2024 Olympic golf -- Rose Zhang redefines what it means to do it all - ESPN

STANDING BAREFOOT IN her family's backyard, 9-year-old Rose Zhang stared down at a bottlecap laying on the grass. She watched her father swing his seven iron and make contact with the bottlecap and thought, «I can do that.» She got the hang of it within minutes.

Haibin Zhang saw his daughter's natural talent for golf, and how much she seemed to enjoy learning everything she could about the game. Near their home in Irvine, California, there were plots of empty land slated for tract homes. The Zhangs would make their own driving range there on the weekends. Standing on a square carpet mat, Rose took swings across the dirt and rocks for hours. «Another one,» she would tell her father, running after the balls to collect them before hitting more.

«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,