Brittany Altomare took the early lead at the ShopRite LPGA Classic on Thursday with a hole-in-one.
Well that’s one way to take the lead at a golf tournament.
Brittany Altomare started her opening round of the ShopRite LPGA Classic on the back nine at the Bay Course at Seaview Golf Club on the shore in Galloway, New Jersey, making birdie on the par-4 10th. She followed suit on Nos. 12 and 15 before raising the stakes on the par-3 17th.
The 29-year-old made an ace on the 119-yard par-3, taking the outright lead at 5 under early on Thursday. Another birdie on No. 18 put Altomare at 6 under at the turn.
Still searching for her first LPGA win, Altomare is no stranger to the top of the leaderboard. Her first professional win came in 2016 at the Symetra Tour’s Guardian Retirement Championship. A year later she came up just short at the 2017 Evian Championship, losing in a playoff to Anna Nordqvist. Two weeks prior Altomare finished T-3 at the Cambia Portland Classic.
In eight events this season, the Virginia grad has missed just one cut while logging three top-20 finishes.
This longstanding LPGA event has become a fall classic in 2020, an ideal run-up to next week’s major outside of Philadelphia.
Given the strict restrictions in place in New Jersey and canceled pro-am rounds (yes, rounds), there was reason to be concerned that this year’s ShopRite LPGA Classic might not happen.
To the delight of fans and players alike, the longstanding LPGA event at the Bay Course at Seaview Golf Club has become a fall classic in 2020, an ideal run-up to next week’s major at Aronimink Golf Club outside of Philadelphia.
But first, the skinny on this week.
This marks the 32nd playing of the ShopRite LPGA Classic on the Jersey Shore and the winner’s list reads like a who’s who in women’s golf.
The best of the best win here
Juli Inkster won the first showing back in 1986. Inkster ultimately won it twice, and Betsy King won it three times, as did Annika Sorenstam.
Cristie Kerr signs autographs for fans at the LPGA ShopRite Classic at Stockton Seaview Hotel and Golf Club in Galloway Township, New Jersey.
Add in Nancy Lopez, Dottie Pepper, Se Ri Pak along with current players and major champions Stacy Lewis (2012, 2014), Brittany Lincicome (2011), Anna Nordqvist (2015, 2016), Cristie Kerr (2004) and Angela Stanford (2003) and all bets should point toward a marquee winner this week.
“It’s a thinking person’s golf course,” said Cristie Kerr. “You know, it’s a great short game and wedge playing golf course, so I think that’s why you see a lot of the great players that have won here have had very good careers. That’s where you make your money in golf, is chipping putting.”
Atlantic City can be seen in the background as Stacy Lewis walks along the 15th hole during the second round of the 2012 LPGA ShopRite Classic in Galloway Township, New Jersey.
New month, different course
The tournament has been held at Seaview since 1998 (in addition to the first two years of the event). Typically held in June, this year’s October dates will present a new challenge on an old-school track.
Stacy Lewis, who made a double-bogey every day in 2014 and still won by six, noted that the greens are actually better now than they are in the summer. It’s not playing as hard and fast as usual, which means length might be more of an advantage. The intricacies of the greens and the subtle breaks, however, remain the same.
“If you get on the wrong side of the hole putts can be really fast,” said Lewis. “This week especially it’s going to be dealing with spin and how much the ball is not releasing and controlling wedges.
“And the fescue is down, too, so who knows what that year is going to bring.”
Past champion Annie Park, who grew up 80 miles from the Seaview, described the wind on Wednesday as monstrous, telling Megan Khang it felt like they were back in Scotland.
“I love fall in New York and New Jersey,” said Park. “I love sweater weather.”
There’s an extra round
For the first time since 1990, and only the second time in event history, the ShopRite will be a 72-hole hole competition. Christa Johnson won 30 years ago at Greate Bay Country Club, finishing 5 under for the event.
The ShopRite typically hosts pro-ams on Wednesday and Thursday but due to COVID-19, both were canceled. Players have gotten used to not having fans at tournaments, but the lack of pro-ams and early-week bustle takes getting used to as well.
The mentality of needing to floor the gas pedal changes a bit too at a 72-hole event. Lincicome welcomes the change.
“If I’m going to win an LPGA event,” said Lincicome, “I always want it to be a four-day event against the top players in the world, hardest fields, just so when you win it’s kind of justified. You played four rounds against the best players.”
Players walk up the fairway on the sixth hole and past the skyline of Atlantic City during the second round of the ShopRite LPGA Classic presented by Acer on the Bay Course at the Stockton Seaview Hotel & Golf Club in Galloway, New Jersey. Photo by Hunter Martin/Getty Images
One group, five wins
One of Thursday afternoon’s must-see groups goes off at 1:06 p.m. ET, just in time for Golf Channel’s three-hour broadcast (1-4 p.m. ET).
