Teeing off in Paris, Rose Zhang redefines what it means to do it all

“There was something about just getting into the grind and hitting golf balls over and over again,” Zhang says. “I really started to love it. And I wanted to do more of it, so that’s when we started going to real driving ranges.” Her family signed her up with Jeff Tu, a swing coach at Oak Creek Golf Club in Irvine. Soon she was winning consecutive tournaments on the junior circuit.

“It was very intuitive,” Zhang says. “It was a mind game from early on which was very interesting to me. I was competitive with myself.

“I never actually thought about, ‘I have to be winning this tournament.’ And no one ever told me I had to be winning tournaments. But it was almost the ingrained perfectionism in me.”

This past April, 12 years removed from hitting bottle caps in the backyard, Zhang missed the cut at the Chevron Championship in The Woodlands, Texas, the first of the five majors of the 2024 LPGA season. It had been 10 months since her acclaimed win in her professional debut on the LPGA Tour, her only win up to that point; 10 months of Rose-mania, a jam-packed schedule of tournaments, appearances and media days.

She had also been juggling 20 units at Stanford, all while battling undiagnosed stomach and digestive issues. Last summer, Zhang says, her stomach would hurt so bad that she couldn’t stand up. Due to her rigid travel schedule and lack of sleep, Zhang said her body struggled to digest certain foods causing serious bloat, pain and discomfort. She said she learned how to play through it because she couldn’t find the time to slow down. “My schedule and lack of sleep affected my digestion and stress. I still don’t know what’s going on, so I have to get it checked,” Zhang says. “I have my ups and downs with it.”

“There’s no way to describe it other than I was just doing it all,” Zhang adds. “I was trying to do it all.”

On the flight home from Texas to Las Vegas, she clasped her hands and closed her eyes, deep in prayer. “I missed the cut at Chevron and that’s when God spoke to me about staying patient and having no fear,” Zhang says. “And I was like, ‘OK, well I don’t know what patience even means right now. But I have to embrace it, right?”

Zhang, 21, still loves golf and the grind. Through a particularly tumultuous year, she’s trained her internalized perfectionism on two goals: winning on the course and finding her identity off it. Currently ranked No. 9 in the world, Zhang has two career victories and eight career top 10s since making her professional debut. Now, representing the U.S. at the Paris Olympics, she aims to forge a new, healthier definition of what it means to do it all.

IN HER EARLY YEARS, Zhang never quite understood her talent on the golf course. She wouldn’t call it “imposter syndrome,” more like “never feeling like I had a sense that I could be really good in this game” and “always striving to be better but never knowing when you’re better.”

Those feelings started to creep in when Zhang started winning tournaments as a junior golfer. During her years playing in the 9-11 age division, Zhang often would find herself competing against fewer than 10 girls in a tournament. The small pool allowed Zhang to capture the No. 1 spot on numerous occasions. But even after winning tournaments, there were times where Zhang would leave the golf course without picking up the medal. Zhang says that, for her father, it was a statement about her potential, and if she didn’t reach what he and she believed she was capable of that day, they would leave. The hardware would “almost be insignificant,” Zhang says, “which is interesting because all you want is to hold up a little medal even if it wasn’t a good day.”

Before Rose even touched a golf club, she dabbled in other sports like swimming and tennis. Her father was looking at her potential in every sport; he knew the doors that sports could open for his daughter, from college to career, even to the Olympics. Zhang remembers her father telling her, “If you stay disciplined and practice and get better then there’s potential … If you play well enough, we keep working hard and playing. If you don’t play well enough, it’s going to be just a hobby.”

“It gets hard because when you have a voice that’s so demanding of you, pushing you to your limit, and I’m glad he did or else I wouldn’t be where I’m at today, but when you push yourself to always be on that trending trajectory but never feel like you’re really good at something,” Zhang says, her voice trailing off before adding, “I really had to learn early on how to train myself to really just get into that grind constantly.”

Growing up, Zhang watched her parents and her brother, Bill, who is 10 years older than she, work extremely hard. Bill and their parents had moved to the U.S. from China before Rose was born, and the family communicates in Mandarin. Rose remembers her father waking up at 4 a.m. to start his day before going to work at a tech-based bathroom utilities company. He also worked technician jobs on the side to help pay for his family’s life in Southern California. Zhang’s mother, Li Cai, worked long hours at a dental manufacturing company.

