She has been named Player of the Year of the American Women’s Tour (LPGA Tour) and we may be looking at the golfer of the decade. Lydia Ko, who already showed signs of what was to come when at the age of 14 she became the youngest amateur to win a professional tournament, is proving at 18 that she is an extraordinary golfing phenomenon. To compare her with other ‘extraterrestrials’ of the sport, Tiger Woods was Player of the Year when he was 21 years old and the youngest American soccer, basketball, baseball and field hockey stars in the American leagues won the award when they were between 19 and 22 years old.
Lydia has had an extraordinary season in which she has broken records again and has been crowned number one in the world, becoming the youngest golfer to reach that planetary summit. Not only is she the youngest Player of the Year in the 49 years of the award’s existence, but she also recently became the youngest golfer in history to reach ten LPGA Tour victories.
In her second season on the best circuit in the world (in the first she was Rookie of the Year) she has scored five victories, including her first major (The Evian Championship), and has also finished in the top ten twelve times in the twenty-four tournaments in which she has competed, that is, seventeen top-10.
She won the Player of the Year award in a hard-fought battle with South Korea’s Inbee Park, world number two, whom she finally beat by only two points: 280 to 278. Her spectacular season was crowned by winning the CME Globe Race and pocketing a million-dollar bonus for it. Her earnings in the two years she has been on the LPGA Tour total almost five million dollars, of which 2.8 million correspond to 2015. Her income from advertising has not been disclosed but is assumed to be in the millions of dollars.
Four professional titles as an amateur!
Born in South Korea and raised in New Zealand, where she is a citizen, Ko turned professional at the age of 16 after leading the world amateur ranking for 130 weeks and winning no less than four professional tournaments with amateur status! In April 2012, at the age of 15 years and four months, she became the youngest to win a tournament on the American Women’s Tour (LPGA Tour) and in August 2013 she broke the mold again by being the only amateur to have triumphed in two events on the aforementioned circuit (CN Canadian Women’s Open). She did not make the cut in any of the 25 professional tournaments she played as an amateur.
She also won a European Women’s Tour tournament as an amateur (New Zealand Women’s Open), in February 2013.
After her second place in The Evian Championship, Grand Slam, in October 2013, she decided it was time to turn professional.
Professional at 16
In October 2013, at the age of 16 and having been admitted to the LPGA Tour despite being a minor, she played her first tournament as a professional on that circuit. It’s not often that the LPGA welcomes a rookie who has already been a two-time champion on this Tour,” said commissioner Mike Whan when Ko’s request to join the world’s best women’s tour was granted.
In April 2014 Lydia won her first LPGA Tour tournament (Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic) as a professional and her first on U.S. soil. Just the day she lifted that trophy she celebrated her seventeenth birthday. That same month she won her second victory (Marathon Classic), and in November she crowned her exceptional year with victory in the last tournament of the season (CME Group Tour Championship), beating Spain’s Carlota Ciganda on the fourth hole of the playoff and pocketing half a million dollars.
With those credentials, there was no doubt who would be voted Rookie of the Year: Ko.
In the 26 tournaments she played in 2014 on the LPGA Tour, she had three wins, two second places and three third places. She totaled 15 top-10s and did not fall in any cuts. She was third on the earnings list, with just over two million dollars, and her average score per round was 70.08 strokes, the fifth best of the season. She finished the season as number three in the world ranking, only preceded by Stacy Lewis, who led it, and Inbee Park.
In her forays into the Grand Slam, apart from her triumph at The Evian Championship last September, her extraordinary second place in that same tournament when she was still an amateur, in 2013, and her third place at the LPGA Championship in 2014, stand out.
In 2015 she has shown that her talent was not fleeting and that every day she consolidates her extraordiary game. This is evidenced by her five wins (ISPS Handa Women’s Australian Open, Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic, Canadian Pacific Women’s Open, The Evian Championship and Fubon LPGA Taiwan) , her world number one, her CME Globe Race and her Player of the Year title. As David Leabbetter, one of her instructors, says, “the strength of her game is that she has no weaknesses”.
She started playing when she was 5 years old
Lydia started playing golf at the age of five when her mother took her to a club in Auckland owned by the professional Guy Wilson, who would be her coach until a year ago, when he was replaced by the British David Leadbetter, also Michelle Wie’s coach.
Wilson, very disappointed with his pupil’s decision, recalled that when he met her the golf clubs were too big for her and she didn’t know what a driver or a putter was, “but now she has one of the best swings on the LPGA Tour”.
Among the world’s most influential
In April 2014 Ko, who is under contract with the powerful representation agency IMG, was named by the Times magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Annika Sorenstam, the greatest golfer of the past two decades, an eight-time LPGA Tour Player of the Year, has said of Lydia that she is exceptionally talented and very mature for her age and well liked by rivals and golf fans alike. “She is responsible for the growing interest in our sport not only in her homeland of South Korea and adopted New Zealand, but also among young women around the world.”
Lydia’s greatest passion, apart from golf, is cooking, and if she were not a golfer, she would like to work in media, especially television. Her only confessed superstition is to keep using the same ball marker if she does well on the green. Her hobbies include going to the movies, reading and playing tennis. A very normal girl… off the golf course. In there she is something else… very serious.
Leave a Reply