Yani Tseng has not won on the LPGA for 3,243 days. She hasn’t competed for 663 days.
Where in the world is Tseng and what happened to her?
The first question is easy to answer. She’s back in San Diego gearing up for her return to the LPGA at a place that couldn’t be more familiar. The 2021 Gainbridge LPGA at Lake Nona later this month gives 32-year-old Tseng a chance to ease back into competitive golf. In 2009, she bought Annika Sorenstam’s old house at Nona, with big plans on how to fill her enormous built-in trophy case.
Two years ago, Tseng sold that house and moved back to California, where her journey in America first began and where it’s an easy flight back to her aging father in Taiwan.
“I didn’t sell it for a good price though,” said Tseng, smiling behind her mask during a recent FaceTime call. She was at The Farms Golf Club in Rancho Sante Fe, her bag slung over her shoulder as she headed over to the practice area.
The second question – What happened to Yani? – takes more time to unpack.
At the end of 2012, Tseng finished the season No. 1 in the world. Five years later, she’d fallen to 102nd. At the end of 2018, she was 328th. She’s 919th going into the Gainbridge LPGA event.
“I was playing really good during practice rounds,” she said, “but once it got to the tournament like my mind, I was losing control of my mind, my swing, my body. I don’t trust as much.”
In the spring of 2019, Tseng suffered a back injury that sent pain shooting down her left leg. She opted to rest rather than have surgery and was set to return in 2020 at the Founders Cup in Phoenix, but the COVID-19 pandemic instead sent her back to Taiwan, where she remained until the start of this year.
Tseng, a 15-time winner on the LPGA who is four points shy of the LPGA Hall of Fame, wants to prove to herself and to everyone else that she can still do it again – play golf at the highest level. The powerful yet sensitive player tries not to worry so much about what others think, but it’s still there. Especially when she’s back in Taiwan, where it’s impossible to escape her celebrity status.
“People ask, ‘What’s going on Yani? Why, why, why,’ ” she said. “Sometimes I want to know why too.”
• • •
Two years ago, Tseng wished none of it had happened. That she’d never become the youngest player to win five majors. Never been World No. 1 for 109 consecutive weeks. That’d she’d never dominated a worldwide tour to the point that she couldn’t legally have a beer in her home country without it making the evening news.
“Now that I’m getting older,” she said, “people are telling me to drink more. Maybe they think I need to relax.”
Dips and plateaus are nothing new in golf. Few get to experience the gift of going out on top like Lorena Ochoa or Sorenstam. But Tseng’s downward motion wasn’t a dip. It was a dive so spectacularly awful that she can’t fully explain it.
“I don’t know how many times I cried,” she said, “how many times I cried on the course.”
The seeds of doubt first crept in ever-so-slightly. Tseng’s current instructor, Chris Mayson, said Yani tells a story of finishing fifth in a tournament in Asia, and fielding a “What happened?” question from a reporter. The next week she posted another top 10 and was met with “Why are you in a slump?” As crazy as it sounds, that sent Tseng searching for answers.
When she got to No. 1 in the world, Tseng thought she needed to spend 12 hours on the range pounding balls because, in her mind, that’s what a top-ranked player should do. It wasn’t how she got to No. 1, but that didn’t matter.
“I was looking at (what) I imagined World No. 1 should be,” she once said, “someone much better than I am.”
Stacy Lewis battled against Tseng in her prime and eventually replaced her as No. 1. You could play alongside a rhythmic talent like Inbee Park, said Lewis, and not even realize she’d shot 65.
“With Yani,” she said, “you got caught watching.”
Lewis never sought out a sports psychologist until she reached the top of the game. The unending scrutiny got to her.
“When you get to be No. 1 in the world,” said Lewis, “people just think they can say whatever they want to you. It’s a really tough place to be.”
Add in the element of being a country’s first No. 1, as was the case for Tseng, and the pressure boils as hot as a pot at her favorite shabu-shabu restaurant in downtown Taipei.
Tseng won 12 events worldwide in 2011, and that included an extraordinary victory at the LPGA’s first-ever event in Taiwan, where more people watched her in the first round than the galleries Tiger Woods brought in at the 1999 Johnnie Walker Classic.
At a downtown press conference in Taipei, the same security guards who looked after Lady Gaga whisked Tseng from one stop to the next. Fans climbed into trees to get a glimpse of the nation’s newest icon. LPGA player Sophie Gustafson climbed to the roof of the clubhouse to take a picture of Yani-mania. She’d never seen anything like it.
When a victorious Tseng walked off the 18th green on Sunday and into the arms of her 92-year-old grandmother, Cheng-chu Yang, 20,000-plus fans went nuts.
It was a good pressure at first, Tseng said. But looking back, she hadn’t a clue how to handle it.
