There are things Tiffany Joh will try to have you believe if you let the 21-year-old UCLA junior bend your ear. Like how she's the worst college golfer in the country.

OK, maybe not the worst, but definitely not as good as Amanda Blumenherst at Duke or Stacy Lewis at Arkansas or even fellow Bruin Maria Jose Uribe, the U.S. Women's Amateur champion. I mean come on, don't you know how awesome they are and how Joh is "just lucky to get the ball off the ground" some days?

When the conversation ends, though, do yourself a favor. Check out the UCLA women's golf website. You will find Joh actually has a tidy 72.0 average in nine tournaments this season, seven top-eight finishes and nothing worse than a T-13. You'll also learn the San Diego native was just named Pac-10 player of the year and is on the U.S. Curtis Cup team competing at St. Andrews later this month.

After that, you can talk to Joh's college coach, Carrie Forsyth, to clarify this getting-the-ball-airborne problem. "Her ball striking has always been exceptional," contends the nine-year Bruin skipper and former national coach of the year. "She's one of the best collegiate ball-strikers I've ever seen."

According to Derek Uyeda, a teaching professional at San Diego's Stadium Golf Center and Joh's instructor since high school, her swing actually is the model he uses for every player he instructs, male or female. "She will never say this," Uyeda explains, "but she has complete control of her golf ball."

If Joh exaggerates about her lack of ability, rarely mentioning the 2006 U.S. Women's Amateur Public Links title she has on her résumé, the same can't be said about her knack for finding herself in some embarrassing situations. There actually are several entertaining Joh stories that have become part of college golf folklore, some Joh, a communications major, has helped spread by writing about them on an Internet blog.

Like the time in the college event where she didn't notice until she was on the first tee that her skort was on backward. ("Had to go find a bush real quick," she says.) Or when she qualified for the LPGA's Safeway Classic last August and saw Nancy Lopez in the locker room. Joh was so star-struck, she literally walked into a wall as Lopez passed by. ("I'm not very good at multitasking.")

Then there was the one from last year's Pac-10 Championship: The night before the team was to leave for the tournament, Joh realized she had forgotten to pick up her golf clothes at the dry cleaners. The store was closed the next day, so Joh decided to spend the entire night outside the place in her Honda CRV, hoping the owner might appear anyway. "Sure enough he got there at about 5:30 a.m.," she recalls. "I had left about 20 messages on the store phone. He came out with my stuff and said 'Don't do that again.' " (For the record, Joh won the tournament.)