Sarah Stirk
The LPGA season got the climax it deserved at the CME Group Tour Championship in November, with Jin Young Ko producing a masterclass to pull away from a chasing pack which included World No.1 Nelly Korda.
It really was an awesome display and a fitting end to one of the best years for women’s golf I can remember. The Solheim Cup at Inverness Club was obviously the highlight from a European perspective, but the emerging rivalry between Ko and Korda could be even more exciting for the sport as a whole in the coming years.
Golf fans and the media have always loved a good rivalry, and when you have two players who are so clearly at the top of their games, it makes for a great spectacle. Ko won five times on the LPGA Tour this year, while Korda managed four victories (including her first Major) plus an Olympic Gold Medal. They seem to be spurring each other on to even greater heights at the moment and neither of them show any signs of slowing down.
A quick look at Ko’s stats of late tell you she is on a hot streak, the likes of which don’t come around very often. In her last nine starts of the 2021 LPGA Tour season, the South Korean won five times and shot only four rounds in the 70s (29 in the 60s). Her scoring average over that time was 67.4 and she hit 87.8% of greens in regulation. No wonder the rest of the field found it hard to keep up with her in Florida!
It’s perhaps too soon to call it a true rivalry, but if these two can keep going with the same intensity next season, interest in the women’s game will continue to rise. If you look back at the history of the men’s game, rivalries have always been a huge talking point, whether that be the ‘Big Three’, Faldo and Norman or Tiger and Phil. Whatever the sport, the public loves to see the best in the world going toe to toe with the baton being passed back and forth.
The current focus in the men’s game, however, seems to be on the feud between Brooks Koepka and Bryson Dechambeau, which led to the latest incarnation of The Match. This is purely based on trash talk and feels more than a little contrived. The PGA Tour’s ‘Player Impact Program’ may well be at the heart of it all, which tells its own tale. It might be just me, but I feel the men’s game is in danger of focusing too much on commercial interests and boosting ‘engagement’. I’m not naive and I know this is a major part of sport today, but to me it feels a bit crass.
When you compare the Brooks/ Bryson thing to Ko and Korda, whose rivalry is based on the quality of their play and mutual respect, I think it shows what an opportunity there is in the women’s game at the moment. It feels more pure in a way, and the fact that sponsors are showing so much interest highlights there is a real appetite out there to be involved with a success story which is going from strength to strength.
The CME Group Tour Championship had a record prize of $1.5 million and there are rumours the US Open will become the biggest purse in women’s golf next year. This comes off the back of The R&A announcing a record figure for the AIG Women’s Open at Muirfield next August. It finally feels like the top women are getting what they deserve and there has been a proper momentum shift of late. The hope is that this will begin to filter through the game and female players further down the pyramid will start to benefit more.
With all the talk of new tours and obscene amounts of cash being the focus on the men’s circuit at the moment, it’s the women who are producing some of the most fascinating on-course narratives in the game. With Ko and Korda at the forefront, more and more people are sitting up and taking notice, which will hopefully lead to a greater number of players getting the rewards their talents richly deserve.
“Korda and Ko seem to be spurring each other on to even greater heights”