Lydia Ko

Lydia Ko was 14 when she won the NSW Open in Sydney by four strokes, becoming the youngest winner ever, male or female, of a professional golf tour event. A year later, she won two more – unprecedented for an amateur. By the time Lydia was 17, she was the youngest ever number one in the Women’s World Golf Rankings (Tiger Woods was 21 before he made number one). When she triumphed in the Evian Championship in France that year, she became the youngest female golfer to win a major. Her fourth-round score of 63 was the lowest ever final-round score. (She broke that record in 2021 with a final-round score of 62 at the ANA Inspiration.)

Lydia won so much and so fast that the LPGA waived its usual stipulation that athletes have to be 18 to turn pro – she did so at the age of 16 years and 172 days, on 13 October 2013, having spent 130 weeks as the top-ranked woman amateur golfer. She has competed in two Olympic Games (Rio and Tokyo) and won medals in both (silver and bronze). She has claimed almost 100 top-10 finishes. And with more than $16 million in prize money so far, she is one of the highest-earning female golfers of all time. It is sometimes hard to remember that Lydia is only 26.

“I still don’t feel like I’m the best,” Lydia says as she drives me around Lake Merced Golf Club in Daly City, just south of San Francisco. The course used to be a tour stop, and in 2018 Lydia made headlines when, in the playoff against the Australian Minjee Lee, she made a 234-yard shot to within two feet of the hole for an eagle on the 18th to win the championship. It was so spectacular that the club has commemorated it with a plaque. At the ceremony when it was laid, Lydia joked, “This is where I’ll be buried.”

So it was a thrill to be in her golf cart, careening around Lake Merced. As she steers, I sneak a peek at what I know to be her first tattoo, on her wrist, commemorating the date of her triumph in the inaugural Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic in 2014. She had come out one stroke ahead, with a birdie on the par-five 18th, to notch up the opening tour win of her pro career. That, too, happened here at Lake Merced. (Her father was the last to notice the notation. For months, she wore bracelets to cover it.)

Years ago, she told a reporter that a course like Lake Merced had to be solved “like a game”. Now, when she looks out over its doglegs and canted greens she narrows her gaze: this is a woman who has cracked that puzzle. No longer the demure, bespectacled girl in a polo shirt and charcoal shorts, she’s a powerhouse of her sport. The fourth hole is the trickiest, she tells me. The 12th stretches over a gaping vale. (Since she was a child, she has kept a mental catalogue of terrains and greens around the world, the ones she likes – fescue grass and bentgrass at Windross Farm in New Zealand – and the ones that have unsettled her – Bermuda grass in Florida.

Lydia’s strength is her short game – the shots that are made within 100 yards of the green, for which a player needs to visualise the lines and maintain concentration under immense pressure. “She made it look easy,” Annika Sörenstam, who has won 10 majors, has said. “From 150 yards in, she was deadly.” Lydia contests the idea that her short game torments her opponents. What is true is that no matter how seamless she makes it look, the game requires not just attention but machine-like repetition, and she excels at that. Hole after hole, swing after swing, Lydia’s aim is to be as consistent as possible. When her then caddie Jason Hamilton advised her to aim the ball “like, half a yard left” of the 18th hole at the 2016 ANA Inspiration, it landed just shy of the flag, bounced twice and then stopped dead precisely 18 inches from the pin. The shot clinched her second major. “It looks so flawless from the outside,” Lydia says, smiling slyly. “But it’s not true.”

Lydia was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1997. Her parents, Gil and Tina, moved the family to Auckland, New Zealand, when Lydia was six. They had no interest in golf, but in 1998, Se-ri Pak had become the youngest winner ever of the US Women’s Open after a 20-hole playoff; Golf World called her “a pioneer” who “changed the face of golf even more than Tiger Woods”. Tina’s sister, Insook Hyon, had become fanatical about the game. So in 2002, when the family visited her in Sydney, Australia, “It was like, ‘Why don’t we all go to the golf course?’” Lydia tells me. She was handed a seven-iron. “I made contact with the ball,” she remembers, and it wowed her parents. When the family returned home, Lydia took her aunt’s sawed-down seven-iron and a putter with her.

