Grand China Air LPGA – Epilogue

Helen Alfredsson not only won the Tour's first official event in China by three strokes, she posted Sunday's low round of the day by the same margin.  Her 65 really stands out among the plethora of 70-something scores on the leaderboard.  Yani Tseng, Shanshan Feng and Suzann Pettersen were the only others in the top 16 who broke 70 in the final round.

Helen also won two tournaments in 1998, the Office Depot and Welch's/Circle K events.  The ten-year span between multi-victory seasons could be a record (I'll see if I can beat LPGA.com to figuring that out).  Coincidentally, Alfredsson won the Evian Masters that year as well - it was an LET event only at that time.

Over the last two rounds, Laura Diaz played the final five holes to the tune of +7.  She played the other 44 holes of the event in -15.  In Round One, Laura birdied three of those five closing holes.  Crazy game.

Two players who have had fine seasons go off-track recently collected Top 10s this week.  Christina Kim struggled a bit on Sunday but wound up tied for seventh while Lindsay Wright finished tied for ninth.

I mentioned Hong Mei Yang's good finish in the recap.  Tao-Li Yang was the second-best local finisher, coming in at +1 T34.  Xiaolong Zhong was third in the Local Player Sweepstakes at +5 T46.

Tough choice for Big Surprise but the edge goes to Allison Fouch, who finished T7 for her second Top 10 of the year.  Young Kim gets a shout-out for collecting her second Top 10 and finishing fifth, but Allison gets the nod because YK won at Corning last year.  The Big Disappointment is an easy but sad choice.  Inbee Park, ranked #18 by Rolex and #10 by Yours Truly, finished 60^th in a 62-player field.  The U.S. Open champion only four months ago, Inbee has hit rock bottom.