Most people can only dream of even getting to play a round of golf at Augusta National, the home of the Masters Tournament. Only a handful of folks on earth can say they've won a championship there.
16-year-old Anna Davis is one of them.
The Steele Canyon High School student won the Augusta National Women's Amateur Tournament on Saturday. She fired a final-round 69, one off the lowest round of the entire tournament, to finish 1-under par. Davis is the only player to break par for the 54-hole event.
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Davis made birdie on the 9th, 12th, and 13th holes then finished with five straight pars with some wizardry around the greens (much like another left-handed golfer from San Diego has a couple of times). During those final holes she admits to doing a little bit of leaderboard watching to see just how close she was to a title.
"I was, yes. Towards the back-9 there are scoreboards everywhere so it's hard not to look," says Davis. "I saw that I was pretty close (to the lead). I think I was 2nd going into the last two holes so I was just trying to stay consistent and not make any dumb mistakes."
Davis was the only one able to keep her nerves in check down the stretch. LSU star Latanna Stone had a 2-shot lead with two holes to play but finished double bogey-bogey on 17 and 18 and Sweden's Ingrid Lindbland made bogey on the last hole. those missteps dropped them both back to Even for the tournament, one shot behind the champion.
"I wasn't as nervous for some reason," says Davis. "I knew I was kind of an underdog in the field and I didn't have as much pressure on me to do extremely well so I was just out there having fun."
She was a bit of an unknown commodity but it's hard to understand why. Last year Davis won the Girls Junior PGA Championship at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville by a whopping seven shots. Her laid-back demeanor has already made Anna a darling of social media, and rightfully so.
It's wild to think that Davis is still a sophomore so she's not even able to talk to potential college recruiters about scholarship opportunities yet. She'll have several suitors, and the option of going pro right after graduation is always there for a player this talented.
