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Editor’s note: Golfweek recently caught up with LPGA players Jennifer Kupcho and Maria Fassi to look back on the final round of the inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur. Because the tournament, originally scheduled for this week, has been postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak, NBC will rebroadcast the 2019 edition on Saturday from 1 -3:30 p.m.
Looking back, Maria Fassi can’t believe how fast she went to sleep. It must have been the bonfire at the family’s rental house that put her at ease the night before her world forever changed.
“Waking up was honestly just like any other morning,” Fassi recalled. “I had picked out my outfit the night before, just like any other tournament. It wasn’t until we were driving into Augusta National, down Magnolia Lane, that I thought maybe this isn’t just another round. I was wearing my headphones, just to play it cool.”
Jennifer Kupcho arrived about an hour and 15 minutes prior to her 10:20 a.m. tee time. Amateurs usually prep on the range under the watchful eye of a parent or coach and that’s about it. But at the inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur last April, thousands poured in on a postcard-perfect Saturday to witness history. They wanted autographs and high-fives and selfies.
Kupcho scanned the crowd as she warmed up, looking for the familiar faces who had come to watch her play.
The two friends suddenly found themselves alone on the practice putting green next to the first tee. They teased each other to lighten the mood.
“I think she drained a long putt and I was like ‘Oh, I see how it is,’ ” recalled Kupcho. “She’s like, ‘I have to do something to keep up with you.’ ”
Annika Sorenstam, Nancy Lopez, Se Ri Pak and Lorena Ochoa awaited the college seniors on the first tee. Two-time Masters champion Bubba Watson was there too.
“I was like ‘Oh boy, I’ve got to hit a shot in front of him now,’ ” laughed Fassi.
She went in for a fist-bump while Kupcho looked for a high-five. It was a funny, awkward moment that released tension and melted into a hug. The pair set the tone right there: Let’s have fun.
Fassi typically says a short prayer prior to the start of every round. She usually asks for general things like health. It’s never about results.
On Saturday morning at Augusta, however, as she waited for her name to be called, Fassi asked God for something different.
“I need the ball to stay on the tee,” she told him. “Just help me with that. I don’t care where the ball goes.”
Fassi, a high-octane player with enormous power, bogeyed that first hole but recorded four birdies before making the turn. Neither player remembers too many details from that front nine. The shot that sticks out the most, Fassi said, was her approach into the seventh. She’d hit that same shot to a front right pin during a practice round with her caddie, more to defy him than anything else. But he was right, and when they saw that hole location on Saturday, Fassi said, “Hey, this is our pin.”
“It’s very weird to be aiming 15 yards past and 5 or 10 yards left of the pin with wedge in your hand,” she said. “Of course, nobody is clapping because everyone thinks I missed the shot.”
But as the ball spun off the fringe and started trekking back down the slope toward the hole, the noise began to crescendo. She’ll never forget that build-up to a tap-in. Augusta magic.
Fassi, who trailed by one coming into the final round, tied Kupcho after seven holes in what had essentially turned into a match-play contest.
After Fassi putted out for birdie on the par-5 eighth, Kupcho began to experience blurry vision in her left eye while on the green. She missed the birdie putt, and the reality of a migraine setting in shook her to the core.
“Like why now?” Kupcho asked. “I was definitely full-out panicking. This is my biggest moment, and I get a migraine.”
The last time Kupcho had played through a migraine was in high school, when she battled through to reach the Colorado state championships.
Kupcho crouched down in pain on the ninth tee and waited for medicine. Fassi first noticed that something was amiss on the 10th tee when Kupcho’s caddie asked her brother to get her a Coke.
“I’ve played with her a million times and that’s not her mid-round snack,” said Fassi, who thought maybe her friend had a craving or needed a jolt of sugar.
It was the caffeine that Kupcho needed most. She polished off the rest of the Coke in the 10th fairway. On the green, she missed a short par putt, bravely taking on Augusta’s greens in the dark.
Relief came on Amen Corner.
“I remember walking off the 11th tee and looking back at my caddie, saying ‘I can finally see again.’ ”
While standing in the 11th fairway, Kupcho caught the eye of Wake Forest coach Kim Lewellen. She held up four fingers, indicating to her coach that she needed four more birdies to get the job done. The goal was set.
Standing on the tee box of the par 3 known as Golden Bell, Kupcho knew that she had a 5-yard sweet spot to land the ball. The adrenaline was blocking out any pain that lingered. She felt surprisingly relaxed for being two strokes down.
“I thought, it’s time for me to show what I can do,” said Kupcho.
Fassi calls her own up-and-downs for par on Nos. 11 and 12 stronger than some of the birdies she made that day.
The Arkansas star thought she hit a perfect drive on the 13th tee but was disappointed to see her ball kick right into the rough.
Kupcho’s original plan on the 13th was to hit 3-wood and lay up. But she was down two strokes to Fassi with six to play and decided she had to go for it.
