By Keely Levins
The final half-hour of the Pelican Women’s Championship on Sunday, the second-to-last event on the 2021 LPGA schedule, had the potential to be heart-breaking for Nelly Korda in her quest to close out the season as the tour’s top player. But in the end, the 23-year-old World No. 1 came away a fortunate playoff winner who controls her own destiny in the race for Rolex Player of the Year.

With two holes left at Pelican Golf Club in Belleair, Fla., Korda was tied with Lexi Thompson at 19 under. But on the short par-4 17th, Korda missed her drive left and then inexplicable stumbled on her way to the hole. On the green, she found herself staring at a two-footer for double, a two-footer that she missed.

Yet Thompson missed a short par putt herself, and repeated the error on the 18th, her putter failing her down the stretch. Meanwhile, Korda regrouped and made a 20-foot birdie putt on the 18th, setting up a four-way playoff at 17 under with Lydia Ko and Sei Young Kim joining the group.

The four major champions went back down the 18th hole. Ko and Kim made par, while Korda faced a similar birdie putt to the one she made in regulation—and proceeded to hole it again, fist pumping as she walked to get it out of the hole. Thompson had a six-footer for birdie to continue the playoff, the same distance that gave her trouble at 17 and 18 in regulation. This one, too, missed.

By claiming her fourth title of the 2021 season Korda pulled ahead of Jin Young Ko in the official POY standings. Players receive points for each top-10 finish throughout the year, the player with the most points winning the top honour. Ko was leading 176-161 going into this event, but Korda’s 30 points for the win put her out front 191-181 with one event left in the season: CME Group Tour Championship.

The playoff birdie that clinched win No. 4 of the season, No. 7 of @NellyKorda‘s career! ? pic.twitter.com/08mHoruUL1

— LPGA (@LPGA) November 14, 2021

“I didn’t really expect much going into this week,” said Korda, who shot a one-under 69 on Sunday after rounds of 65-66-63. “I guess that should be my attitude every week, and just kind of have fun out there. I tried to take the demeanor of like if I missed a putt, which there were a lot this week, just to kind of shake it off and see if I can do it the next hole. So I just tried to keep it really light and easy because I hadn’t played in a while, and there was expectations, a lot of talk.”

Ko and Korda are the only players to win four times on tour in 2021, though one of Korda’s victories was a major, the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship. Korda can also boast a fifth win in 2021 at the Olympics, but that event does not count official toward the POY race.

Though Korda has every right to be confident heading to the CME in Naples, Fla., there is one more wrinkle to consider: Ko is the defending at Tiburon Golf Club. It sets up an exciting finale for the LPGA, with the top 60 players in the field playing for a $1.5 million first prize.

As for the POY showdown, as Korda proved coming back from a triple at 17, anything can happen. The key for both likely will be to keeping their cool as the pressure mounts.

“I honestly lost hope,” Korda said about her mental state after 17. “But my caddie really kept me in my head, in the moment, and I didn’t give up. Thank God I didn’t.”

The post Nelly Korda survives late-round triple(!), wins in a playoff and takes command of the LPGA player-of-the-year race appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Ryan Herrington
Nelly and Jessica Korda rank first and sixth, respectively, in scoring average this season on the LPGA Tour. With just two tournaments left on the 2021 schedule, Jessica’s 69.927 is too far back to catch her sister (69.074), or Jin Young Ko, who ranks No. 2 with a 69.186 average. Yet neither she, or Nelly, or Ko for that matter can go down officially as the winner of the scoring title, anyway, due to a caveat in how the honour is handed out.

To be eligible to win the LPGA’s Vare Trophy (and earn a point toward induction into the LPGA Hall of Fame), a player must have played in a minimum of 70 rounds or 70 percent of the round she is eligible to play in a given season. Add four rounds at this week’s Pelican Women’s Championship, and four more at next week’s CME Group Tour Championship, and Nelly still only will have played 66 on the season, while Jessica will have played 67. Ko also falls shy of the 70-round minimum (67) as does Inbee Park, who currently ranks No. 3 in scoring average at 69.534 but is not playing this week.

