NAPLES, FLORIDA | The Race to the CME Globe lived up to its name. It’s not often that the biggest winner’s check in women’s golf, $1.5 million, is not the top prize up for grabs in the final round of the season’s final event. But that’s what you got at the CME Group Tour Championship. On Sunday morning at Tiburón Golf Club, Jin Young Ko (above) and Nelly Korda were tied at 14 under and battling for the Rolex LPGA Player of the Year award. Korda, who led the season-long battle by 10 points, didn’t have to win to take home the title. But if Ko won the tournament, the South Korean world No. 2 also would win her second Player of the Year title and the LPGA Hall of Fame point that comes with it.
The tone was set early. Ko put on a ballstriking show the likes of which hasn’t been seen all year. She birdied the first hole from short range to take a one-shot lead. Then she birdied the third, fourth and sixth, never sniffing a bogey. The lead got to two. Birdies at Nos. 8 and 9 for a front-nine 30 stretched it to three.
As Korda said afterward, “It was the Jin Young Ko show out there today.”
The show got better on the back nine. After missing a short putt on 10 for birdie, and seemingly opening the door to Korda, who made a birdie to narrow the lead to two, Ko rolled in a 30-footer on 11 and a 12-footer on 13. After that, she was on cruise control. An easy two-putt birdie on the par-5 17th gave her a two-shot lead ahead of Nasa Hataoka, the third member of the final group, with one hole to play.
Ko two-putted the final green for par to shoot a career-low 63 and a tournament-record 23-under par. Hataoka birdied the last to pull within a shot. But this was, indeed, Ko’s show. And it went much deeper than the scores on her card.
Ko came into the week fighting a left wrist injury that has nagged her for most of the year. She got anti-inflammatory medication from the LPGA’s on-site doctor. But the pain, which she called an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10, kept her from hitting more than a 52-degree wedge in practice all week, even in warmups. A few chips, a putt or two, and she headed to the first tee.
The old adage about being wary of the injured athlete has never been more on display than it was in Naples last week. After missing the ninth green on Thursday, a slight tug with a short iron that ended up in a bunker, Ko hit 63 consecutive greens in regulation. It likely would have been more if they hadn’t run out of holes. Her ballstriking was so good that she claimed to be trying to hit the sections of the fairway that were mown down-grain to minimize stress on her wrist through impact on her approaches.
“I couldn’t believe how straight every shot went,” Ko said after capturing her fifth win of the year, which, along with the Player of the Year award, put her only three points away from qualifying for the LPGA Hall of Fame. Among the stellar roster of South Korean players who have won on tour, she is the only one to win Player of the Year twice.
“I’m very proud of the way I played,” she said. “But I’m probably most proud to be Player of the Year.”
Korda finished tied for fifth after shooting 69 on Sunday. It was her eighth consecutive round in the 60s to end the season as world No. 1.
Steve Eubanks