“I never hit a draw,” she said, “but I’m about to hit a draw with a driver and see how it goes.”
It worked out perfectly, setting up the one of the greatest approach shots ever hit into the 13th green by anyone – male or female. Kupcho pured a 3-hybrid from 211 yards out to 6 feet and drained the eagle putt.
“It was dead online,” said Kupcho. “Off the top of my head, I don’t really remember a better shot.”
Walking to the 14th tee, Kupcho heard her teammates shout “That’s two, you need two more!” (Eagles count as two in the Wake Forest birdie game.)
Fassi remembers Kupcho’s supporters too.
“I joke with them about it,” said Fassi, “telling them ‘you guys were so annoying.’ They should be. My family was annoyingly loud too, but I don’t care about that.”
Fassi bombed her drive off the 14th tee. During the practice round, she had 9-iron into that green. In the final round, she hit driver, 54-degree wedge.
“The adrenaline I was feeling was just out of this world,” she said.
When Fassi drained her birdie putt on the 14th, she screamed “Vamos!” at a decibel that was so loud her coach/caddie told her to tone it down. It was the only way she knew to release the tension.
“I think it fires me up even more,” said Kupcho of Fassi’s fire, “because I just want to come back and do something so that I can fist pump.”
That opportunity came quickly on the par-5 15th, when Kupcho’s drive landed too far down the left side. The plan was to aim to the right side of the green by the bunker and grandstands and try to get up and down for birdie.
“That was the plan until I got over the ball,” said Kupcho. “I think I was just in a mindset that I don’t know why, but I thought I could pull off anything that I tried.”
The draw off the 13th tee worked, so why not try it again? Even Fassi applauded the effort.
After Fassi was forced to lay up, Kupcho two-putted from just off the back for the green from 20 feet to square the match once again with three holes to play.
On the 16th tee, Kupcho simply wanted to get the ball on the green. She hit another beauty to 6 feet while Fassi three-putted from the top right portion of the green. That opened up a two-shot swing for Kupcho, and she never relented.
“The three-putt on 16 hurts,” said Fassi. “Even then I wouldn’t take it back. I feel like things happen for a reason. I do not have one single regret, or even half-regret.”
Kupcho maintained her two-shot advantage as she walked onto the 18th tee. She took out a 3-wood, hoping to stay shot of the bunkers, and put it somewhere in the fairway.
Kupcho wasn’t exactly caught up in making history in that moment.
“I had to go to the bathroom so badly because I was so nervous,” she said, “that I was just thinking about that.”
Kupcho found the fairway while Fassi put her drive in the left bunker.
“Walking up the 18th fairway, of course I knew that it was over,” said Fassi. “I had tears in my eyes. I played the whole hole crying, but I wasn’t crying like I lost. I was crying like, in a way, very proud of myself. I was empty. I had nothing else in me. I could not have fought any harder.”
Kupcho, meanwhile, was in shock.
“Is this real?” she asked herself. “Am I living real life?”
Fassi had never seen so many people on a golf course. Couldn’t tell where the sea of people ended.
Kupcho remembers walking onto the green and looking for family, wondering how all of her loved ones would make it to the back of the green where they could celebrate.
“How does this all come together?” she thought to herself.
Before Fassi struck her first putt, she turned to Kupcho and said, “I hope you go to school with this putt.”
“I hope you’re a good teacher,” Kupcho replied.
It would end as it had begun, with playful ribbing among friends to lighten a heavy moment.
Kupcho, the No. 1-ranked player in the world who hit the opening tee shot in Round 1, drained the 20-foot birdie putt. The friendly rivals hugged not once, but twice. Kupcho played the last six holes in 5 under par to close with a 67 and win by four strokes. No one was more supportive than Fassi.
“It’s a feeling I can’t describe,” gushed Kupcho in Butler Cabin. She later enjoyed a low-key pizza party with her family before starting a whirlwind media tour.
Fassi keeps an album of pictures from that week on her phone and often scrolls through then when she’s on a plane. Something reminds her of that once-in-a-lifetime week nearly every day.
Back at her parents’ rental home Saturday night, her friends and family did their best to cheer her up. Fassi called her mom inside the house for moment of privacy. In her mother’s arms, she broke down and cried.
“Let’s just do this for five minutes,” she said. Then she’d be OK to face the world.
It was her mom, she’d later say, who put it best, as mothers often do.
“It’s very easy to be gracious when you win,” she said. “She’s like ‘it’s very hard to be gracious when you’re defeated, and you were that.’ For me to be seen by the world, I cannot tell you how many people tell me, ‘Hey, that was inspiring, what you did, the way you handled yourself.’
“All these things. I feel like they are a win for me. Yeh, I didn’t get the trophy, but I won. People saw me. People saw how I truly want to be remembered. In a way, maybe losing was what I needed. In a way, as you said, this was the introduction of Maria Fassi to the world. For it to have been the way it was, I don’t think I could’ve pained it any better.”
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