“At home, I got to just be a kid. My parents wanted me to just be a kid when I got home. But when I was in the golf circle, my dad was really rooted into me, perfecting each and every routine and being able to practice and stay in the zone, detail orientation,” Zhang says. “That balance was extreme for a little kid. But I guess I was able to handle it.”

Two years after Zhang started playing golf, her father quit his job to focus on her career. Zhang started working with George Pinnell, a PGA golf coach who worked with dozens of AJGA Rolex Junior All-Americans. She started playing in higher-level junior tournaments with the Toyota Tour in Southern California, placing in the top 10 in 12 of her 13 tournaments her first year.

But Zhang knew she could be better. After not placing first in her final tournament of the season, she called Pinnell, who had been recovering during the winter break from a knee injury and had taken time off from his lessons.

“When are you gonna be back to work? I need to see you,” Zhang said.

“Why? What’s going on?” Pinnell asked.

“Well, I want to know when I’m going to win a trophy,” Zhang said.

Pinnell returned to work in early January. One month later, Zhang won her first tournament of the season on the Toyota Tour. The first of many.

Attending a rigorously academic high school, the Pacific Academy, Zhang would often come home from golf practice at 8 p.m. and stay up on FaceTime with friends until 3 a.m. to finish her schoolwork. She always worried she was falling behind, but she made education a priority even though her parents emphasized that she didn’t need to get straight A’s. She leaned on her friends, like Nicole Zhang, who also practiced with Pinnell and attended the same school.

“The funny part is that we didn’t even talk about golf,” Nicole says. “I knew she was a good golfer. I wanted to be a good golfer like her. But we’re friends, and I knew that she wanted to have a life outside of golf. That was important to her.”

By the time she finished high school, she had won the 2020 U.S. Women’s Amateur, 2020 Rolex Girls Junior Championship and 2021 U.S. Girls’ Junior. She was a two-time Rolex Junior Player of the Year, 2020 ANA Inspiration Low Amateur (breaking Michelle Wie West’s scoring record), and she represented Team USA at the 2021 Curtis Cup. She says those moments with friends and her conversations with God allowed her time to breathe and reflect, giving her the insight to push back on her father’s desire for her to turn professional after high school.

“I knew that I would 100 percent burn out if I turned pro right away,” Zhang says. “I wanted to go to college because I wanted an identity outside of golf, but also it cannot be emphasized enough that I knew that all of that internalized pressure would result in burnout.”

At Stanford, she won her first three tournaments. She won four of 10 events her freshman year, including the 2022 NCAA individual championship in addition to the team title. Her slew of awards, including Pac-12 Golfer of the Year and Pac-12 Freshman of the Year, had everyone around her, it seemed, asking when she would turn pro.

“She was winning a lot and winning’s great, but winning also comes with a heavy toll,” says Anne Walker, her coach at Stanford. “I was a confidante of hers where I knew that behind the scenes, Rose the person just wasn’t quite ready to jump off that cliff. The whole golf world was like, ‘She needs to turn pro.’ But that’s what Rose is pretty good about, separating the noise with what’s real.”

Zhang continued to win in her second year. She was the top-ranked amateur in the world, but something didn’t feel right. She remained one of the best students on the team but struggled internally during her winter quarter, worrying about her ability to manage everything. “I’m very hard on myself when it comes to not performing well,” Zhang says. “Year 2 was very conflicting for me because I knew I was playing well. Like, I knew my stats were there. But did I have what it took to turn professional?”

On May 22, 2023, she fired a bogey-free, 4-under 68 at Grayhawk Country Club in Scottsdale, Arizona, to defend her NCAA title. She became the first woman to win multiple national titles in her career, tying the NCAA record with her eighth win in 10 events that season, and tying Tiger Woods for most wins in a single season at Stanford.

Four days later, Zhang announced she was turning pro.

THIS SPRING, ALMOST a year after that announcement, she found herself gripping the edge of the bunker with her feet on the first hole at Upper Montclair Country Club at the Cognizant Founders Cup. All that stood between Zhang and her second LPGA win was Madelene Sagstrom and 18 holes.

