Continued: Golfer Hilary Lunke comes home a champion

Hilary Lunke awoke one day five years ago with a distant place and time swirling in her brain, the morning after her life changed forever.

"Interlachen, June 2008."

With one final, dramatic stroke a day earlier, the former Minnesota high school girls' golf champion from Edina emerged from obscurity to win the 2003 U.S. Women's Open -- a playoff victory so stunning, it still rivals any other in professional golf.

After pocketing the largest check in women's golf history and with countless media requests looming that morning, she contemplated a faraway opportunity that would shape her life enough to time the arrival of her first child, a girl named Greta who was born last fall.

"Seriously," she said. "You don't want to be nine months pregnant that month."

Her U.S. Open victory remains the startling, inexplicable exclamation point in a career that has become part-time work while she first carried and now cares for her child. Until that wondrous week, Lunke had never finished better than 15th in an LPGA event and never won more than $12,000 in a tournament, a financial state that left her unable to make car payments earlier that year.

Lunke's best finish in the five seasons since is a tie for 22nd in 2006.

But when Lunke steps to the first tee on the final Thursday this month for the U.S. Women's Open at Interlachen Country Club in Edina, she will be introduced as a past champion on a historic patch of Earth where she once played nine-hole high school matches.

"To be able to play the biggest event in your sport in your hometown, that just doesn't happen to any athlete," she said while in town last month for a corporate outing at Interlachen. "To be able to look at the marshals on the side of the fairways and be able to recognize three-quarters of them, to have your family and your friends cheering you on, it's something I've been looking forward to since the morning after I won."

That July 2003 victory by a 24-year-old, second-year pro on a course called Pumpkin Ridge near Portland, Ore. -- a noticeably short hitter on what then was the longest course in the championship's history -- defied all logic.

"It honestly was magical," Lunke said. "It sounds so cheesy to say that, but how did it happen? I don't know. I wasn't doing anything different than I am now in terms of practicing and working on my game. It still is just as much of a miracle as I thought it was."

When her surname shockingly appeared on the leaderboard during Friday's second round, even acquaintances who knew of Hilary Homeyer's accomplished amateur career didn't recognize one of their own, because she had changed her name the previous fall after marrying former fellow Stanford golfer Tylar Lunke.

"She came out of nowhere to win," said two-time U.S. Women's Open champion Juli Inkster. "She made every putt she had to make, and that's surprising for someone who had never been in that position before."

Excess and expectations

She arrived at Pumpkin Ridge in 2003 just hoping she would play well enough to advance to the Women's British Open and avoid a third trip to the Ladies Professional Golf Association's qualifying school -- a demanding, stressful steppingstone to full status on the big pro tour.

With faith and a fabulous short game that endured for five consecutive days, she left Pumpkin Ridge with a $560,000 winner's check. Instant celebrity, a free pass to play on the LPGA Tour for the next five years and an invitation to the next 10 U.S. Women's Opens -- including this year's championship at Interlachen -- came along, too.

With the money came expectations that Lunke could duplicate her sudden success. She never has, but memories of her victory in that 18-hole playoff remain vivid for her and the women she beat that Monday, nine-time LPGA winner Kelly Robbins and tour pal Angela Stanford. The three of them had sent the great Annika Sorenstam home by a single stroke on Sunday's final hole.

"I'll remember that week forever," said Stanford, who played the final two days with her friend. "It just seemed like everything, for whatever reason, was meant to be for her that week."

Five years later, fans still ask her to sign the Golfweek magazine cover that commemorated her victory.

"Every week, there's somebody with a Golf World or a Golfweek," she said. "And every week someone comes up and says, 'Do it again, Hilary.'"

No regrets

Lunke played herself to exhaustion in the next 18 months after that miraculous Monday, trying unsuccessfully to make the U.S. Solheim Cup team and snatching up every opportunity presented to a U.S. Women's Open champion. She reaped another $100,000-plus in a few new sponsors, additional corporate outings and appearance fees for overseas tournaments. More important, her title delivered guaranteed playing status on the LPGA Tour and the opportunity to travel the globe.

The sudden direction of her life delayed for a few months plans for her and Tylar, who carried her golf bag that week at Pumpkin Ridge, to buy a house in Austin, Texas. He postponed business school for a year while they traveled the world and they decided to wait a few years to start a family. In October, Greta was born. Hilary Lunke quickly discovered the pitfalls of trying to have it all.

This year, she has played only three tournaments -- each time missing the cut that reduces the field for the tournament's final rounds -- in a season that started with a stress-induced illness. A full-time mom and this season's president of the LPGA Players Association, the 28-year-old Lunke now plans to play only a handful of tournaments this year.

"I've learned you can have it all, but you can't do it all well," she said. "And I learned that really quickly. I'm not someone who likes to do things and not do them well. I was able to juggle all the balls and keep them in the air, but I didn't feel like I was doing anything well.

"Something had to give. The mom thing wasn't going to give. I want to make sure I'm not missing out on something her first year that I would regret deeply later."

Letting the stars align

Lunke weighed her option to step back from her profession against a desire to demonstrate that she can win again. Discussions with her mother, Penny, convinced her she need not prove herself worthy again, not after winning a trophy whose engraved list of champions includes golf greats Patty Berg, Mickey Wright, Babe Zaharias, Betsy King and Sorenstam but excludes such LPGA Hall of Famers as Kathy Whitworth, Nancy Lopez and Beth Daniel.

"It was hard to make the decision to cut back because part of me felt like I was giving up," Lunke said. "I know I didn't need to validate my win. I know I could win again, if everything came together just right like it did. I got to the point where just because I haven't won again doesn't mean I have to keep pursuing it. My mom told me, 'You've won the biggest event in your sport. What could you regret?'"

Her mother cried when footage of Lunke's clutch 15-foot putt that ended the Monday playoff was shown during an Interlachen luncheon at which Lunke spoke last month. Lunke said she has watched video of that championship only a handful of times, usually right before the U.S. Open to get her corpuscles jumping.

And every time, just when Lunke expects the story's ending to change, she wins the U.S. Women's Open with that putt and a celebratory fist pump that began to form when the ball still rolled toward the hole.

"As it was happening, you were just playing golf," she said. "Now, you're watching it as a spectator and you're saying, 'Wait a minute now: Annika is leading.' You just expect certain things to happen."

Instead, the unimaginable did, a victory that far exceeds anything else in her career.

"I kind of struggled through that for a while," Lunke said. "I'm at the place now where I'm separated enough from it that I can look back and just say, 'That was awesome.' I'm going to accept it the way it was. I would like to go out and win again. Do I think I could? Yeah, but that doesn't mean I have to be on a mission.

"You can't set out to win a tournament and do it. You just have to go out and play golf and when things fall into place and the stars align, let the magic happen."

Staff writer Mark Craig contributed to this report.