Pressel Handles Stress of Success

Morgan Pressel turned heads for playing through adolescence, becoming the youngest player to qualify for the United States Women’s Open when she was 12 and the youngest to win an L.P.G.A. Tour major, at 18.

Morgan Pressel, who lives with her grandparents in their home in Boca Raton, Fla., is the youngest player to win an L.P.G.A. major. She did it at 18.

The focus is sure to remain on her this week at the L.P.G.A. Championship as she aims to become the eighth player — and the first since Annika Sorenstam in 2005 — to win the first two legs of the L.P.G.A.’s calendar Grand Slam. While allowing that it would be an amazing feat, Pressel said, “I can’t put any more pressure on myself just because I won the first one.”

Because Pressel’s game is so grown up, people tend to look at her as a hard-boiled competitor and not notice the typical teenager’s eggshell psyche.

The day after her breakout victory at the Kraft Nabisco Championship in April, she cried when her golf bag, which had her name stitched across the front, went missing. It disappeared on the trip home, somewhere between the airports in Palm Springs, Calif., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. She was especially upset by the loss of her Callaway driver, which she had come to love like no other in their few months together.

Pressel suspects that the clubs were stolen, and she has had friends scouring eBay. In the meantime, she has gone through at least a half-dozen drivers, all of them supposedly made to the same specifications as her old one. When she talks about her driver, she sounds like any other anguished teenager.

“I don’t know exactly what it was, but I just hit it so good,” she said in a recent interview at her home in Boca Raton, Fla. “I had been so comfortable with it. Every other club I’ve tried just doesn’t feel the same.”

Since her final-round 69 at the Kraft on April 1, Pressel has played 17 competitive rounds and broken 70 only twice. As with any growth spurt, it takes time to adjust. Pressel enjoys the higher profile that comes with being a major champion but has found the attention a bit draining.

The stress of success was a factor in her taking a birthday mulligan. Two days after turning 19 on May 23, on what amounted to a long travel day, Pressel woke up in the Boca Raton home of her grandparents and informed her grandfather, Herb Krickstein, that she was taking the day off to go shopping on the tony Worth Avenue in Palm Beach.

She braced for a battle, but her grandfather, a retired pathologist who is the septuagenarian seer behind her career, did not fight her. He let her go after extracting a promise that she would curb her consumerism.

For the next few hours, Pressel provided a running text-message commentary of her pilgrimage (and purchases, which included lip gloss, sunglasses and a handbag) to her best friend, Lauren Mielbrecht, who was playing in a Canadian Women’s Tour event in Vancouver.

“A perfect day,” Pressel said the next morning, when she was back to work.

Emerging from her bedroom a little after 9, Pressel looked as if she had stepped off the pages of a Ralph Lauren sports catalog. Walking through the kitchen, she stopped to break off a piece of a giant frosted chocolate chip cookie that was a birthday gift from her grandmother, Evelyn, and popped it in her mouth.

Pressel has lived with her grandparents since shortly after her mother’s death in the fall of 2003. They accompany her on the Tour while her father, Mike, raises her younger siblings, Madison, 15, and Mitchell, 13.

She checked messages on her BlackBerry as she made her way to the dining room, where a photographer was waiting. She shook the photographer’s hand and gave him a big smile. “Do I have anything in my teeth?” she asked.

The long, rectangular dining-room table is where Pressel can go to feed her ego. Plaques, trophies and certificates that she has accumulated over the years cover the glass tabletop.

There are scraps — medals and flags and such — from the 11 victories she posted during her American Junior Golf Association career, the winner’s silver chalice from the Kraft and her year-old diploma from St. Andrew’s High School in Boca Raton.

Pressel was offered a golf scholarship to attend Duke, which recently won its third consecutive N.C.A.A. team title, but turned it down to go pro. Her golf education has since continued at an accelerated pace.

In the final round at the Kraft, she showed how much she learned last year, when she was paired on the final day of the tournament with Karrie Webb, who came from seven strokes back to win. As a witness to Webb’s final-round 65, Pressel saw the value of staying patient and playing one’s own game even when the leaders seem out of reach.