Zhang opened her clubface, looked down at her ball cushioned beneath the rough and tried to remain as balanced as possible. She chipped the ball out of the rough and lost balance. Her arms waved in the air as she propelled her club down to the grass to catch her from falling. Her golf ball hit the flagpole and landed just inches from the hole.

The first hole foreshadowed what would follow for the next 17. “A lot of mistakes could have happened, can happen, and I just have to be able to take whatever I have out here,” Zhang said. “It was a roller coaster.”

She birdied four of the last five holes to secure her second Tour win, carding a 66, 24-under par, to set the 72-hole tournament scoring record at the course. Zhang hugged her caddie, Olly Brett, and headed to sign her scorecard. Hours later, she returned to her hotel room and called her brother, Bill.

Throughout her childhood, Bill was her sounding board, her best friend and her spiritual mentor. He acted, as he likes to call it, as her “DoorDash” — when Rose needed something, her brother would be there as soon as possible.

“She needed that validation,” Bill said of the Founders Cup win. “But she needed to realize that it was out of her control. She wants to have it all. But sometimes, it’s not up to us. So, we need to stay patient and just trust.”

Three days later, Zhang, still on the East Coast for the Mizuho Americas Open, sent Bill an early morning text. Bill’s wife woke him up before his alarm, “Hey, Rose isn’t going to play,” she said. Bill thought he was still dreaming. He looked at his phone and saw his sister’s text that read, “Hurting so bad.”

Since that start of the year, Zhang had been working with a nutritionist to help with the stomach and digestion issues that have bothered her since college. During the pandemic, foods that she once loved suddenly became intolerable. She would be in pain almost daily, struggling to eat and then struggling to sleep because of her stomach pain. During the summer of her rookie season, she experienced food poisoning that reignited her stomach issues. Her intensified travel schedule didn’t help; she became accustomed to feeling bloated and exhausted. She started paying closer attention to her nutrition, cutting out food that caused irritation. She was trying to figure out the underlying issues causing the trouble but had been waiting until she had a break in her schedule before she could go through a series of tests and procedures with her doctors.

It caught up with her this year in New York. After completing only three holes of the opening round, Zhang withdrew from the Mizuho Americas Open. Her brother called her immediately.

“Sometimes you have to take a step back to move two steps forward,” Bill told her. “It’s unfortunate, but you can come back even stronger next year. You need to just focus on yourself and God.”

Zhang returned home to Las Vegas to prepare for the next swing of tournaments that included three majors: the U.S. Women’s Open, KPMG Women’s PGA Championship and Evian Championship. She knew that what happened in the coming weeks would determine whether she would be going to Paris.

After missing the cut at the U.S. Women’s Open, Zhang started to feel that internalized pressure building. It was her second missed cut at a major this year. “I knew I was in Olympic territory,” Zhang said. “I put a lot of pressure on myself to be able to play well.” She rested in the few weeks off before the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship, then carded a T-35, holding on to her world ranking.

On June 25, Zhang got the call: She would be headed to the Paris Olympics representing Team USA alongside the world’s highest-ranked female golfer and Tokyo 2020 gold medalist Nelly Korda, and world No. 2 Lilia Vu.

HOLDING A BASEBALL in her right hand, Zhang thrusted her left leg forward, cranked her right arm back and threw. Twenty feet away from her stood Michelle Wie West with a glove sticking out from her left arm. The ball landed in front of her, and the former LPGA star quickly shimmied to pick it up.

“I think I’m going to try my left arm,” said Zhang, who swings the golf club right-handed. “I can’t remember the last time I threw a ball, but I’m left-handed, so I guess that might be better. Should I do it all officially with the leg kick and everything? I’m going to try it.”

In six hours on this day in early May, the two would be standing on the mound at Yankee Stadium throwing out the first pitch. But for now, they are practicing on a patch of grass in nearby New Jersey, at Liberty National Golf Course, away from the tee boxes and fairways.

Less than a year ago, Zhang and Wie West stood in this same spot, Zhang clinging to a trophy and bouquet of roses. She had just become the face of the LPGA, after a playoff battle against major winner Jennifer Kupcho on June 4, 2023, during Zhang’s professional debut at the Mizuho Americas Open.