By chance, the Kos had settled near the Pupuke golf course, on Auckland’s North Shore. There, they met Guy Wilson, a former professional who owned a golf shop. Tina asked him to coach Lydia. Over the next decade, Wilson and Lydia would construct her swing and refine her game until she was mesmerising the golf world. Their start wasn’t eloquent: Wilson spoke no Korean, and Lydia knew four letters of English, which she recited: “A, B, D, C.” Wilson was a devotee of the game; Lydia couldn’t hit a ball more than 50 yards. He was a grown man; she was a child who sometimes aggravated local hobbyists with her habit of skipping down the fairways. But soon Lydia’s talent was proving undeniable.

In 2012, after she won the Canadian Open as an amateur – which meant the $300,000 prize money went instead to the runner-up, Inbee Park – Wilson explained her success by saying, “Lydia hits more golf balls than anyone. She just doesn’t get fazed. She keeps working on it every day.”

“I always felt like, No, no, no, I’m not a child prodigy,” Lydia tells me now. She claims instead that she performed well as an amateur and was thus invited to compete with adults; she won, and the invitations continued. It’s all down to momentum, she insists. “All these pieces were like dominoes.”

Her sister, Sura, who is nine years older and has been her manager since 2015, sees it differently. “She is fearless,” she tells me by email from Orlando, Florida, where Lydia has lived and trained since she made her professional debut at 17. “When she was a junior, her nickname was Shrimp. But she has so much passion, so much desire. The pressure is enormous, but she is strong mentally beyond her age, and that has been a big key – she always sees the next step ahead and has tried to accept and embrace those moments in her own way.”

Lydia had seemed unstoppable, so it was a shock when, in 2017, she started losing. That year she failed to win a single tournament. With a T-19 finish at the ISPS Handa Australian Open, she fell out of the top 10 not long after 85 straight weeks (and 104 overall) at number one. Cristie Kerr, a veteran of the tour, told reporters that Lydia seemed “a little lost”. Lydia hobbled through 2019 and 2020. The pandemic descended. Commentators whispered about a revolving-door of coaches and caddies and the work she had done to reimagine her swing.

It was a low point, and one that she couldn’t seem to climb out of. Then, in August 2020, the American former number one Stacy Lewis approached Lydia at Royal Troon. “She said that she had had a patch where she wasn’t playing as well, when she kept trying to be the player she had been when she was number one,” Lydia says. “And I realised I was doing the same thing. When you’re fortunate to have a span where you play really well, you chase that. But I will never be the same person I was when I was 16. I’ll never be who I was at 19.

By the time Lydia called Sean Foley, the Canadian golf instructor who had coached Tiger Woods on his swing from 2010 to 2014, she had fallen to 55th in the world. “When I started working with her, our sessions consisted of her asking me 20 questions,” Foley tells me. “The first step was to be there to answer questions, and as time went on she had less questions and less questions. When we got to the point that there weren’t any left, things became clear. Eighty per cent of Lydia’s improvement was getting her to understand herself better and forgiving herself for the mistakes she had made.”

The other 20 per cent involved nudging her back towards an approach that predated her formal training. “When she learned so much of this, she was eight, nine, 10,” Foley says. “She could just do it. It wasn’t like she engineered it and put it all together.” Her swing – distinctive back then and a little unconventional – worked. And she worked at it. Foley remembers her hitting 200 six-irons in a single practice, in 38C heat. “I’m pretty stubborn,” Lydia says. “Sometimes it might not be the best mindset to receive actual information.” But it works to her advantage. “When someone is like, ‘No,’ I’m like, ‘I’m right.’”

By the end of 2022, Lydia had quietly racked up wins at Boca Rio in Florida; in Wonju, South Korea; and in the final tour event, the CME Group Tour Championship in Naples, Florida, for which she received a record prize of $2 million. Her scoring average for the tour was 68.988 – the second lowest in LPGA history – and her win put her back in the number one spot. She was named Rolex Player of the Year. “I couldn’t have done better,” Lydia tells me, “but it’s hard to maintain.”

