Last but not least: The final player added to the U.S. Women’s Open field has high hopes

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — Early this week, a Golf Channel video crew caught up with Amanda Doherty as she played the par-5 6th hole at Pebble Beach.

Cameras are a constant during big events at Pebble. But this was Monday afternoon, three days before the start of the U.S. Women’s Open. Doherty was not hitting shots that mattered. At that point, she wasn’t even in the field. But things were about to change.

“I saw them coming toward me with the cameras,” Doherty says. “I just looked at them and said, ‘I have a feeling I know what this is about.’”

In tournament golf, one player’s misfortune can be another’s opportunity. So can one player’s scheduling conflict. Only hours before, the USGA had gotten word that So Young Lee, exempt into the Women’s Open through her Rolex ranking, had opted not to turn up in Monterey, choosing instead to defend her title in the MBN Ladies Open on the LPGA of Korea Tour. Lee’s absence left an 11th-hour vacancy for Doherty, first on the list of alternates, and last player into the 2023 field.

“I was hoping I’d get in. I was thinking I’d get in,” Doherty says. “All you can do is be ready if and when it happens.”

Tournament fields are fluid lists. Final rosters aren’t fixed until the last group tees off in the opening round. You never know. Someone might fall sick, or strain a muscle, meaning someone else gets summoned to the tee. Doherty, 25, had this fact in mind in May, when she barely missed securing her place at Pebble with a lipped-out birdie putt in a three-way playoff at a qualifying event in Virginia.

Though she’d failed to punch her ticket into the Open, she bought a ticket to the West Coast anyway.

“Book the travel in advance before the prices go up,” Doherty says. “You can always get the points or the credits back later. This is the national championship. You do everything you can to give yourself a chance.”

You’d rather have a guarantee, of course, as Doherty did last year, her first full season on the LPGA Tour, when she won a qualifier in Missouri to claim a spot in the 2022 U.S. Women’s Open at Pine Needles, a start she parlayed into a T40. Golf is fickle, though. You take what it gives you, even if it entails a cross-country trip and travel outlays with no promise that you’ll get to play.

“You can’t really think of it as an expense,” Doherty says. “It’s an investment in yourself and your career.”

She arrived on the Monterey Peninsula on Sunday, settling into an Arbnb that she’s sharing with her parents, her sister and her caddie, 15 minutes up the coast from Pebble. There was nothing left to do but control what she could, trying to get her mind and her mechanics right. She hit the range, and then the course, playing both a practice round and a waiting game that ended as she putted out on 6.

The cameras whirred. Doherty smiled and expressed her excitement. 

“I was just so pumped,” she says. “To me, this is the biggest event there is.”

No alternate has ever won the U.S. Women’s Open. But nothing is pre-written. Not tournament fields. Not tournament results. Come Sunday, Doherty says, she’s hoping the cameras will be on her again.

“Ideally late in the day,” she says. “Coming down the stretch.”