Major championships can add enough extra pressure down the stretch to make collapses commonplace, especially for those who’ve never lifted the LPGA’s most coveted trophies. And for almost an hour on a chilly Sunday afternoon north of Houston, Lilia Vu had a front-row seat to the late misfortune of several contenders at the Chevron Championship.
From her position as the clubhouse leader at 10 under after a closing 4-under 68, Vu watched from the back side of Carlton Woods’ sprawling clubhouse:
• A shank by A Lim Kim on the final hole.
• Atthaya Thitikul rinse her ball on the very next shot.
• Angel Yin bogey Nos. 16 and 17 to fall a shot off Vu’s lead, only to force extra holes with a closing birdie. (By that time, Vu had moved to the range to hit balls.)
Vu then got up from her metaphorical seat, reentered the fracas and won her first major championship in a playoff.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Vu said afterward.
Somehow, she had been impervious to the major nerves. Despite just nine major starts under her belt. Despite a third-round 73 that left her, in her own words, moody. Despite feeling every bit of those major nerves.
“Honestly, the past two days, I was very angry,” Vu admitted. “I didn’t feel like myself, just internally. Golf game, that’s whatever. I just felt like I was getting angry over every single little thing, and that’s usually not how I roll, so I was upset about how I portrayed myself and how I handled myself.
“It was just – I couldn’t believe that that happened, that we won a major.”
With Yin facing 10 feet for par following a splashed second shot of her own on the first playoff hole, the par-5 18th, Vu had two putts from off the back of the green for victory. She left the first one 15 feet short. The second, though, was hit perfectly.
Suddenly, it was everyone else with the front-row seats to a late plunge. Only this time it was Vu, a native of Fountain Valley, California, somewhat fittingly becoming the first to leap into the new Poppie’s Pond – Lilia’s Lake, perhaps? – as the Chevron’s first champion at its new home in The Woodlands.
“I can’t even put into words what I was feeling,” Vu said. “I was nervous, I was scared, I was cold. I just wanted to hit the putt and just be done with it. I just saw my line and speed and I knew it was going to be fast, and I just trusted myself.”
It hadn’t always been that way.
Vu notably made just one cut – and cashed a measly $3,830 – in nine LPGA starts in 2019. That next year, she experienced family tragedy with the death of her grandfather, who back in the early 1980s secretly built a boat to help he and his family escape Vietnam. That’s when she contemplated quitting professional golf and going to law school. That career move never materialized, and two years later, Vu won three times on the Epson Tour to earn her way back to the LPGA. In 24 events last season, Vu missed only three cuts and notched eight top-10s, while pocketing nearly $1 million in earnings. And then in February, she broke through for her first LPGA win, at the Honda LPGA Thailand.
Full-field scores from The Chevron Championship
Now, she’s earned her biggest check to date, $765,000, and should crack the top 10 in the Rolex Rankings for the first time (she entered the week ranked a career-best 12th).
“Everything happens for a reason – all the bad things, everything I’ve ever struggled through, family-wise, internally,” Vu said. “I think of myself as the biggest obstacle; I had a pretty tough, not easy past two days. I was definitely my own enemy, and I don’t know how I pulled this out.”
On a day where so many caved to the pressure, Vu, much to her own disbelief, was the last player standing.
While victory had slipped through the many hands of her competitors, she was the one slipping on the white, winner’s robe.