Keith Strudler: Lucy Li

You have a bar mitzvah at 13. A quinceanara at 15. A debutante ball at 16. All of these are formal proclamations of adulthood that come before the American legal tender of 18, which of course is before the drinking age of 21 and being able to rent a car at 25. But all of these feel senior compared to the new standard age of adulthood for women’s golf. And that age is 11, which is the age of Lucy Li of Redwood Shores, California. Li last week qualified for the US Women’s Open Championships, one of the sport’s major tournaments. She’ll technically compete as an amateur, but she’ll face pro golfers far older and more seasoned.  She’s the youngest to ever qualify for the Open, taking that title from Lexi Thompson, who did so at age 12 in 2007.

It’s unlikely Li will have a measurable impact at the Open. Just making the cut after the first two days would be a remarkable victory. Thompson didn’t in her first attempt, although she did later turn professional and won her first pro event at age 15. It can only be assumed that Li will attempt to follow the same path, earning a living long before her school mates have a driver’s license.

Of course, I’d guess Li doesn’t spend a whole lot of time hanging out with classmates. She’s probably more involved at her other school, the Jim McLean Golf School in South Florida, which has a knack for producing pre-teen golf protégés. Like tennis and other individualized sports of relative privilege, underage success typically means long hours of guided practice with a high price tag. It’s not easy to do what Lucy Li is doing, and it’s also not cheap.

There’s a whole lot of ways to deconstruct Li’s accomplishments. On the one hand, it’s remarkable, competing athletically with those twice her age and beyond. Athletes, even golfers, have a relatively small window for peak performance, with a handful of outliers. Certainly, Li falls more than a standard deviation below the mean.

Conversely, some might suggest this speaks volumes to the current condition of women’s golf in the US, where an 11-year-old can make the open. There’s certainly some truth to this politically incorrect construct, evidenced by the lack of American winners on the women’s professional tour, with Korea and Japan accounting collectively for 70 of the top 100 players, compared to a mere 21 from the US. That’s in contrast to the men’s side, where 45 of the top 100 in the world are American despite a far more globalized competitive field with infinitely larger prize money. So it’s fair, if a bit caustic, to recognize that the pool of top women’s American professional golfers is relatively shallow, at least by comparative standards.

It’s worth noting that female athletes have a strong history of developing before men – such is the case in tennis, gymnastics, and golf. I’m not qualified to deconstruct the divergent physiology of athletic development by sex, or to know how much the influence of power and performance sports for men skew this statistic. But it’s fair to say there are very few Jennifer Capriatis in men’s sports, where the gulf between boy and man feels awfully large.

But all these questions aside, perhaps the real quandary is whether an 11-year-old playing an adult’s game, with all the pressures and connotations, is really okay. Not physically, but emotionally, cognitively, and all the things that might matter not for Lucy Li’s golf life, but rather her whole life, which will extend far beyond her playing career. It’s impossible to have a singular, dogmatic answer. And certainly, Li’s parents and surroundings are as determinant as anything. We have no idea how much of her success is pull and how much is push. But there are more than a few cautionary tales. Jennifer Capriati, Tiger Woods, Todd Marinovich, all prodigies pushed too hard, too young. And even as two of the three turned out pretty well athletically, all have struggled otherwise. Perhaps it was the spotlight; perhaps it was the controlling regimen at a young age; perhaps it was the pressure of success. And since this is a subset with limited generalizability, Lucy Li’s mileage certainly may vary. But if nothing else, they are cautionary tales of too much, too soon.

Should we applaud the athletic accomplishments of Lucy Li? Of course, since they are remarkable. But we might be wise not to set this as a standard. In the end, the rental car companies may have it right. Even if you can do adult things at 13, or 11 in the golf world, 25 is a much safer bet.

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