“My family, nobody knows what’s going on,” she said. “The team in Taiwan, nobody knows. It’s the first time ever and we weren’t ready for it.”
LPGA commissioner Mike Whan said Yani led the league in smiles when she was No. 1. He compared going to Taiwan with Yani to heading to Boston with Tom Brady.
“She literally couldn’t get out of a car without someone taking a picture,” he said. “The press conference was like something out of a presidential election. It was crazy how many cameras were in one room.”
• • •
Tseng’s first instructor, Tony Kao, told her to focus on one thing at age 10: Hit the ball as far as possible.
By age 12, she could work the ball both ways and carry it 240 yards off the tee.
When Tseng first joined the tour she worked with a kind, mild-mannered coach named Glen Daugherty. One time the 19-year-old rookie forgot to pay her electricity bill at her home in Beaumont, California, and couldn’t see well enough to pack. She asked Daugherty to bring the shirts she had shipped to his house down to Florida for the Ginn Open. There was so much to learn in those early days.
Back then, Tseng held back some of her power in favor of consistency. Daugherty once said that no one on the LPGA had the leg drive that Tseng possessed, but that she didn’t need all that natural strength to succeed on the LPGA.
Tseng has seen a number of instructors over the years, including Gary Gilchrist, Dave and Ron Stockton, Claude Harmon III and Kevin Smeltz.
In the spring of 2018, when she showed up to work with Mayson for the first time, she was swinging the club 109 mph and tee shots that were going maybe 50 feet in the air were by design.
“She was very, very fast with her backswing and got really long,” Mayson said. “To hit a fade, she was coming way over the top. I hate to say it was a 20-handicapper move, but it kind of was.”
There wasn’t one miss, Tseng said. The ball went everywhere. She started hitting those low bullets hoping to keep it in play.
“It got lower because when you’re scared to hit the ball,” she said, “you’re afraid to see the ball go too far.”
Together they turned around Tseng’s ball-striking, to the point that she felt like she was hitting the ball better than when she was on top of the world.
“She’s by far the best female ball-striker I’ve ever seen,” said Mayson.
But then something else went terribly wrong.
“Did I tell you I got the yips?” Tseng asked.
As Tseng started to find fairways and greens again, the pressure to make putts sent her into another tailspin.
“At the end,” she said, “it felt like I needed to hole my second shot.”
She turned to Derek Uyeda, who works with several PGA Tour pros, including Phil Mickelson and Xander Schauffele, for help. Tseng started to draw a line on the ball, and placed her trust in that line. It’s 70 to 80 percent there now, she said.
Of course, nothing can truly be measured until she tests it in competition.
“I feel like my skills are better than before,” she said, “my ball-striking is better than before … just the mental not quite there yet.”
• • •
When Tseng took a medical exemption in 2019 and went home to Taiwan, she enrolled in a 10-day meditation retreat. No talking, no cell phones, no computers, no eye contact, no food after noon each day.
Tseng cried for the first five days.
“I finally let it go,” she said of the weight of the world and the internal demons that plagued her heart. She had sought the advice of so many over the years, looking for answers. In the quiet, remote dorm room, she was forced to look within.
“I don’t want to live my life so hard,” she said. “I’ve been so hard on myself.”
Tseng also did laundry every day, even though she brought a suitcase full of clothes. The player who pushed and pushed and pushed for so long, struggled to be still.
Tseng left the retreat with a peaceful mind. Her relationships with friends and family got so much better as a result that she went back a few months later.
In the fall of 2019, Tseng went out to the Taiwan Swinging Skirts LPGA event as a spectator and discovered something else.
“You know,” she said, “I still love this game.”
She even missed the pressure.
Vision54 performance coach Lynn Marriott vividly recalls watching Tseng play a money game against good friend Suzann Pettersen during a practice round at an LPGA stop near Sacramento. There was a child-like quality to how she viewed competition. Of course, there were not yet any scars.
“It’s called competition, but pure play,” said Marriott, “she totally had it. It was unencumbered.”
When asked what advice she’d give to other phenoms, Tseng said just be yourself.
“I was playing golf for someone else,” she said. “I was trying to be a person that people wanted me to be instead of, this is just me.”
Of course, she continued, it didn’t help that she was trying to find out who she was at the same time. Trying to grow up as a human being while being revered as a superstar can, at times, feel like an impossible ask.
This time around, Tseng wants to take things slow. She’s lowering the personal expectations and trying to let go of all the embarrassment that’s plagued her inside the ropes in recent years. She doesn’t want to set her sights on No. 1 anymore, she just wants to feel comfortable on the course again.
Physically she’s better, but she knows it’s still a battlefield in her mind.
“I just want to get back to the real Yani,” she said.
Now, at least, she knows who that person really is.
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