In case you missed it ... one of 2020's great sports stories

 

Sports in a world of coronavirus closures and lockouts and lockdowns and virtual events and fanless stadiums and artificial crowd noise -- well, it's been a mixed bag.  Baseball in the U.S. is trying a 60-game season (which could possibly yield a .400 hitter for the season);  NHL and NBA are in a "bubble", trying to have a championship;  Liverpool won a sprint-to-the-finish Premier League title;  they managed to finish the UEFA Champions League this weekend (Bayern Munich defeated Paris St. Germain);  men's pro golf had it's first major of three (the Brit is off) with a youngster winning it;  and the Indy 500 ran today, too.

Minor league sports are adrift;  most college sports are canceled;  the Olympics next year are still not a certainty;  tennis may get in the U.S. Open with a field missing many top stars, there's no Wimbledon but I guess there's still supposed to be a French Open in the autumn.  

So, for fans of sports, there's a lot missing and a lot of uncertainty.  But if you're looking for a real great sports story, in Britain today, there was a huge one.  Bill Murray could talk about the "Cinderella story" in Caddyshack, but when someone out of nearly nowhere, someone on the verge of quitting last year, someone ranked lower than 300th in the world -- wins the women's British Open of golf ("The Open"), that's a story of John Daly-ish proportions.   (And those are usually pretty big.)

But that's what happened.  Talented, but not accomplished, Sophia Popov managed to qualify for the British Open, showed up Tuesday, played one practice round, then just proceeded to hit fairways and make putts and get around the course in less shots than anyone else (that's how you win, of course), and won the thing.

And even though she's officially German (the first of that country to win a women's major, and apparently the only German man who won a golf major is Bernhard Langer), she played golf at the University of Southern California, and she's now based in Phoenix, AZ.  So we Yanks can claim her as one of ours (we actually can, she has dual citizenship).

Despite her struggles (and apparently in addition to injury she also had to contend with Lyme disease, no fun at all), she does have athlete genes.  This is taken from her USC player biography (from a couple of years ago):

"Popov's brother, Nicholas, is a swimmer at Arizona. Her mother, Claudia, was a top swimmer at Stanford while her father, Philip Popov, was a first division field hockey player ... Popov was an accomplished amateur tennis player and swimmer in Germany before deciding to focus on golf ..."

It's funny how that works ... being a champion requires a lot of dedication and work, but natural athletic propensity often seems to play a part, too.

Everything came up roses for Popov