Magazine 2003 Giant Eagle Classic

Volume 1, Number 8 June 18, 2003

Giant Eagle 2003: Mighty Minny

Pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Results

Minny Yeo notches her best result of the year. More to come?

Minny Yeo is an interesting golfer in a lot of ways. She is known on tour as being very fashion forward, and her trademark wide brimmed hats allow you to easily pick her out in a crowd. Unlike most of the Korean golfers in the LPGA, however, she has not had a lot of success since she joined the tour in 2000. But to her credit, she keeps plugging away, and from what I've seen, she has the talent to make some noise out here, she just needs to get more consistency. She proved it again at the Giant Eagle.

But the Yeo success story starts last year, at the Rochester event, where she scored her best ever finish, a 33rd place. A few weeks later came the Sybase Big Apple Classic. Playing as a nonexempt player in 2002 made it all the tougher, because she was not even guaranteed entry into most fields. Yet suddenly, amazingly, by the end of round one, it was Minny Yeo who sat atop the leaderboard. What this showed is that Minny has the talent to compete on this level, at least on a round by round basis. But she was still not ready to compete for a title, because the very next round she shot an 80 and missed the cut. Still, she made headlines, and thus progress.

Minny is fast becoming Ms. Thursday
(or at the Giant Eagle, Ms. Friday!)
AP Photo/Ron Schwane

Minny at last year's Sybase Big Apple Classic

The very next week, she almost did it again. At the Wendy's Championship for Children, Minny again shot a great opening round which left her just out of the lead. This time she did not collapse in the second round, but instead easily made the cut. If Se Ri had a deserved reputation as 'Miss Sunday', then Minny could conceivably be called 'Ms. Thursday' (she is married, hence the Ms!), at least based on these performances. Minny even got some TV coverage that week, and finished a respectable 41st.

But perhaps the biggest moment in Minny's career came after the season was over. That was when she acquired her exempt card at the LPGA Q School. No more Monday qualifying! She would now have an entire season where she would be guaranteed entry into most fields.

Alas, up to this last week, Minny's 2003 has not been extremely successful. Though she has shown flashes of brilliance here and there, she has missed almost every cut this year, and when she has made the cut has not finished high. But it was right around this time last year that Minny started to surface, and sure enough, it happened at the Giant Eagle this year. Once again, Minny came out of seemingly nowhere, and on a day when even the best players in the world struggled, she posted a 4 under 68 to take sole possession of the lead after round one. She says she knew the round was something special when she started to see photographers come to take her picture while she played. And it indeed it was: though she had an early bogey on three, she followed that with a birdie at the par 5 5th, and two more at 7 and 8 to go out in two under. On the back the great shots kept coming, and after a bogey on 10, she had birdies on 11, 12, 14 and 15. Interestingly, the only hole in that stretch that she did not birdie was the par 5 13th (she got a par). A final bogey at 16 left her with her 4 under score, which tied her best round ever.

Another shot from round 1
Reuters/Ron Kuntz

Getty Images

So the big question now was, how much of a drop off would she have in round 2? The conditions were significantly better, so the scores got pretty low. Minny was not able to match what she had done on Friday, but to her credit, she did not play that badly, finishing with a 2 over 74 that kept her in 20th place. Her first career top 20 was certainly a possibility. On Sunday, she was pretty solid on the front nine, going out in even par, but started having difficulty on the back. After bogeys on 14 and 15 it looked like her round could really be heading south fast, but she ended the bleeding with a birdie on 16, a hole she had bogeyed the two previous days. That had to be encouraging! In the end she shot 72 and finished in a tie for 35th, her second best finish on tour. Not quite a top 20; but now that she knows she can produce day one heroics, all she needs to do is figure out how to do it even one more day, and she might very well start making her presence felt.