Rose Zhang has many virtues. Not only does she play golf like an angel, she is also a great student, very dedicated and shows exquisite manners, values instilled in her home since she was a child in Irvine (California). But children do not always have a lapse and the one of the young American’s father last summer was to remind him over and over again.
It turns out that Haibin, as the man is called, had a serious oversight a few months ago and now it explains how Rose Zhang lowered her level of success on the greens since then. It was on the way to the AIG Women’s Open, held at Walton Heath and won by Lilia Vu, when the gentleman forgot the club on a train in London…
Until then, the Californian had played five tournaments as a professional: she won in her debut at the Mizuho, was eighth at the KPMG, ninth at the US Open, did not make the cut at the Dana Open and finished ninth at the Amundi Evian Championship. Everything was going swimmingly until the putter was left on that English convoy.
It was the club that Rose had used during her two stellar university seasons with Stanford, where she had won everything, and suddenly her father forgot the best weapon of the woman who holds the record for weeks leading the world amateur ranking. This affected, obviously Zhang’s game, in addition to her multiple commitments with the press, with the different sponsors and even some stomach problems, probably derived from stress, which she is trying to solve with a diet.
Rose spoke about her father’s forgetfulness after the first round of the Tournament of Champions, where she started at a good level with three under par. “My dad took the putter out of the bag. We got on a train in London and it stayed there,” the Californian narrates after the first round at Lake Nona. “At the AIG I couldn’t putt well because the specifications were wrong, the putter was an inch shorter, the wrong shaft, every weight was wrong, so I just didn’t know where the ball was going to go,” recalls the American.
“And of course, throughout the season, obviously everyone was talking about how my putt had gotten worse. And it was because I found it difficult to visualize the putts going in again,” she explains. “Then I played the Grant Thornton and got a replica of my previous putter, but it broke and I didn’t notice, so I finished the round. And then I thought: ‘Ok, I can’t look at this putter again. Let’s start over’. So little by little we are moving forward. I am very grateful for these kinds of experiences that remind me that I have to check, check, check…”, she emphasizes.
At least, Rose Zhang knows how to make light of the situation and even jokes because the club had no distinctive or personal detail, except for an Evian cover for the putter head, so it “is probably on eBay; if not, it will be in the hands of someone, probably an English golf fan. That Odyssey Works model putter that gave Rose glory at Stanford and in her first tournaments on the LPGA went from blessing to curse…
