The U.S. Women’s Open has been a mixed bag for Angel Yin. This year she’s started with a hot putter and is tied at the top

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ERIN, Wis. — Angel Yin’s 10 appearances at the U.S. Women’s Open have all been wildly different.

She was mostly all bliss after her four-under 68 in the first round Thursday because she is tied with five others atop the leaderboard and had conquered Erin Hills … at least for a day. The Californian has two top-six finishes in this major and has six missed cuts. A reporter told her he didn’t understand her career at the U.S. Women’s Open.

“I don’t understand it either. It’s bipolar, like Hyde and Jekyll. Either really good or really, really terrible, where I don’t see the weekend,” Yin, 26, said. “I think it just says a lot about the championship. You have to play your best. There is no mediocre. You can’t save it around. You can try to make good saves, but at the end of the day, if you don’t have it, you don’t have it. It just maximizes whatever you have that week.”

Rio Takeda, Yealimi Noh, Jinhee Im, A Lim Kim and Julia Lopez Ramirez are all tied with Yin at four under.

Yin had it all working for her on Thursday. She pulled into a tie for the lead, then made bogey on No. 17 after she hit into the thick rough and then birdied the par-5 18th, making a 14 footer to end the day. Her game was so ferocious she even birdied the 139-yard par-3 ninth hole that has had players befuddled all week.

“I really thought my back was going to give out [on 9]. I think there was audio on my shot too,” Yin said. “It was not a full pitching wedge. It was like a three-quarter pitching wedge, and I hit it, and it looked really good direction-wise, and my back almost gave out. I was like, I hope it’s enough. It just carried enough to be great. It’s a really difficult hole. There was a volunteer that joked it was the hardest par 5 on the golf course. So dad joke, whoosh.”

Yin even added the drum roll noise after for good measure. It’s all fun when you’re in the red at a major. There’s plenty of golf left, of course, and it’s important to Yin to try to win the U.S. Women’s Open in her career.

“I mean, I’m American, so I want to win this,” Yin said. “This is my nation’s championship. It used to be Chevron, just because it was in California, but this is the next best thing to me. Well, the greatest thing ever.”

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Yin is putting well, leading the field in strokes gained/putting at +4.74 for Round 1. She’s been working with a new putter for a month but put it in play for the first time at Erin Hills.

“I like to tinker with things, and I’ve been trying to adjust to our playing conditions since the beginning of this year,” Yin said. “We’ve been playing on slower greens. I think it might be weather related, I don’t know. I don’t want to speak too much on that.

“Then I know the U.S. Open is going to be extremely fast, so I wanted to find a putter that will hold the ground and just do what I want it to do. It just so happened to be this putter.”

The other thing that’s working is her food menu this week. She didn’t feel well at the Chevron Championship, and she said it might have been a gluten allergy. She didn’t believe it then and still doesn’t, but she’s not taking any chances, either.

“Obviously I’ve taken that into like a very serious matter because I didn’t believe in it, and I ate pizza in New York and I died afterwards,” Yin joked. “[This is a] huge tournament, very important, so I’ve been taking it more seriously. I got an Airbnb, so I’m just cooking every night. I eat meat and vegetables and then rice. I’m very careful. I don’t even eat out anymore.”

The pizza and famous Wisconsin cheese curds can wait for a celebratory dinner if she holds on to win. Until then, she’s hoping the same game she had on Thursday continues to stick around for the weekend.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com