GAINESVILLE, Va. – Lexi Thompson gets her Suzann Pettersen moment Sunday.
Local becomes U.S. Solheim Cup hero with clinching putt.
Lilia Vu birdies final two holes to give Americans first Solheim Cup victory since 2017.
That’s the one. Print it.
Storylines changed by the shot on Sunday as digital leaderboards at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club kept updating, altering the math for what the United States needed to prevail and what Europe needed to survive.
Fortunately for the home team, it didn’t need many points in the singles session – just 4½ of them. Thanks to three big wins early, it seemed not a matter of if the U.S. would win but how the scenario would ultimately play out.
Who would get that point or half-point to finally end the Americans’ Solheim Cup misery?
Speaking of misery, U.S. captain Stacy Lewis was suffering. She was so close and just needed someone to close it out.
“That was the longest hour and a half of my life, I’m not going to lie,” Lewis said of the time between reaching 13 points and finally getting the requisite 14½.
Thompson would have been the perfect protagonist, and with her positioning in the middle of the lineup, it almost felt expected that she’d deliver that moment. But when have things gone as expected with Lexi? Three up through 11 holes, she lost, 1 up, to Celine Boutier. She had a 10-footer at the last that, at worst, would have earned a half-point and, at best, pressured Boutier into missing her 5-footer.
Maybe, just maybe, she’d make her putt, it would win the Solheim Cup, and she’d call it a career. Instead, it slid sharply past the right edge, never threatening the hole.
Next up was Lauren Coughlin, a Virginia native who had never won on tour until recently and then managed to do so twice. She had a 15-footer that outright would have sealed it. It, too, missed.
That left another avenue for a U.S. win as Europe’s Maja Stark, Coughlin’s opponent, had raced her 25-foot birdie putt 10 feet past the hole. She had to make that to keep hope alive. Thankfully, she did because no one – especially Stark – wants a story to begin: Maja Stark missed a 10-foot putt to …
The tie, compounded with Andrea Lee’s earlier halve, put the U.S. at 14 points.
“Half-points matter,” Coughlin said after her match. “During a team dinner, the message was: Go get that half-point.”
Now someone had to at least get a half-point more, which proved to be Vu. Two down with two to play, Vu birdied the 17th. A perfect drive at the par-4 18th left Vu with a wedge in.
“It was 103 yards, helping wind,” Vu described. “That’s actually my least favorite number to hit, like a 90 [yard] shot downwind. But I just had to step up to it. I knew I had to hit it close.”
Inside 2 feet.
Forced to putt it to make victory official, Vu popped in the most nerve-wracking 18-incher of her life.
“It meant the world because I really felt today that when I was kind of letting myself get down, that I wasn’t doing anything for this team and didn’t see light at the end of the tunnel,” Vu said. “And then I got to 2 down … and then was able to birdie 17 and 18. I don’t know how. It just happened. I know I looked in the fairway to the leaderboard, saw that we were at 14 [points], so wanted to get that half-point for us.”
Add in that Vu was sidelined earlier this year with a back injury that has never fully healed, to the point where she felt guilty competing this week while not 100%, only emboldens her headline.
“To see Lilia pull off that shot in that moment was just really, really special,” Lewis said.
Vu’s putt set off a celebration the U.S. hasn’t been able to enjoy in seven years. Thompson was in tears (the good kind). Coughlin and Vu were each draped in American flags.
Past captains were hugging, the drinks were starting and out came a caddie’s cry of utter relief: “F---ing finally.”
That’s a better headline.