You have to go to No. 4 in the current ranking, Lydia Ko, to find the first player eligible to win the award—presuming she makes the cut this week at the Pelican and plays all four rounds next week in Naples.

Suffice it to say, the fine print associated with the award’s eligibility is something neither Nelly or Jessica knew much about or sounded all that fond of it.

“I was like, ‘Oh, OK. Cool. That sucks.’ That’s pretty much what I said in our group chat,” Nelly said ahead of the Pelican about learning that she wouldn’t have enough rounds to qualify.

“Yeah, I was like, ‘great rule,’ ” said Jessica sarcastically. “It’s just such a weird rule when your No. 1 and 2 player in the world [can’t win].”

Nelly noted that she pulled out of the LPGA stop in Portland two weeks after the Solheim Cup in September because she wasn’t feeling well. She also took off the Arkansas stop a week later. “I don’t think I could have played more events because my body was just so tired,” she said when asked about not reaching the minimum. “I typically play all the events at the start of the year, and if I play well then I’ll take some time off, because the travelling in the summer was just so crazy.”

Compounding things in 2021 was a crazy summer schedule that included Korda going to Japan and playing in the Olympics, where she won the gold medal.

This is the second straight year that the top players in scoring average aren’t eligible for the Vare Trophy because of failing to reach the minimum-round threshold, although the pandemic in 2020 understandable impacted how many events players could reasonably compete in. Still, it’s a trend that the Kordas hope causes the tour to consider changing the rule.

“There is a board of players and people higher up than us that are going to need to come up maybe with a different plan,” Jessica said.

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By Keely Levins
With this week’s Pelican Women’s Championship followed by the CME Group Tour Championship, there are two tournaments left in the 2021 LPGA Tour season. There is, however, really just one competition that has most people’s attention: Jin Young Ko vs. Nelly Korda. They’ve traded the World No. 1 ranking in the past month—Korda has it at the moment—and on a tour where the talent pool is deep, the pair have separated themselves on the Rolex Player of the Year points list.

Ko, by virtue of her four wins to Korda’s three, has 176-161 edge in the points standings (Patty Tavatanakit is third with 121). Who’ll shake out as the ultimate winner will depend on their finishes in the last two starts—players get points for top-10 finishes, 30 points for a win. That strictly objective measure of looking at the POY, which got us wondering: If you take more data into account and consider a few subjective measures, would the race between the duo look different or still be too close to call?

This is the first year that advanced data has been collected on the LPGA Tour, the KPMG Performance Insights. Golf Digest was given a look into some of that data, in hopes of trying to find something that might separate Ko and Korda. Yet even there, you’ll find the two each have their own strengths but none that allows one to stand out significantly.

Korda, 23, separated herself from her peers, including Ko, in the “birdies or better per round” stat, making 4.78 on the season. That’s .44 more than second place, according to the tour. Korda also leads in strokes gained/off the tee, and total driving—that stat combines both distance and accuracy. Lastly, she leads another category: ball-striking, which is a combination of off the tee and approach shots.

A look at Ko’s stats, however, demonstrate superiority in her long game. The 26-year-old ranked second in greens in regulation, hitting 77.9 percent of greens. She’s just behind Korda in the ball-striking stat. This season, Ko tied Annika Sorenstam and So Yeon Ryu’s record for most consecutive tournament rounds in the 60s. Knowing that, it isn’t surprising that she has the highest percentage of rounds in the 60s this season at 57.6.

Here’s some more data to compare the two, and it once more shows just how strong both have been in 2021.

So what about some other intangibles? What’s interesting about their seasons is something the data doesn’t necessarily show: the two have had very different years in terms of when they were playing their best. Ko has gotten hot in the last half of the season, while Korda won earlier.

It wasn’t until July that Ko actually won for the first time on tour in 2021. Since then, she’s won three more times in her next six starts. Conversely, Korda won the second event of the year, and got her three wins in the first 11 events of the season. One of those wins was the KPMG Women’s PGA, her first career major. But since that win in late June, she hasn’t finished higher than T-13 on the LPGA Tour and has taken a few weeks off after a long summer schedule.

