Kraft Nabisco Championship 2010
The best women golfers in the world will fight for the right to wear a seriously unfashionable article of clothing

By Steve Trivett

Brittany Lincicome is an LPGA Tour major champion. She has the bathrobe to prove it.

While the Masters, the first major championship of the year on PGA Tour, gives its winner a coveted green jacket, the winner of the Kraft Nabisco Championship, first major of the year on the LPGA Tour, gets a radically different, yet equally important, article of clothing.

Ever since Amy Alcott took that first plunge into Poppy’s Pond, the moat surrounding the 18th green of the Dinah Shore Championship Course at Mission Hills Country Club, back in 1968, the winner of the Kraft Nabisco has held her post-victory press conference wearing that special white bathrobe. Last year, it was Lincicome who slipped her arms into the plush terrycloth.

“I still can’t believe it,” she said moments after emerging from Poppy’s Pond and just a few more moments after her eagle putt on the par-5 finishing hole found the cup and gave her a one-shot win over good friends Kristy McPherson and Cristie Kerr. “I didn’t know if this was ever going to happen.”

The long-hitting Lincicome had carried the shoulder-bending weight of being “the best player to have never won a major” since first arriving on the tour. And until she took one fateful swing on the closing hole of the 2009 Kraft Nabisco Championship, it looked as if she might be carrying that moniker a little longer.

Trailing Kerr, who was already in the clubhouse, as well as playing companion McPherson by one shot walking to the 18th tee, Lincicome wasn’t sure that even birdie on the par-5 closing hole would be enough to give her a shot at a playoff. She erased all that when she sank her five-footer for eagle while McPherson could only make par.

One hole…one winner.

After ripping her drive more than 270 yards down the 18th fairway, Lincicome, nicknamed “Bam-Bam” by her friends, still had 210 yards remaining to the island green. Without flinching—and with no thought of laying up—Lincicome pulled her hybrid-rescue wood from her bag.

“I’m glad it came down to the 18th hole and my length was a strong point and I was able to go for the green in two,” she said. “I’m standing over the ball, the hybrid in my hands and my hands are shaking and my heart is racing.

“I’m trying to calm myself down by breathing or singing or whatever I can possibly do, and right when I hit it, it came off the clubface exactly where I wanted.”

Not only did her ball find the green, it finished just five feet below the hole. Lincicome then calmly, at least on the outside, stroked the putt home.

She was almost as perfect on her jump into the pond, making her one of the tournament’s fabled “Ladies of the Lake,” a title just as important as the winner of the British Open Championship being called “Champion Golfer of the Year.”

And when the 2010 edition of the tournament opens April 1, Lincicome will be back in the field to defend her title—something that hasn’t been done since Annika Sorenstam won back-to-back in 2001 and 2002.

In fact, since the calendar rolled into 2000, seven different players from six different countries have donned the bathrobe. Over the past 10 years, Sorenstam, born in Sweden and now retired, won three times and Australian Karrie Webb claimed the title twice. In addition to Lincicome, other past winners include American Morgan Pressel, who became the youngest winner at 18 in 2007; France’s Patricia Meunier-Lebouc (2003); South Korea’s Grace Park (2004) and Mexico’s Lorena Ochoa (2008).

And this year’s tournament figures to be an international event as well. Not counting the defending champion, the American contingent will include Michelle Wie, who won her first career LPGA victory toward the end of 2009; Pressel, Kerr, McPherson, Cristina Kim, Paula Creamer and maybe even 15-year-old Alexis Thompson, who made the cut last year.

Ochoa, the No. 1 ranked woman golfer in the world, will also be in the field, but she won’t be the only foreign player on the odds-maker’s short list. Jiyai Shin, the Louise Suggs Rolex Rookie of the Year in 2009, will head a strong Asian contingent that will include South Korea’s Na Yeon Choi and Japan’s Ai Miyazato. Suzann Pettersen will head the list of European players to make Mission Hills a must-stop.

Come Sunday, one player will walk past the 18th-hole grandstands, sink a putt on the final green and then make the traditional leap into Poppy’s Pond—and history.

Steve Trivett is a staff writer with Desert Golf Magazine