Why this top-20 player’s best season hasn’t derailed her retirement plans

This week’s CME Group Tour Championship will not only be the last tournament of the season for LPGA Tour player Ally Ewing, it will also be the last of her career.

HOW Lexi Thompson AND Brittany Lincicomewho also announced plans to retire this year, on Sunday at Tiburon in Naples, Fla., the 32-year-old Ewing is ready to call it a career.

Ewing has three career LPGA Tour wins and is currently 18th in the Rolex rankings. Despite posting the highest earnings total of her career, with $1.9 million so far this season — and six top-10 finishes (another career high) — Ewing said her last game only how much it has reinforced her decision to leave the golf pro.

“If anything, it gave me more and more peace,” Ewing said Tuesday. “The better I played, and really, too, since Solheim was high on that list, being on this team. Then I realized that it was my last Solheim. To be able to finally win one, that was pretty special too. So I never looked at my family or my husband at any point in the year and said, I don’t know. They would beat me up a bit. Yes, I knew and I had peace all year. This strengthened my decision even more.”

Ewing has played on the LPGA Tour since 2016 and says that aside from hoping to start a family with her husband, she’s ready to embrace the normalcy of life at home.

“I think I’m just excited for the next chapter,” she said. “You know, I can’t tell you exactly what it looks like, but I’m just looking forward to the little things. You know, I like to be at home. I joke that my husband, he might get so annoyed with me being home that he might tell me to go do something else.

“Yeah, just the little things,” she continued. “There are only things I miss, like I miss my bed. Just little things like that. Making my own coffee at home. There are many things I will miss about this tour. I will miss the people. However, I have always been a homebody, so traveling becomes very difficult for me.”

Ewing said health considerations also factored into her decision.

“As a type I diabetic, the routine of being at home will make management a little easier for me,” she said. “And then there’s the part if we’re blessed to have kids on the way, starting a family, that’s something we’re definitely looking forward to.

“I had a pretty good idea two years ago that I had two to three more years in me,” she said. “If we are blessed with children, this will be a high-risk pregnancy for me; I am 32 now. I’m not the youngest player on Tour anymore. So you just put a lot of things into the equation and it was the right time for me.”

When Ewing plays her final hole Sunday, she said she will try to stay focused on the task at hand.

“I’m going to try to avoid eye contact with the family until I finish the 18th hole safely,” she said.

Ultimately, though, Ewing is thankful to end her career on a high note, no matter how this week plays out.

“When I looked at my career, I wanted to play good golf while I finished my career,” she said. “I didn’t want to fail. Fortunately, knowing this year was my last year, I played some of my best golf. So I think that’s just how I compiled it. I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense to people, to stop playing when you’re playing good golf, but that’s what I wanted to do.”

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