AS a little girl, Minjee Lee would leave motivational messages for herself. “Achieve your goals,” she urged on Post-it notes. “Do your best.”

Her mother would find them sticky-taped to a desk in her daughter’s bedroom.

“She’d have a little motto and write it down on the desk,” Clara Lee says. “She always had a little goal. She did this from when she was very young.”

By the age of 10, Minjee had turned that steely determination to golfing. She would spend up to eight hours a day practising at the course.

“I’d bring her to practice and she’d never say no,” Mrs Lee says. “She wasn’t practising because someone told her to. She was practising because she wanted to.”

When she was 11, Minjee came to the attention of the man who would become her coach, Ritchie Smith, for a whole other reason. She walked into Smith’s Perth Golf Academy, at Melville Glades Golf Club in Leeming, with a swing so wayward it had her on course “for a fairly significant injury”. But Smith also sensed in her something special.

Lee, now 18, agrees that when she met Smith her swing was “all over the shop”.

“But you have got to start somewhere,” she says.

Minjee Lee at The Evian Championship, France, last September. Photo: Stuart Franklin/Getty Images
“Over a period of time, my swing has changed a lot working with Ritchie. Every year there has been a lot of improvement . . . But it’s looking much, much  better.”
That’s the understatement of the decade. Lee won two Australian Women’s Amateur championships back to back and last February became the world No. 1 amateur. She turned professional in September.

Now the teen prodigy is regarded as the future face of women’s golf — and, not surprisingly, international sports management company IMG quickly signed her up after she’d won her tour card.

“We believe Minjee is going to be a superstar both on and off the golf course, which is obviously one of the reasons we made her our No. 1 recruitment priority earlier last year,” says Kevin Hopkins, IMG’s New York-based golf client manager.

“We’ve already seen a great reaction from the corporate marketplace and by the time she tees it up as an LPGA rookie, she’ll have equipment, apparel and corporate deals already in place.”

via Golfer Minjee Lee on turning pro | Perth Now.