Sometime soon, Aphrodite Deng will be worrying about her sophomore year of high school. Until then she has a much bigger assignment: contending in this week’s Canadian Open.
Deng is just 15 years old but is tied atop the leaderboard after 18 holes at the CPKC Women’s Open, held in Ontario this week, in her homeland of Canada though still very far from where she was raised in Calgary.
Deng shot a first-round 66, matched only by LPGA vets Megan Khang and Gaby Lopez, and found herself at the center of attention post-round. Peppered with questions about nerves, experience, playing in front of crowds, etc., Deng seemed mostly unbothered.
“It’s really cool,” she said in an interview afterward. “Definitely something I’ve dreamed about.”
On those crowds:
“Yeah, it feels nice. I like just try to stay focused around here.”
And what it felt like to see her name atop the leaderboards?
“I thought it was pretty cool, but I just knew I had to keep the same game plan.”
We’ll allow her to get comfortable in front of the cameras, but there will be plenty of those following her this weekend. We’re just one round in, of course, but you can forecast the conversation if she continues to hang around the top of the board. People will start to talk about how a 15-year-old did the same exact thing at the Canadian Open 13 years ago. That was the bespectacled Lydia Ko, in 2012, becoming the youngest player to ever win on the LPGA Tour.
What followed in Ko’s career, given that launching point, isn’t that surprising. And with all due respect to weight of the weekend ahead of her, Deng has been rising almost just as rapidly. She has relocated to Florida to work on golf full-time, attending school online at ICL Academy. She works with coach Todd Anderson at TPC Sawgrass, and occasionally finds herself hitting balls in front of Anderson’s other pupil, Billy Horschel.
Deng’s summer has included three amateur victories, notably at the Mizuho Americas Open — playing alongside Nelly Korda — and then the U.S. Girls Junior Championship in July. As the 22nd-ranked women’s am in the world, she’s been green-lit for golf stardom after joining Team Canada’s NextGen squad, a national program aimed at getting more Canadians on the PGA and LPGA Tours.
All of which is to say, yeah, she’s got a future in the game. How bright will it be? We might get some clues this weekend in Canada.
