'A star is born!' Golf-mad Japan salutes 'Smiling Cinderella'

"Smiling Cinderella"??  ANYONE KNOW HOW SHE GOT THIS NAME?

Kaeri - I think it was her fairy godmother

I would also like to know why she is called 'Cinderella'. Was she born in poverty, or was she cruelly misused in her youth?

What a great story! I hope she has a long and successful career.

Hehe.  Indeed.  Seems like a silly handle but well done to her.  hope she isn't a one win wonder......

That last round was so exciting. When I saw how hard she hit that last putt I thought it would end in heartbreak. But then I stared in disbelief as it went in, and honest to God, I shed some tears.

Like I said on the first thread CONGRATS!!

Same here.

Some of the quotes in the article are rather cringeworthy tho!!!!

Why is she Cinderella?

@educator

”One tv program I saw this morning said it was the overseas media that gave her the nickname.”

English media didn’t give her that name Too strange of English.

I watched all four rounds. The original nickname was SMILE CINDERELLA but that’s a little TOO Engrish so the English media simply made it at least grammatically correct, though still strange. Especially to the native English speaking world.

The momentum shift occurred on the tee at the par four 12th when she whipped out a giant oversized black driver that the British broadcasters zoomed in on and said ‘she is not messing around.’

she proceeded to line up to the right, uncorked a massive free swing, cleared trees then just barely a pond and bounced onto the green in one.

cinderella has more balls than we knew

It is seen as a "Cinderella Story" [shindererasutōrī (in katakana) as Asahi Shimbun has called it]. In March, she was ranked 577th in the world, then suddenly she started winning serious events in Japan. In May she won the World Ladies Championship Salonpas Cup, one of the four major golf tournaments for women on the LPGA of Japan Tour, and in July she won the Shiseido Anessa Ladies Open, so she becomes the Smiling Cinderella.

Idiomatically, a Cinderella story is more about having started from somewhere lowly, suddenly to become 'rich'; that is her story.

Great. Hope to see her smiling to more golf wins in the future.

 "I want to buy as many snacks as I can eat," 

LOL

Congrats!

Wish I still had my Caddyshack video and VCR

Good for her!

One of the wide shows/ news programmes this morning translated an English newspaper headline “First Japanese Golf Win in Forty Years” as “ Smiling Cinderella Wins the Open”.

Funny but tragic....

Does she wear glass slippers? Ride in a pumpkin chariot? have three terrible step-sisters and a step-mother who abuse her? I understand the smile part, and she has a lovely smile, and I wish her congrats, but "Cinderella"?

@smithinjapan: "Cinderella story" is an idiom that seems to have made its way to japan, and can even be found in Japanese dramas: "Juken no Shinderera", for example. It does not mean that the story's trajectory follows the original Cinderella story precisely, it has come to mean, a story in which you start from somewhere lowly, and and up 'rich', with some serious prize, something extremely valuable. In sports, the terms Cinderella, "Cinderella story", and Cinderella team are used to refer to situations in which competitors achieve far greater success than would reasonably have been expected; in this case, it is a Cinderella story because in March, she was at position 577 in the the womens' golf rankings, but, by the time she reached the British Open, she was somewhere in the 40s; she had come from nowhere in the rankings, and won three significant tournaments, including one women's world golfing major when, at the beginning of the year, it would have seemed highly improbable.

A Cinderella story doesn't need to have anything to do with glass slippers, pumpkins, cruel step sisters and step mother.