Rose in full bloom

Grillrooms, barbershops, 19th holes and neighborhood sports bars stay in business by stoking arguments over who’s the best. Rocky Marciano or Muhammad Ali? Bird or Magic? M.J. or LeBron? Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle? Hogan, Nelson, Tiger, Jones, or Jack? The debates are endless. That’s what makes them fun.
What you won’t hear is an argument over the greatest female collegiate golfer of all time. That one’s settled. Rose Zhang – who won her second consecutive NCAA individual title at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Arizona, last Monday and who turned pro late last week – is golf’s Pete Maravich. She’s a player whose collegiate career was so eye-popping that we expect people to point to it for decades.
Zhang won 12 college tournaments at Stanford – the most by any golfer in school history for a university that produced Tiger Woods, Notah Begay, Maverick McNeely, Patrick Rodgers and Andrea Lee. Woods, McNeely and Rodgers had 11 wins each. McNeely did it in four years, and Woods and Rodgers needed three seasons. Zhang, who turned 20 la...