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Stacy Lewis on her way to winning the Mizuno Classic in Shima, Japan, earlier this month.
An hour before last year's L.P.G.A. player of the year announcement, Stacy Lewis was in a hotel room working on the recipient's speech. Yani Tseng of Taiwan, with seven tour victories, was the repeat winner and had asked Lewis for help putting her thoughts down on paper.
As Lewis worked with her friend Tseng on polishing the final draft, it never occurred to her that she might be prepping for her own celebratory bow a year later.
"It's kind of strange," said Lewis, who wrapped up the points-based 2012 Player of the Year award Sunday with a tie for fourth at the Lorena Ochoa Invitational.
Harder to fathom is that Lewis, a four-time winner this year, is the first player born in the United States to win the award since Beth Daniel in 1994, the 17-year dry spell encompassing the lifetime of the American Lexi Thompson, the youngest rookie this year on the L.P.G.A. tour.
"It's kind of shocking that it took so long," Daniel said in a telephone interview.
The drought started with the ascension of Annika Sorenstam of Sweden, who won the first of her eight Player of the Year awards in 1995, and grew more conspicuous with the Australian Karrie Webb's two-year reign, followed by the four-year rule of Ochoa, who is from Mexico. The globalization of the game made Daniel's accomplishment look, in retrospect, like the high-water mark for women's golf in the United States.
The long chorus line of American players who came close but earned no award included Meg Mallon, Juli Inkster, Paula Creamer and Cristie Kerr, who won the Lorena Ochoa Invitational for her 15th L.P.G.A. title. Kerr, 35, briefly held the No. 1 world ranking in 2010 and became the top American player on the career money list last year when she passed Inkster to move into fourth place.
"It's just crazy to think that there have been so many great players, and I am the one after Beth," said Lewis, who will perform golf's version of the victory lap at this week's Titleholders tournament in Naples, Fla.
Lewis, 27, joined the tour in 2009 after earning medalist honors at the qualifying school in December 2008, her success overshadowed by the presence of Michelle Wie, who also earned her tour card.
It always seemed as if Lewis was being eclipsed by somebody. At this year's first major, the Kraft Nabisco Championship, she answered more questions about the world No. 1 Tseng than about her own title defense. At the final major of the year, the Women's British Open, in September, Lewis answered more questions about the 15-year-old amateur Lydia Ko, who won an L.P.G.A. tour event in August while paired with Lewis, than she did about her own season, which at that point included two victories.
"It gives me some motivation to play better," Lewis said, "so people will talk about me."
Daniel described Lewis, who grew up in Ohio, as a throwback, a golfer temperamentally suited for the days before building a brand usurped building a career.
"Now it's all about who's backing you and putting your name out there," Daniel said in a telephone interview. "She would have been perfect in my generation. She's such a hard worker. She puts all of her energies into getting better."
Lewis, a four-time all-American at Arkansas, does not have a signature look like Creamer, who has a fondness for pink. She was never a giggly, gangly girl beating grown-ups like the teenage sensations Wie and Thompson. Lewis has a compelling story, having spent seven and a half years in a back brace with scoliosis, and being the winner of a major title (the 2011 Kraft Nabisco). Yet she came into this year feeling as if she were invisible in plain sight.
"When everyone talks about the top American players, they'd always talk about Paula and Cristie, and I was never thrown in the mix," Lewis said. "My goal coming into this season was to get my name in that mix and get people to see that I am one of the top American players."
Tseng claimed victories in three of her first five starts and then cooled off, while Lewis came on strong. In September, she won her third title of the year, at the Navistar L.P.G.A. Classic. That's when the Player of the Year award, which had been a fuzzy goal, came into clear focus.
But there was not much public chatter about Lewis's prospects, so she felt compelled to clear her throat, the better to uncharacteristically toot her own horn.
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