Four wins to three would seem to give the edge to Ko, but with one of Korda’s victories being a major, that might subjectively be worth more. And then there’s also one other tournament that hasn’t factored into any of the metrics but seems to be a critical intangible to consider.

Korda won the gold medal at the Olympics where Ko finished tied for ninth, seven shots behind Korda.

Gregory Shamus.

Of course, this is not an LPGA Tour event, so it doesn’t count towards official Player of the Year points, but for argument’s sake, does winning the Olympics push Korda past Ko in the Player of the Year debate? The field was different from a usual LPGA Tour event, but the pressure at the event was immense, putting players in the unusual position of playing not just for themselves but for their country.

Given that, if POY came down to a vote, and that vote was taken right now, this writer would lean toward Korda. But we don’t live in this hypothetical world. Two events are indeed left on the calendar, and both players have the opportunity to make a statement with their play. Does Ko’s hot streak continues? Or can Korda can disrupt it? Needless to say, it will be fascinating to watch.

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By Keely Levins
The stretch coming up in women’s golf is a big one. In the last two weeks of competition this season, from Dec. 10-20, the LPGA Tour will be competing for $10.5 million. And after her unyielding performance at the Pelican Women’s Championship, Sei Young Kim might be peaking at exactly the right moment to cash in on that historic amount of money.

The South Korean on Sunday won by three shots over Ally McDonald, her 12th LPGA Tour victory.

Kim led by one after the second round and by five after the third. She maintained that five-shot lead throughout the majority of the final round, but an 18th hole bogey and a McDonald birdie reduced her margin of victory to three.

The win was Kim’s second of the 2020 season and second in a row. It was the first tournament Kim has played since her victory at the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship at Aronimink. That was her first major win, one that combined with her victory on Sunday gives her a measure of momentum heading into the final major of the year, the U.S. Women’s Open.

It is unusual for pros to attempt to peak in December, but the scheduling reshuffling that has occurred because of the coronavirus pandemic has the U.S. Women’s Open’s starting on Dec. 10, followed by the CME Group Tour Championship the next week. Having the two biggest purses of the year land at the end of the season opens up the opportunity for someone to find a lucrative timely groove.

“If I keep doing same as last two tournaments I think, yeah, that’s possible,” Kim said of the potential for momentum to carry her through to a successful end-of-season run.

Kim’s strong form and growing confidence heading into that stretch is further boosted by the fact that she’s defending the CME Group Tour Championship, played each year at Tiburon Golf Club in Naples, Fla. Having shed the title of the highest-ranked player on tour without a major, she potentially is an even greater threat heading into the U.S. Women’s Open.

Kim has found that with notable wins, including the CME last year and the KPMG this year, she has been able to relax more on the golf course – a key to her playing well, she said. That combined with her newfound confidence should make her a favourite as the season closes.

“After [I won] CME and then I got more confident,” Kim said. “I think that major win [will be] very help[ful] for another U.S. Open major tournament.”

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By Alex Myers
In recent years, golf’s governing bodies have relaxed some of the game’s rules, including those regarding the signing of an incorrect scorecard when you didn’t know you’d committed a penalty. What hasn’t changed, though, is a player still has to sign his/her scorecard.

Unfortunately, one LPGA Tour pro found this out the hard way on Thursday at the Pelican Women’s Championship. China’s Yu Liu forgot that tiny detail and was disqualified from the tournament.

Golfweek’s Beth Ann Nichols alerted us to the unusual situation:

Yu Liu was disqualified after the first round for failing to sign her scorecard. She opened with a 74.

— Beth Ann Nichols (@GolfweekNichols) November 20, 2020

As Nichols notes, Liu had opened the tournament with 74, so at least she didn’t waste a great score. Liu bogeyed three of her last four holes, perhaps explaining why she might have been distracted in the scoring area. At four over, the 25-year-old who is 28th on the Race to the CME Globe points standings sat 10 shots behind first-round leader Sophia Popov.

That being said, there were still three rounds to go, so anything’s possible. Well, anything other than Liu making this mental mistake again.

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