Past champions Stacy Lewis, Anna Nordqvist and Lexi Thompson, who have five titles at ShopRite between them, will try to feed off each other’s good vibes during the first two rounds.
“What’ll be interesting is that you’ll see three different ways probably of playing the golf course,” said Lewis. “You’ll have Lexi who will bomb it; Anna and I are probably going to hit it pretty straight and hit it good.
So it’ll be three different ways you can win, and be fun playing with people that are obviously comfortable on the golf course. Hopefully see a lot of the putts go in.”
Hinako Shibuno lines up a putt during the 2019 AIG Women’s British Open near Milton Keynes, England. Photo: Tim Ireland/Associated Press
Special invitations
Four players received sponsor invites into this week’s field: Natalie Gulbis, Hinako Shibuno, Brynn Walker and Megha Ganne.
Walker, a senior at North Carolina, has competed in ShopRite’s Monday qualifier six times dating back to her senior year at Radnor High School outside of Philadelphia, advancing twice.
Ganne, the reigning New Jersey Junior Girls champion, competed in the 2019 U.S. Women’s Open, the 2019 U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship and the 2019 Drive, Chip and Putt National Finals at Augusta National.
While Gulbis has been a staple at Seaview for two decades, Shibuno is new to American golf. The 2019 AIG Women’s British Open champion turned down LPGA membership last season but now hopes to play her way onto the tour. Shibuno had hoped to participate in LPGA Q-School this season, but it was canceled due to the pandemic. She plans to try next year if she doesn’t play her way onto the tour before that.
“When I played with So Yeon Ryu and Nasa Hataoka at Japan Women’s Open Championship last October, I realized that they were on totally different levels with me,” she said with the help of an interpreter. “That incident made me want to go to the U.S. and compete in more high-level tournaments.”
Ten years after making her pro debut, Lexi Thompson returns to the ShopRite LPGA Classic with 11 victories and a budding skincare line.
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Lexi Thompson made her professional debut at the ShopRite LPGA Classic 10 years ago, roaring onto the tour – quite literally – in a Red Bull Racing show car. She was 15 years old, a rising 10th-grader with all the head-turning ingredients that point to stardom.
“I felt like I hit it pretty hard when I was younger,” said Brittany Lincicome, “but she was a whole ‘nother level of swinging hard.”
Thompson was asked that first week as a pro if there was a “Lexi line” of clothing in the works. That would be cool, she answered.
A decade later, on the heels of a switch in her management team to GSE Worldwide, Inc., Thompson, an 11-time winner on tour, announced the new “LEXI” brand, with projects that center around “LEXI Golf,” “LEXI Fitness” and “LEXI Skin.”
Her copper-based, anti-aging skin care is set to have a soft launch in December, with a full roll-out in the first quarter of 2021.
“I’m just very excited to have something other than golf,” said Thompson, “and something that I’m interested in and hopefully can help people’s skin, and my skin. The product is great. I’m already using it.”
Golf won’t last forever, Thompson notes, though she has been one of the most consistent players on tour, winning at least one time in each of the past seven seasons.
The 25-year-old’s lone victory in 2019 came at the Bay Course at Seaview, when she drained a 20-foot eagle putt on the final hole to clip Jeongeun Lee6 by one stroke. Thompson said she gets chills each time she watches the clip, including several viewings last night.
BOOM 💥 🦅@Lexi takes a two-stroke lead in to the clubhouse
This week’s 120-player field will compete for $1.3 million over the course of four days. With no fans coming to the Jersey Shore and no pro-am, officials decided to expand the tournament to 72 holes for the first time since 1990. Additional past champions in the field include Annie Park (2018), Anna Nordqvist (2015, 2016), Stacy Lewis (2012, 2014), Brittany Lincicome (2011), Cristie Kerr (2004) and Angela Stanford (2003).
While Thompson has spent time in 2020 preparing for her future, she has also looked to the past to get back to the winner’s circle. A crash session with childhood instructor Jim McLean ahead of the ANA Inspiration sent Thompson back to what felt good as a swing-for-the-fences prodigy. They looked at old tape, as far back as elementary school, and returned to a familiar shot shape.
“I know I can aim up the right and draw it back,” she said. “That does wonders for my mind.”
Thompson saw immediate results, finishing two shots out of the playoff at the ANA Inspiration. She then withdrew from the next week’s event, the Cambia Portland Classic, due to smokey conditions from forest fires that reduced the event to 54 holes.
After two weeks of tournament prep in steamy Florida, she headed up the east coast early to take a Sunday spin around Aronimink ahead of next week’s KPMG Women’s PGA Championship. Conditions were soft she said, and she hit driver on nearly every hole.
There’s no better marketing for Thompson’s upcoming launch, of course, than winning golf tournaments.
