What A Girl Wants

The checklist for UCLA’s talented, fun-loving Alison Lee: Buy books, hang with her girlfriends in the “Babe Cave,” become World No. 1

- Alan Shipnuck

AS SHE SAT in the backrow of her Methodologies in Communications Research class—in a subterranean classroom beneath UCLA’s public-affairs building, during a lecture that touched on reverse causality versus exogenous confounders—AlisonLee put down her pen and blurted out a profound realization: “Oh my gawd, I need to book my flights for Asia!”

This is the dual reality of a talented 22- year-old who’s both a budding LPGA star and a fun-loving undergrad immersed in college life. In two years on tour, Lee has already played in a Solheim Cup and made more than $1 million between the ropes, to say nothing of a healthy endorsement portfolio. Yet she shares a bedroom with a friend in a modest Westwood apartment that’s crammed with three other young women. They call it the “Babe Cave.” There are no golf mementos, but the apartment boasts two trophy cases of a different sort: floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with empty bottles of a wide variety of alcoholic beverages. “That’s just since the start of the fall quarter,” Lee says of the decoration. “It is literally beautiful.”