If they start young and go long, elite players can spend months in and around Augusta, just on an annual April visit. Viewed that way, Jack Nicklaus has logged well more than a year in Augusta, counting his days and nights over the past 66 years. Sergio Garcia must be over the half-year mark.
But among the 25-and-under crowd, the leader in this odd category is not Ludvig Aberg or Tom Kim or Akshay Bhatia. It has to be Megha Ganne, a Stanford junior now trying to win the Augusta National Women’s Amateur. This is her fifth crack at it. Before that, she played in the Drive, Chip & Putt national finals at Augusta in four different years.
Ganne is 21 and a lifelong resident of the Garden State. She went to Holmdel (N.J.) High. Her swing coach lives in lower Manhattan and is an assistant women’s golf coach at Columbia. Ganne has been getting written up by the Asbury Park Press and other Jersey papers for a while now. In 2021, for instance, when, at 17, Ganne was the low amateur in the U.S. Open. More column inches are coming. On Wednesday, the first day of the three-round Augusta Women’s Am, Ganne shot a nine-under 63 at Champions Retreat.
That course-record round gave Ganne a two-shot lead going into Thursday’s second round, also at Champions Retreat. After Thursday’s round, the 72-player field will be cut to the low-30 and ties. Every player in the field is invited to play Augusta National on Friday. The players who made the cut return to Augusta National on Saturday to play for the title.
“I think it’s the most exciting week in amateur golf, men’s or women’s, period,” Ganne said after her first round. “I think everyone in golf knows about it. People tune in.”
If you haven’t, you’re missing out. This is a chance to watch the best female amateurs at stroke play, and, come Saturday, to see Augusta National play as its architects, Bobby Jones and Alister MacKenzie, intended it to play. Thirteen, for instance, the iconic par-5, at 450 yards. Driver, 5-wood — if you dare! So much anxiety, so much fun! Ganne knows all about that, having played in the finale in 2023 (T9 finish) and 2024 (T20). So does her swing coach, Katie Rudolph, who has caddied for Ganne at the ANWA. This year, Rudolph is watching from the rope line.
“We’ve been working together since Megha was seven,” Rudolph, a Wake Forest golfer in the late 1990s, said in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon. Rudolph met Arnold Palmer at a Wake outing. That was a game-changer. She met Ganne at an LPGA/USGA kids’ clinic. That was a game-changer. She met her future wife — Jenn, described as a “recovering lawyer” — as a random playing partner at a public course (Van Cortlandt Park) in New York City. That was a game-changer. They married in 2017. There’s an interesting piece about Rudolph by Steve Eubanks on the LPGA website.
Rudolph picked up something from watching Palmer that she has shared with Ganne (and other players). She said Palmer, at this Wake outing, was playing indifferently until the final couple holes, when a small crowd gathered to watch him. “And then he turned it on, like the performer he was, and he played some great golf,” Rudolph said. “And that’s what I tell Megha. You’re performing out there. You’re like an actor on Broadway, putting on a performance eight times a week. There are days that you might feel lousy or your boyfriend broke up with you or whatever. But you’ve got to dig in and find your best stuff.” Rudolph said a performance might be for yourself, for teammates, for family members who are watching. What matters is that you find something.
Ganne does that, Rudolph said. She digs deep no matter where her game is on any given day. Rounds of 63 are out of a magic hat, rare for every golfer. What happens on the days you don’t have it makes all the difference. Tiger Woods said this repeatedly in his prime: The days that meant the most to him was when he was swinging like he was shooting 76, or fighting the flu, and wound up signing for 71.
Whenever Ganne has played in Georgia — at the Drive, Chip & Putt, at the ANWA — her family has been watching her. That is, her mother, an endocrinologist; her father, a tech guy; and her sister, a high-school senior who will play college golf. (The daughters are first-generation Americans; the parents were born in India.) Augusta has been their spring-break destination for a decade, back to the fro-yo heyday.
Ganne is fully expected to return to Stanford for the 2025-’26 school year and graduate in the spring. In other words, she’s not turning pro anytime soon, and the wall between elite amateur and early-career pro has never been more blurred anyhow. Ganne’s stylish outfits this week are being supplied to her by Ralph Lauren, a brand she mentioned by name in her Wednesday-afternoon press conference. That’s OK. That’s the way of the world. NIL has found the ANWA. The golf is the golf.
Ganne’s threesome turned into a twosome because Rianne Malixi, who won both the USGA Women’s Amateur and Junior Girls’ titles last year, withdrew because of a lower-back injury. The Wednesday round took five hours. Waiting to play her second shot on the 9th hole, Ganna sat cross-legged on the fairway. How playful. She’s 21. She’s a kid. Millions of kids all over the world like to sit cross-legged like that. One in a million can come to the ANWA and shoot a first-round 63. Some performance. More to come.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@golf.com.
