NAPLES, FLORIDA | It’s the rivalry we’ve always wanted and the one we’ve waited decades to get. We’re early into it, but it’s not too soon to call this what it is: women’s golf’s version of Arnie vs. Jack, Tiger vs. Phil, Ali vs. Frazier, Liverpool vs. Man U. Fans showed up at Tiburón Golf Club early and in large numbers on the weekend of the CME Group Tour Championship to choose sides, don colors and root like this was a college football game.
And choose sides you must. Despite some of the best golf of the season and a leaderboard that included the likes of Nasa Hataoka, Danielle Kang, two-time 2021 winner Céline Boutier, California favorite Mina Harigae, Lydia Ko and Lexi Thompson, fans bifurcated into two competing camps. By Sunday, you were either Team Nelly Korda or Go Go Jin Young Ko. That wasn’t just because those two players were together with Hataoka in the final group on Sunday, battling for the top spot on the leaderboard. It was because they are the two best players in the world, representing the two most dominant nations in women’s golf, with disparate styles. They also were competing on Sunday for $1.5 million, the largest single-day payout in the women’s game.
There was even more on the line. The biggest award of the year on the LPGA Tour, the Rolex LPGA Player of the Year, came down to the final round. The LPGA Tour issues its Player of the Year based on points rather than a vote. With Korda’s win in the penultimate week of the season at the Pelican Women’s Championship, she took a 10-point lead into the season finale. Both Korda and Ko had four wins coming into the week. Korda was No. 1 in the Rolex Rankings. The only things separating them were the strengths of the fields – Korda won a major, the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship, along with an early-season victory at Lake Nona in Orlando, which had a strong field, and the Pelican, which also had a number of players the drive-by fan would recognize. Ko finished the season with 13 top-10s and arrived in southwestern Florida with all four wins, a runner-up and two T6s coming since the first of July. But two of her victories, in Dallas and South Korea, weren’t against the strongest fields.
Still, as rivalries go, there have been few better on the LPGA Tour. In 1968, Kathy Whitworth and Carol Mann both had 10 wins. Mann won the Vare Trophy for low stroke average. Whitworth won the money title and nudged her way to the Player of the Year trophy.
The other close one, which extended for years before and after the turn of the millennia was Annika Sörenstam and Karrie Webb. Sörenstam was Player of the Year in 1997 and 1998. Webb won it in 1999 and 2000. And Sörenstam won it from 2001 through 2005. In 2000, Webb had seven wins and Sörenstam had five.
Now those who follow women’s golf are getting the Full Nelly, a world No. 1 who bombs drives and has a golf swing that should get more views than Tiger Woods’ wedges.
The only controversy this year, if you could call it that, stemmed from the Olympics where Korda won the gold medal. The LPGA doesn’t count that achievement toward its Player of the Year race because it’s not an official event, just as Ko’s win at the Hite Jinro Championship on the Korean LPGA in 2019 didn’t count for any LPGA awards that year. Granted, more people saw the Olympics than a 54-hole KLPGA event named after a beer company, but in reality, the field in the Tokyo 2020 Games wasn’t that strong.
Still, the debate rages. Just look at Twitter. And that’s great for women’s golf.
With Korda, you have the new face of women’s golf, one that American fans have been seeking for the better part of a decade. Tall, blonde, athletic, fiery, and as red-white-and-blue as turkey and pumpkin pie, she always had shown the potential. When she came out as “Jessica’s little sister” it felt like Serena Williams had just shown up in the shadow of Venus. Now those who follow women’s golf are getting the Full Nelly, a world No. 1 who bombs drives and has a golf swing that should get more views than Tiger Woods’ wedges. Never mind that the Korda family speaks Czech at home and are all so lean and fit that you can’t imagine tryptophan coming anywhere near their lips. Nelly, the middle child of Petr and Regina, is officially the one that American fans have awaited.
Also, she always has had the look. When Korda first showed up at the 2013 U.S. Women’s Open at Sebonack Golf Club on Long Island, having qualified as a 14-year-old, she stood on the putting green, gangly, with a teenager’s haircut and braces on her teeth, and stared at every player like a shark eyeing its prey. Even then, she looked like the player of the future.
That future is now. And Ko is the perfect competitor, a player who wears white on Sunday and hits more greens than Iron Byron, even with a wrist injury that kept her from hitting a single practice ball, even in warm-ups, all week. Ko put on an exhibition in Naples, hitting 63 consecutive greens in regulation after tugging an iron into the bunker on the ninth hole on Thursday. After that she was flawless, shooting a remarkable 63 on Sunday to finish 23-under and win her second consecutive CME Group Tour Championship.
“I have to win,” Ko said when asked on Saturday night about her mindset going into the final-round. She did just that with an injury that will require an MRI when she returns to South Korea this week.
Incredible stuff. We’ll have to wait until next year for a rematch. True fans of the game can’t wait.
Top: Jin Young Ko moved in front of Nelly Korda in the final round at Tiburón Golf Club.
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