Riding on the golf cart to the 18th tee at Liberty National Golf Course to start the playoff on the final day at the tournament, she got chills watching the dozens and dozens of fans — most of whom called themselves the “Rosebuds” — rush to catch the moment.

After tying the first playoff hole, Zhang and Kupcho returned to the tee box. Once in the fairway, Zhang hit a 4-hybrid that landed her second shot less than seven feet from the pin. “I just knew that was it,” Zhang said. “It was one of the best shots I’ve ever hit.” Kupcho three-putted, allowing Zhang’s two putts to seal the deal.

Zhang’s victory made her the first woman to win a professional golf tournament on her first try in 72 years, since Beverly Hanson in 1951. Zhang earned immediate membership on the LPGA Tour and secured her eligibility for the 2023 Solheim Cup.

Michelle Wie West, the host of the tournament and one of Zhang’s mentors, rushed over to pull Zhang in for a tight hug.

Before there was Zhang, there was Wie West. During Wie West’s junior and amateur careers, she set multiple records and became the youngest USGA champion at the age of 13 when she won the USGA Women’s Amateur Public Links Championship. She became the youngest player to make the cut at an LPGA event at the age of 13 and tied the tournament record for lowest round by an amateur. By the time she turned professional at 15, Wie West was the face of women’s golf. The teen phenom, who graduated from Stanford, went on to win four times on the LPGA Tour, including the 2014 U.S. Women’s Open, before she officially retired in summer 2023. But during her peak playing years, Wie West said she battled numerous injuries — many of which she didn’t speak about publicly — and struggled to live up to the expectations that she set on herself from a young age. For Wie West, the grind became her norm, and she pushed herself to her limits.

“When I think about Rose, I think about how proud I am of her and everything she’s done,” Wie West says. “She didn’t play her best on that Sunday final round, but she held on. That’s Rose. She will hold on and fight until the end. That’s half the battle, right? She shows up when she needs to show up and she shows out. And she believes in herself. That’s the other half of the battle.”

Even before winning the tournament, Zhang viewed Wie West as a role model and mentor. Zhang believed her path to a professional career was like Wie West’s and wanted to make history on the course just like the 2014 U.S. Women’s Open champion.

“With golf, when you are really good, everyone just expects the game to be extremely easy,” Wie West said. “Sometimes, you wake up and the golf feels so foreign, and everything feels so weird. I want Rose to give herself grace. I want Rose to stay patient with herself. Golf is a really hard game. She’s going to keep defying odds, but at the same time, she’s going to make mistakes. And that’s completely OK. She’s human.”

Since her debut win, Zhang has grown closer to Wie West. They share the same agent, and 34-year-old Wie West has helped Zhang navigate the spotlight. “She understands better than anyone what it’s like,” Zhang says. “I am just grateful to have her. I’ve always looked up to her.”

Back at pitching practice, Zhang tried throwing with her left hand. After a few tosses with Wie West, Zhang started to fire off pitches with a little more heat. Each time, she would laugh and smile. After 15 minutes, Zhang and Wie West decided they were good to go. “Whatever happens, happens,” Wie West laughed. “Let’s go!”

A few hours later, Zhang boarded the 4 train and headed for Yankee Stadium. Under the bright lights of one of the most revered stadiums in sport, Zhang smiled as she waited for Wie West to throw out her pitch. When it was her turn, Zhang launched the ball with her left hand and it landed just next to Yankees outfielder Jahmai Jones. The crowd screamed its appreciation.

Walking back to the clubhouse, Zhang tossed the baseball in her hand. In two weeks, stomach issues would force her to withdraw from the tournament she was here promoting. A few more weeks after that, she would learn that she’d made the U.S. Olympic team. If she can’t control all the moments along this roller coaster, she’s learning to accept them.

She tees off Wednesday at Le Golf National in Paris in her first Olympic appearance, with the hard-earned knowledge that doing it all also includes letting go — just like her brother taught her with her faith, just like Wie West taught her with her golf game. She’ll continue to rely on her internal voice that has been refined by the grind, the sacrifices, the missed cuts, the victories, and reframed by her most trusted sources.

“Do not fear for I am with you.”

“You can come back even stronger.”

“Whatever happens, happens.”