Thompson is in a hurry, all right. She is the next teenager on the fast track to success. It says so on a Web site, not her own, which introduces Thompson as Golf’s Next Big Star.
She is big, all right. After a growth spurt, Thompson is 5 feet 11 inches. She has looked perfectly at ease competing with players twice her age at this weekend’s Kraft Nabisco Championship, but Thompson’s slouch between shots betrays her adolescent awkwardness.
It is widely assumed that Thompson, who celebrated her 15th birthday in February, will turn professional after the Curtis Cup, a match-play competition in June among the best female amateurs in the United States, and Britain and Ireland.
“I think it’s time to make that move,” Thompson’s father, Scott, said Friday, after she shot a par 72 to make the cut by four strokes in the year’s first major. She had a 73 on Saturday and enters the final round at three-over 219, 13 shots off the lead.
If Thompson chooses to turn pro, she will have to petition L.P.G.A. Commissioner Michael Whan for membership because the minimum age for inclusion is 18. Otherwise, she can rely on sponsors’ exemptions, as Michelle Wie did in her first three years as a pro, to gain entry to a limited number of L.P.G.A. events.
“I think she’ll do wonders for that tour whenever she turns pro,” said Thompson’s brother Nicholas, who is 27 and in his fourth season on the PGA Tour.
Another brother, Curtis, is also an accomplished golfer. A high school junior, he plans to play for Louisiana State.
Speaking by telephone from Texas, where he survived the cut at the Houston Open, Nicholas said: “Curtis is the most talented athlete in the family, but Lexi is probably the most driven. It’s unbelievable the drive and the work ethic she has.”
The Kraft Nabisco Championship is golf’s version of a cotillion. It introduced the public to Wie, who tied for ninth when she was 13; Aree Song, who played in Sunday’s final group in 2000 as a 13-year-old and finished in a tie for 10th; and Morgan Pressel, who was 18 when she won in 2007.
As an eighth grader, Thompson was the low amateur here in 2009, closing with a 69 to finish in a tie for 21st. Now she is striking the ball better — through the first two rounds she was second in driving distance to Wie with an average of 286.5 yards — but her putting stroke has been unreliable.
Thompson is often compared to Wie, who turned pro shortly before she turned 16. But the prodigy with whom she has the most in common is Cristie Kerr, another South Floridian who was taught by the same coach, Jim McLean, and excelled on the junior circuit.
Kerr, who was tied for second after two rounds in the Kraft Nabisco, skipped college to turn professional in 1996, shortly before she was 18. In her first three years she had four top-10 finishes; in her sixth, she posted her first victory; in her 11th, she won her first major, the United States Women’s Open.
Asked how she would advise Thompson about her future, Kerr said: “It’s hard to give advice because it’s such a personal decision. Even looking back on my own career, I think I would have benefited from a year of college. The first couple of years it was kind of the school of hard knocks for me.”
The past several years have been an advanced education in finance for the Thompsons, who live on a golf course in suburban Fort Lauderdale, Fla., but were not to the gated community born.
Scott Thompson stays at home and oversees the golfing schedules and daily routines of Alexis and Curtis, who are home-schooled. Thompson’s mother, Judy, works full time processing insurance claims at a dental office.
“The people who deserve full credit are our parents,” Nicholas said. “They have sacrificed more than you can imagine.”
It was not their parents’ intention to raise a golfing threesome. It just happened after Nicholas was forced to choose between baseball and golf when he was 11 or 12 because the seasons overlapped.
He chose golf, and shortly afterward, the Thompsons bought a house along the 12th fairway of T.P.C. at Eagle Trace. Alexis and Curtis grew up competing with Nicholas in backyard chipping and putting contests, with the loser having to empty the dishwasher, take out the trash or perform some other hated household chore. The contests, the most recent of which took place a couple of weeks ago when Nicholas was home, are intense.
“Oh, yeah,” Judy Thompson said. “Do you want me to sugarcoat it? Of course there’s competitive hostility, especially when they’re going for a chore.”
Alexis Thompson said: “I’m better at the chipping. In the putting, Curtis usually wins.”
Last fall at an L.P.G.A. stop in Alabama, she chipped and putted well enough to go into the weekend tied for the lead. She finished tied for 27th.
Thompson, who is tied for 37th here, is wearing ladybug earrings for luck. While walking the course during her rounds, her mother carries a backpack that contains, among other things, a bag of plastic wind-up ladybug toys that she gives to young girls in Thompson’s galleries.
Asked how she came to view ladybugs as a good-luck charm, Thompson said, “A few years ago I would always see them, and I’d blow on them so they’d fly away, and I’d make a wish.”
Will Thompson be careful what she wishes for, or is she in too much of a rush?
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