that you didn't get your act together.’”
The descendant of heroes got her act together on Sunday. Don’t be surprised when she does it again, and soon.
Steve Eubanks