JOIN USKo and the major question
Before the world No 1 women’s golfer, Lydia Ko, got to work on the range last Wednesday, she settled a piece of business. Ko took a $10 bill out of her wallet and approached caddie Mardi Lunn, a native Australian. Using a black permanent marker, Ko, a Korean-born New Zealander, neatly wrote “Go NZ” on the back of the bill, signed her name and drew a kiwi, the bird that is a symbol of New Zealand.
With a laugh, she handed the money to Lunn, who accepted her winnings from a wager she made with Ko on the recent cricket Word Cup final between Australia and New Zealand, won by Australia.
As she studied Ko’s handiwork, Lunn at last found a weakness in Ko’s skillset.“Is that a kiwi or a duck?” Lunn playfully chided Ko. Later, she joked, “Good thing Lydia can play golf, because she’s not going to make any money drawing.”
Few golfers have had better runs than the one that has swept Ko, 17, to the top of the world rankings. She entered the women’s first major, the ANA Inspiration at Mission Hills Country Club, with a string of 28 consecutive competitive rounds under par. It is one shy of the LPGA record held by Annika Sorenstam, a 10-time major winner.
Ko has never missed a cut on the LPGA Tour as an amateur or professional, a Tiger Woods-like streak that reached 48 starts last week at the Kia Classic. She went on to finish third for her fourth top-3 showing in six 2015 tour starts. She has 10 straight tour finishes in the top-10 dating to October.
“I am amazed how well Lydia is playing,” Sorenstam, now a Golf Channel analyst, said last week on a teleconference call.
She added: “I watch her play and she’s just very consistent in every area. I think the strongest part is between her ears. She just has this composure about her, which she does so well under pressure.”
The coolheaded Ko seems to belie the notion of the impetuousness of youth.“I know someone who does it better than me, that’s Inbee,” Ko said, referring to the world No 2, Inbee Park of South Korea. “She has the same poker face. Sometimes, it may be idiotic, when I make a stupid bogey I just laugh.”
She added, “I just try to simplify things.”Born 11 days after Woods won the 1997 Masters for his first major title, Ko aspires to win her first major before turning 18 on April 24. It is the only gap in her preternaturally grown-up résumé. With a victory Ko would supplant Morgan Pressel as the youngest major winner in LPGA Tour history.
Pressel, who was 18 when she won the ANA Inspiration in 2007, marveled at how Ko, for all of her maturity, acts very much like a kid off the course. “I took everything far too seriously at that age,” Pressel said.
Ko’s perspective on the majors provides a window into her winsomeness. “Everyone says, 'Oh, you’re going to be the youngest winner in a major’ and all that,'” Ko said. “But to me, it’s more important that I have fun playing the majors and I play more consistently in them. That’s been my goal, because, you know, if I play consistently and get used to playing these great tournaments, I think that it will give me a better chance of hopefully being around the lead rather than my goal being, 'I want to win this major.'”
Ko has six victories on the LPGA Tour and 10 worldwide. Last year, in her first full season as a professional, Ko’s best showing in the five majors was a third at the LPGA Championship, and her average finish was 17th.
In two starts at Mission Hills, Ko has averaged a 72. In the past, Ko said, she had made the mistake of inflating the importance of the majors in her mind.
“All I was thinking was, 'Major, major, major, it’s a major,'” she said two weeks ago before the Founders Cup in Phoenix. “I think that kind of threw me off a little bit. I mean, at the end of the day, it should be another tournament. The greatest players are there, yes, but that’s kind of what it’s like every week.”
Judy Rankin, a 26-time winner of LPGA Tour events and a Golf Channel analyst, is stumped by Ko’s struggles in the biggest events. “Maybe it’s just the human part of her, because she seems so wonderfully robotic,” Rankin said. Rankin, who is in the World Golf Hall of Fame, considers Ko’s consecutive made-cuts streak more impressive than her strings of under-par rounds or top-10 finishes. “Because in my mind I go back to what was being said about Ben Hogan or Jack Nicklaus,” she said. “How bad was their bad day? Their bad days were still good, and we’re seeing the same thing with Lydia.”
Ko took up the game at 6, after her family moved from South Korea to New Zealand. At 11, she lost in the final of the 2009 New Zealand Women’s Amateur Match Play. Four years later, she became the youngest winner of an LPGA event with a victory as an amateur in the Women’s Canadian Open.
After successfully defending her Canadian crown in 2013, Ko petitioned Commissioner Michael Whan for LPGA membership for the 2014 season. Whan approved her application because, he said, “I wasn’t convinced she could go anywhere else to grow her competitive game.”
Her game was mature, but could she handle the daily grind of a professional, including hiring and firing caddies, enforcing boundaries with overeager fans, mingling with corporate sponsors and coping with the loneliness of a peripatetic existence?
“Sometimes this job requires you to act 40 even though you’re 19,” Whan said.His fears were allayed last April at the Swinging Skirts event in San Francisco. Whan sat in the row behind Ko and another player, Danielle Kang, on a shuttle bus to the course. He watched them giggle over videos on their smartphones.
“It’s incredible what she’s doing,” Whan said. “It’s even more incredible that she’s doing it and still being young and having fun.”
Ko writes thank-you letters to her amateur playing partners. She asks tour officials if they need anything more from her. During the first week of February, when the players in the 120-woman field for the LPGA Classic in the Bahamas opened their lockers, they found a small box of Whittaker’s chocolates from New Zealand with a note: “From Lydia.”
“I wanted to thank the tour for how welcoming they’ve been,” said Ko, whose sweet gesture gave her another first.“I don’t know that any player’s ever put a gift in everybody’s locker,” Pressel said. “That’s the thing about Lydia. She seems to do all the right things.”