Kerr, 42, knows what it’s like to balance an off-course business with tour life. The 20-time winner on the LPGA and mother of two launched Kerr Cellars in 2013 in partnership with Helen Keplinger. Last month, Constellation Brands, Inc., announced that it had acquired a minority stake in Kerr Cellars’ super-luxury portfolio of Napa Valley and Sonoma County wines.
She’s also one of golf’s biggest philanthropists. Proceeds from her Curvature wine label go to breast cancer research. The Cristie Kerr Women’s Health Center in Jersey City, New Jersey, opened 10 years ago and treats women regardless of their ability to pay.
“The only advice I think I would give (Lexi),” said Kerr, “is just make sure whatever you do that has your name on it, make sure you have control of it.”
Thompson’s new agent, Brett Falkoff, also happens to work with Bryson DeChambeau. Earlier this week Thompson joined DeChambeau as a Bentley Ambassador, posing with her shiny new ride on Instagram.
The pair of power players have met on occasion at Cobra Puma shoots, and she watched DeChambeau’s recent thrashing at Winged foot with interest. That being said, she’ll stick to her one protein shake a day.
“I think we all don’t mind a little bit of extra distance,” said Thompson, smiling, “but I don’t want to put on 40 pounds.”
UNC-Chapel Hill fifth-year senior Brynn Walker has never liked the “highlight reel” quality of social media. Instead, she created a blog.
PAWLEYS ISLAND, S.C. – Brynn Walker has never liked the “highlight reel” aspect of social media. She wants to pull back the curtain more than that, and a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill recently helped her figure out how.
Walker enrolled in a class called “Branding of Me” last spring. The bulk of the grade was assigned according to how successfully she created a blog to brand herself. It took about three weeks to figure out how she’d structure the project. Learn to brand yourself, her professor explained, and you can brand anything. That’s key for a broadcast journalism major like Walker.
“He would have individual meetings with us and he was like, you need to think hard about what you stand for, what you want your blog to be about,” she said.
Walker loves penning messages in birthday cards, especially to her three older siblings. She calls herself an “inspiration junkie,” and that itself gave her a bit of inspiration.
“If I could somehow through my journey in golf, inspire other people by writing and documenting, I think it would be pretty cool,” she said. “That’s kind of the main basis of it. I picked different experiences, different people and then bring it all together with some kind of lesson.”
Even after Walker, who is sticking around for a fifth year at UNC, ceased to be graded for her entries, she kept writing. When she decided she’d be taking that victory lap, she blogged about it. She couched it on the team van she fell in love with on her first recruiting trip to Chapel Hill. The entry is called “One more lap in the big blue van.”
She kept going, even though inspiration amid quarantine was hard to find. But the experiences eventually came back. When she learned she’d get to play the U.S. Women’s Amateur for an unexpected fifth time in August, she blogged. And she blogged about the significance of a sponsor exemption she has received for the ShopRite LPGA Classic in October.
In my latest blog, I share exciting news about my sponsors exemption into this years @ShopRiteLPGA and the significance of the @Seaviewgolf for my family and I through the years. I am so grateful to Eiger Marketing for this opportunity and I cannot wait!https://t.co/Jj8Lor4FF2
Her followers now know her connection to tournament venue Seaview Resort in Galloway, New Jersey, where the Walker family has long vacationed. Brynn had annually tried qualifying for the ShopRite, which always fell around her birthday. When she was 18, tournament officials granted her a pass through the amateur qualifier and into the Monday qualifier. She played her way into the tournament for the first time that year.
The best part of watching sports, Walker believes, is connecting with athletes as people. She has provided a way for her followers to know her that way.
“I love that stuff, I feed off of it,” she said. “So I try to put some more out there.”
A blog about the hard days in golf centered around this question, posed to her by instructor John Dunigan: “How do you handle the inconsistencies of golf?”
Walker jokingly answered ice cream, but then she dug deeper. Encourage others and get back up, she wrote, setting that apart in bold green type. And finally, Our value doesn’t come from what we do; it comes from who we are.
Walker loves it when younger girls read her entries and message her that they feel the same emotions. She has succeeded in revealing a side of this journey we don’t often see.
“I want mine to be authentic,” she said of communicating in a more long-form way than Twitter or Instagram. “In my blog, that’s why I talk about the ups and downs. Hopefully, people can relate.”
Walker’s story has been decidedly shaped by COVID, mostly in the form of timing. After her spring season was canceled, she faced difficult decisions about how to spend the next year of her life. She never dreamed “how crazy it would become.” When LPGA Q-School canceled Q-School for 2020, Walker made the decision to return to Chapel Hill.
When she tees it up at the Shoprite, it will be for the third time. It would have been her professional debut, but that transition will have to wait. She’ll still put Dunigan on the bag and use it as a look at a professional career that remains on the horizon, albeit the distant horizon.
“Everything happens for a reason, you gotta believe so,” Walker said. “I think that this year, maybe I just need one more year to prepare.”
