PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. — The par save that mattered most on Friday did not require Alison Lee’s best swing. It required a 13-month-old to finish his sentence first.
Standing on the 18th fairway at Riviera Country Club, Lee had just punched a crisp approach to the green when her son Levi — watching from beside the ropes with her partner, Trey Kidd — shouted his single reliable word. “Ball!” The crowd laughed. Lee got up and down for par. She walked off at 3-under 68, tied for the lead at the U.S. Women’s Open presented by Ally, and briefly carried Levi up the club’s iconic staircase into the scoring tent before handing him off, mid press conference, to Trey.
That moment — not the birdie at 12, not the bunker scramble at 7 — is what this tournament week is about for Lee. At 4 under through 36 holes at Riviera, she shares the lead with China’s Ruoning Yin heading into Saturday’s third round. Six players trail by one shot, among them major champions Jennifer Kupcho, In Gee Chun, Hinako Shibuno and Sei Young Kim. World No. 1 Nelly Korda is two back. The weight of the moment, though, belongs to Lee, who has never led after any round in 45 major starts and has yet to win anywhere on the LPGA Tour in 11 years as a professional.
What has changed this year is not mechanics. Lee was so depleted at her season debut last month at the JM Eagle LA Championship that her ball speed had dropped to 135 mph — a number she described with a kind of exhausted candor. She is still the only player in the top 20 at Riviera losing strokes off the tee. What has changed is the math of her days.
She wakes at 6 a.m. while Levi is still asleep, trains for two hours, returns to feed him and manage the household while Trey works remotely, then heads to the course during naptime. By mid-afternoon, she is a mother again. On weeks when Levi does not sleep well, she has started crying from sheer exhaustion, a detail she offered without apology — the kind of admission that sounds like a weakness until you understand it as evidence of a very serious person’s honest accounting of her situation.
“There are days where I’ll just start crying because I’m so tired,” Lee said after her round Friday. “I feel like over time I’ve found a good routine for myself.”
The routine was forged partly by necessity and partly by a two-word conversation with Juli Inkster, who won two U.S. Women’s Opens as a mother — in 1999 and 2002 — and remains the last woman to do so. On the days Lee felt she was drowning, she called on Inkster’s judgment. The response she holds onto is not a speech. It is an assessment: “You can do it.”
Inkster’s record makes those four syllables something more than encouragement. They are data.
Lee turned professional in 2015 as perhaps the most decorated American amateur in a generation. She held the World Amateur Golf Ranking’s top position for 16 weeks in college, earned first-team AJGA All-American honors for six consecutive years as a junior, and arrived on tour with expectations calibrated accordingly. What followed was not failure but something harder to explain: sustained excellence without breakthrough. Close calls measured in single shots, a Solheim Cup appearance in 2024 played through first-trimester morning sickness she did not publicly disclose until afterward, and a maternity leave that, rather than softening her ambition, sharpened it.
She had assumed she would step away from competition once she became a mother. The Solheim disabused her of that.
“I told myself, OK, I’m going to have Levi, I’m just going to do everything I can, just tell myself absolutely no regrets looking back,” Lee said, noting that another pregnancy would make a competitive return exponentially harder. The window she has identified for herself is roughly two years. She is 13 months into it.
The course she is contending on is not accidental. Lee was born in Los Angeles. Riviera, the George Thomas design that first opened in 1926, sits minutes from where she grew up. She scouted it in April for what she described as only her sixth or seventh serious look at the layout, and her recollection of that visit carries the precision of someone who stores difficulty not as grievance but as information. “I remember thinking, oh, my God, this is so hard.”
On Thursday, she missed half her fairways and half her greens and still shot under par. On Friday, a fanned drive at the par-4 second left her blocked behind a tree. She punched out to 116 yards, found the green and holed the six-footer for par. She dropped only three shots across 36 holes on a course the USGA has set up as one of its most demanding venues in recent championship memory.
The technical question for Saturday — whether Lee can hold the lead over players with more major experience and, in Korda’s case, demonstrably superior ballstriking — remains genuinely open. Riviera punishes imprecision with a consistency that has kept scoring thin throughout the field. Lee is not certain she can sustain the scrambling she has shown; the game she played through the first two rounds is not one a player can repeat indefinitely on a course this unforgiving. As Golf Channel reported after her round, Lee herself acknowledged the level of fight required to post two consecutive rounds under par while losing ground off the tee.
What is not an open question is what she is attempting. Lee is trying to become the first mother to win a U.S. Women’s Open in more than two decades, at a club she has known since childhood, in the year she decided she had one real window left to find out what she was capable of.
Levi will be back on the ropes Saturday. Trey has already been given his instructions about timing.
