The Tiger Woods of girls's golf is making her professional debut, and she or he's already off to a scorching begin

• Rose Zhang is a girls’s golf famous person who has drawn comparisons to the one and solely Tiger Woods.
• The 20-year-old made her extremely anticipated LPGA debut after 141 weeks because the top-ranked beginner.
• She shot two underneath par in Thursday’s opening spherical of the Mizuho Americas Open in New Jersey.

Tiger Woods set the usual for kicking off an illustrious golf profession.

Practically three many years later, Rose Zhang is breaking that mould.

As a Stanford Cardinal standout, Woods matched a college document by profitable 11 tournaments over his two-year school tenure. Zhang broke that longstanding document in the identical span.

Now, like Woods did 27 years in the past, Zhang is embarking on a highly-anticipated skilled profession. Coming off back-to-back NCAA particular person nationwide titles — an unprecedented feat within the girls’s sport and one which Woods didn’t accomplish on the lads’s facet — the 20-year-old Arcadia, California, native walked away from 141 weeks as World Beginner Golf’s top-ranked participant to compete within the LPGA.

And Zhang is already off to a scorching begin within the execs.

On Thursday, she teed off on the Mizuho Americas Open at New Jersey’s Liberty Nationwide Golf Course for her first skilled match. In a discipline consisting of 120 of the best girls’s golf gamers on the planet, Zhang completed her opening spherical among the many high 15 within the match.

She capped off Day 1 with a bang — effectively, a birdie — to complete two underneath par and 5 strokes again from the lead.

—LPGA (@LPGA) June 1, 2023

Zhang nonetheless has three extra rounds to go together with a whopping $2,750,000 purse on the road. But when her opening day is any indication, she’s proper the place she belongs within the LPGA.