Minjee Lee in practice this week – photo USGA Robert Beck
Perth’s Minjee Lee will this week play her 8th US Women’s Open but, without a top ten yet to her name, her record in this event and in major championship golf generally is below the level she has regularly achieved in her LPGA Tour career to date.
Lee has just five top tens in 34 appearances in major championship golf and having been inside the top ten in the Rolex World Ranking for much of her recent time on the LPGA Tour she is perhaps underachieving at this highest level.
Admittedly Lee, has missed only four cuts in those 34 events and made six of her seven cuts to date at the US Open but she has a best of just 11th in the female game’s most significant event which came in the 2017 event when finishing seven shots behind the winner that year, Sung Hyun Park.
The San Francisco area, where this week’s event is being played, has, though, been good to Lee in the past having won the US Junior Championship at the adjacent Lake Merced in 2012 and finished runner-up to Lydia Ko at the same venue in the LPGA Mediheal event in 2018 and she is using those memories as a motivation this week.
“The look of the golf course is a lot like Lake Merced,” said Lee on Tuesday. “I won the U.S. Girls there, and I just really love San Francisco in general, so it always excites me to come back and visit.”
Lee warmed up for this week with a quarter final appearance at last week’s Bank of Hope LPGA Match Play event in Las Vegas and is feeling good as to how her game is trending.
“I feel like I have a good chance. It’s only Tuesday. I feel like my game is trending in the right direction. I feel like it’s U.S. Open week, it’s going to be a tiring week. Just, it being a major, I think just you give a little bit more pressure to yourself, I think, to perform.
“I’m really excited. It’s going to be such a challenging week, and I think that is what makes it the most exciting.”
