Bamberger on Lucy Li: "She exuded joy."

Michael Bamberger wraps a nice bow around the gift that was Lucy Li this week, with some great behind-the-scenes stuff after her second round.

Bamberger writes:

She answered post-round questions with her hands on her waist and her married parents, Warren Li and Amy Zeng, nowhere in sight. (Zeng, who has a masters in computer science, works for Hewlett Packard.) Lucy ended a lot of her sentences with that classic tweener sign-off of, “So, yeah.” She talked about how her friends at home had responded to the whole thing, raising her voice in imitation and saying, "'So you’re famous now.’” When she tried to search her memory for a shot-of-the-day, she flashed her eyeballs north in the direction of her considerable brain, came back empty and said, “I’m kind of tired now.” Tired, but happy.

And...

Guan Tianling demonstrated tremendous maturity as a 14-year-old. Michelle Wie at 13 seemed like a golfing Mozart with a magical swing but what joy the game gave her was hard to detect. Lucy Li, at 11, is a poised prodigy and joyful one. Plus she’s so smart.

Friday night, somebody gave Lucy’s parents an obscure novel written by a Canadian named Bob Jones, writing in the voice of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, called "Sherlock Holmes Saved Golf."

"Oh, she will love this,” Amy Zeng said. “She will read anything with Sherlock Holmes in it. She goes to the library and gets all the Sherlock Holmes books."