Atthaya Thitikul took up golf as a sickly six-year-old to enhance her poor well being. Now she has joined Tiger Woods as one of many sport’s youngest world quantity ones. Thai teenager Atthaya reached the highest of the world girls’s golf rankings this week after a surprising debut 12 months on the LPGA Tour. The 19-year-old from Thailand’s western Ratchaburi Province has gained two tournaments on the US-based elite girls’s tour and has 12 different top-10 finishes. She grew to become the second-youngest world primary in girls’s golf historical past this week after New Zealand’s Lydia Ko, who was 17 when she first topped the rankings in 2015.
Atthaya additionally joined Ko and Woods in turning into the one golfers, male or feminine, to attain the highest rating earlier than their twenty second birthday.
“Being primary is strain — I do not understand how lengthy I will be primary on the earth, however at the least it is only a rating,” she informed reporters on the LPGA Japan Basic, the place she shot a one-under par 71 on Thursday in her first spherical since rising to the top.
“However what you must do is enhance your self quite a bit. Regardless of the place I’m — primary, 10, 20 or 100 — I am simply making an attempt to enhance myself and be myself every single day that I play, as an individual and as a competitor as properly.”
Atthaya may by no means have taken up golf if her grandfather had not really helpful spending extra time open air as a method to forestall the frequent diseases that affected her as a baby.
He instructed taking part in both golf or tennis, and after watching movies of each sports activities, the six-year-old Atthaya thought that golf could be the least strenuous choice.
Coming from a household of non-golfers, Atthaya needed to push herself to succeed, however it didn’t take lengthy earlier than she was turning heads.
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In 2017, on the age of 14 she grew to become the youngest participant to win knowledgeable tour occasion when she triumphed on the Women European Tour’s Thailand Championship.
Unable to show skilled till reaching the age of 18, she honed her recreation as an novice over the subsequent three years.
After incomes her LPGA Tour card at qualifying faculty a 12 months in the past, she wasted no time in rising to the highest.
“I did not assume I’d be primary on the earth that quick, and I did not assume I’d obtain this in my first 12 months on the LPGA as properly,” she stated.
“General, I am feeling nice, feeling grateful that this has occurred this 12 months.”
Nicknamed “Jeeno”, Atthaya is the daughter of a automobile wash enterprise proprietor father and a hairdresser mom.
She enjoys the lifetime of a standard teenager, and her Instagram web page is filled with pictures of her fishing, sightseeing, enjoyable with associates and dealing on her recreation.
She prefers visiting the mountains of Chiang Mai to lounging on the seaside, and describes herself as a foodie.
She says she tries to not take golf too severely, and thinks having a nasty spherical is “not the top of your life”.
“I am the one who takes it relaxed, smiling,” she stated in an interview final 12 months about her angle on the course.
“I all the time assume taking issues in a optimistic approach is finest for golfers. You play on the course for 4 or 5 hours and your mind is working exhausting already.”
Atthaya says she has struggled with different folks’s expectations of her, however she has realised that “you must simply be your self” and play with freedom.
She is the second Thai participant to prime the ladies’s world rankings, after Ariya Jutanugarn, who was primary for 23 weeks between June 2017 and March 2019.
Atthaya can also be the second participant to succeed in the highest rating in her LPGA Tour rookie 12 months, after South Korea’s Park Sung-hyun in November 2017.
Atthaya is making an attempt to keep up a stage head regardless of her fast rise.
“On daily basis that you simply play golf, you possibly can’t anticipate something with it,” she stated.
“You must take pleasure in each single second that you simply’re on the course as a result of for those who play unhealthy in the present day, you all the time have tomorrow.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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