By then, Lydia had met Jun Chung, who was then working for Hyundai in San Francisco, on a blind date in October 2020. Two years later she proposed to Chung, inscribing the words “Will you marry me?” on golf balls (the last one had room for him to circle “Yes” or “No”). The wedding was held at Myeongdong Cathedral in Seoul on 30 December 2022. Her lacy long-sleeved dress was rented. After the reception, a friend served doughnuts from his shop. Danielle Kang, a fellow golf pro, gave them a photo booth where the two spent most of the night. Lydia’s memories are a blur, she says.

Until she married, Lydia lived with her parents in Florida. “You take it for granted,” she says. “Simple things like laundry, not having to make your own kimchi stew – they’re time-consuming!” Lydia and Chung now live between San Francisco and Orlando. Chung loves the sport at least as much as she does (he has two coaches to her one), and those closest to Lydia have noticed that she is more relaxed.

She has also become more outspoken. At the Palos Verdes Championship in 2022, she stunned Golf Channel commentator Jerry Foltz into stuttering silence when she explained the source of the tightness in her hips and back. “It’s that time of the month,” she said. “I know the ladies watching are probably like, ‘Yeah, I got you.’” Foltz’s only response was a choked “Thanks.” Lydia had to laugh. “I know you’re at a loss for words, Jerry.”

In 2016, at the same Olympics where Lydia won silver, the Chinese swimmer Fu Yuanhui had told reporters her period had started the night before an event in which her team finished fourth. In 2022, the British sprinter Dina Asher-Smith pulled up with cramp at the European Championships in Munich, citing “girl stuff, issues,” before calling for more research on how a woman’s period affects athletic performance. Sura thinks it was “not a surprise at all” that Lydia spoke out. “We talk about this every month. It’s the same for all female athletes. It’s brutal. And it’s important to understand that women are not weak, it’s just different.”

“When I first came on tour, my physiotherapist was male,” Lydia says. “My coaches were male. When you’re 16, talking about your period is not comfortable. If your dad goes, ‘She’s on her period,’ you’re like, ‘Why would you say that?’ It did shock Jerry. But it’s just something girls deal with.”

Lydia is doing what she can to change the game in other ways too. In 2015, when she was just 18, she set up the Lydia Ko Scholarship in collaboration with New Zealand Golf to help young golfers to travel to be mentored by her in Florida. “New Zealand people took me under their wing,” she says. “I’m very proud to be a Korean-born Kiwi, and this allows me to give back and grow golf in New Zealand.” She is interested in the future of the sport. “They’re going to be walking in our shoes,” she says, “and as players now, we want the tour to be better for them. The story doesn’t end where our story ends.”

Lydia plans to retire when she is 30. She would like to continue studying, focusing on psychology or perhaps criminology. And she loves to cook. “She is such a foodie person,” Sura says. “We are so fortunate that we travel around the world and can enjoy different culinary experiences. Lydia takes food very seriously!” Lydia and Chung were in northern California recently and had dinner at the French Laundry, the acclaimed Thomas Keller restaurant. “He gave us an absolute treat,” she says. The couple was swept into the kitchen, where Lydia watched as cooks used tweezers to position a single herb on top of a dish. “When they do it, it makes so much sense,” she says.

But before retirement, she has her sights set on gold at the 2024 Olympics in Paris. Representing New Zealand in Rio in 2016 was one of her career highlights – she made her first ever hole in one on the par-three eighth in her final round.

However, Lydia has had a rocky start to this season. She missed the cut at the Chevron Championship in April 2023, her first time in a major since 2019. In mid-July she got a seven-stroke penalty for the incorrect use of preferred lies. And in late July, she finished with a six-over 77 at the Evian Championship, tied for 61st place. “Sometimes I have bad days and I’m like, I’m going to fold my clubs and be done today,” she says. “And sometimes I have great days and I’m like, I’m going to keep going.”