Grace Park made the Wegmans LPGA
Championship her final tournament.
LPGA TOUR
Park Bows Out With Grace
PITTSFORD, NEW YORK | Monday’s
girls’ night out dinner in Rochester
assumed a different tone when Grace
Park broke the news that the LPGA
Championship would be her final tour-
nament. “Everyone was saying, ‘Oh, it’s
our last time,’ “ Park said. “They were
crying. I was crying.”
In the midst of her 13th season, the
Korean-born Park, 33, announced her
retirement following the second round.
As she approached the final holes,
Park said she began to feel butterflies.
Tears welled in her eyes. She played the
back nine in 3 under, which turned out to
be enough to survive the cut and extend
her playing career for two more days.
“I should’ve got emotional more
often,” she joked.
Park played a full slate of tournaments last season and attacked the
off-season with old-fashioned tenacity
to make one last attempt to regain the
form that earned her six career LPGA
titles, including the 2004 Kraft Nabisco
Championship.
“I didn’t come out here to make a liv-
ing,” Park said. “I came out here to be a
champion and win golf tournaments.”
When she missed her first five cuts
of the year, she knew it was time.
During Tseng’s warm-up, Golf Channel
cameras showed her receiving treatment on her left wrist and arm from
a trainer. But Tseng said she wasn’t
injured and didn’t blame her performance on any lingering pain. A year
after her 11-stroke romp, Tseng barely
survived the cut.
“It was shocking,” said Stacy Lewis,
one of her playing partners in the first
two rounds. “That’s probably the worst
I’ve seen Yani play over two days. Usu-
ally, if she has a bad day, she bounces
right back and is in it again.”
Tseng’s T59 was her worst result in
a major since she missed the cut at the
2009 U.S. Women’s Open.
When Se Ri Pak arrived at Locust
Hill on Monday, several players and
Defending champion Yani Tseng of
Taiwan entered the tournament as the
favorite but matched her worst round
of the season on Thursday with a 76.
After struggling last week at the
Shoprite LPGA Classic, Michelle Wie
tweeted, “Think I have shed more tears
this year than I ever have in my entire
life combined. But it’s time now to put
on my big girl pants.”
Wie’s woes continued last week. She
missed her sixth straight cut – five on the
LPGA and one on the Japan LPGA. She
has broken par only once this season and
is averaging 77 in her last 10 rounds.
In the first round, she played with 13
clubs in the bag after cracking the head
of her 3-wood while warming up on the
range and managed a 2-over 74 and she
soared to 82 on Friday.
“It just kind of all went wrong today,”
Wie said.
With the LPGA off next week, Wie will
attend Stanford’s graduation ceremony
and officially receive her undergraduate
degree in communications. l
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