Lexi Thompson misses out on year of LPGA dominance

NAPLES, FLA. » Lexi Thompson doesn’t have two long months to ponder how her season ended. She gets two weeks. Thompson will be the lone woman among the 12 twoplayer teams for the QBE Shootout. It will be played Dec. 8-10 at Tiburon Golf Club, where she went 34 consecutive holes last weekend without a mistake until missing a 2-foot par putt on the last hole that cost her a shot at being LPGA player of the year and No. 1 in the world.

It’s bad enough that her next tournament is at Tiburon. The QBE Shootout host is none other than Greg Norman.

Is there another player who can appreciate what might have been?

Norman will never get as much credit for all he did right because of powerful memories from the ones that got away. He won the “Saturday Slam” as the 54-hole leader at all four majors in 1986 and ended the year with only a claret jug. That could have been one of the greatest seasons ever.

Was he golf’s dominant player?

He could have been if not for Bob Tway holing a bunker shot at Inverness or Larry Mize making that pitch-andrun at Augusta National. If not for Norman wasting one of the great Masters charges with one of the worst 4-irons ever hit on the 18th hole. If not for losing a six-shot lead another year, still a record collapse in the majors.

Was Thompson the best player in women’s golf this year? She could have been. The good news for the 22-year-old Thompson is she has youth on her side, along with a stubborn streak that could be salve for a growing number of scars. “I’ll move on,” she said. She repeated some iteration of that phrase three more times after finishing one shot short of a dream ending to a rough season.

What the LPGA Tour lacked in a dominant player this year, it made up for in the kind of depth it hasn’t seen in years. This was only the third time in the last 20 years that no one won more than three times (I.K. Kim and Shanshan Feng). The five majors were won by five players for the second straight year.

The points-based LPGA player of the year ended in a tie for the first time since the award began in 1966, shared between So Yeon Ryu and Sung Hyun Park. Thompson won the Vare Trophy for lowest adjusted scoring average. Park won the money title.

Everyone went home with something.