Shin’s 66 gives her British Open title

SUNNINGDALE, England -- She’s a sublime 5-foot-1 force with a ready laugh and a daydream golf game. She’s prone to paint every other fingernail lime-green with the others canary-yellow to match her shirt from Sunday. She wears perpetual eyeglasses and tucks tees and the scorecard pencil into the stem of her ponytail.

Korean fans call Ji-Yai Shin the “queen of final rounds” for her outsized mettle. Her caddie Dean Herden says her Sunday focus kicks in “just like Nicklaus” as “the shutters come down and you can sense it.” She’s a phenomenon aimed for stardom.

Oh, and: She turned 20 in April.

In soaring above a jam-packed leaderboard at the Ricoh Women’s British Open to win her first major title by three shots in her sixth major try, Shin demonstrated all the nervousness of a shark in a goldfish pond. She made six birdies, 12 pars, one gasp of a 40-foot birdie putt over a little mountain range on No. 13, one big-time 66 and one resounding deflation of suspense.

By the time she walked No. 18 in brooding English weather at Sunningdale Golf Club to find her ball so deep in a throaty bunker that she practically vanished to hit it, she stood 18 under par and three up on Taiwan’s Yani Tseng, the LPGA Championship winner. Another stroke of a wand, and Shin’s ball popped out to the green for an obedient trickle of genius. It darned near went in.

Once her par putt rattled around and submitted, she leaned her head and club back and began a new life as the third player from Asia to win a women’s golf major in 2008 and a prodigy with some momentous decisions pending.

Her father back home near Seoul wanted her to play Japan’s tour next year, Shin said in her budding English, “because he thinks I’m not yet, my potential for LPGA, and he wanted more training. But now I’ve made a win, maybe he will change his mind.”

Other evidence of readiness includes her nine for nine in cuts made in LPGA events, her crazy sixth in the 2007 U.S. Open, her whopping 14 Korean tour wins in 18 months, her top-10 world ranking and her qualification for a batch of remaining 2008 LPGA events.

Told she just earned passage to the Samsung World Championship in October, Shin delightedly said, “Really? I can play?”

This, from a player who’d just overshadowed all other story lines, from this tournament as a major harbinger (top five finishers all Asian) to Juli Inkster (good run at 48, sailed sideways Sunday, shot 73, finished nine under) to defending champion Lorena Ochoa (reached 11 under, finished seventh and expressed no surprise at Shin) to 10-time major champion Annika Sorenstam (finished her major-playing career with a birdie on No. 18 in rain beneath a scoreboard that read, “Annika, You’ll Be Missed”).

All yielded to one who traded archery for golf at age 11, became a scratch golfer by 14, finds Se Ri Pak heroic and couldn’t sleep Saturday night because of nerves.

But Sunday came, and the final-round queen, traveling alone here, woke and viewed pictures of her mother, who died four years ago in an automobile accident that left two younger siblings hospitalized for almost a year.

Nerves stayed only until the golf began, with Shin one shot behind leader Yuri Fudoh of Japan. By No. 14, Herden said, Shin said: “I’m really enjoying the people watching me.” On No. 15: “Mom’ll be watching.”

Afterward, smiling serially: “My whole life I’ve been waiting for this time, and my dream comes true now.”