What a year it’s been for Nelly Korda, who has climbed to the very highest of golf’s highs and also suffered some very low lows. The term roller-coaster seems to fit, given how she had gone up, up and up, followed by dipping down, down and down. Because now, if you were waiting for another reminder of her dominance, it has arrived — albeit in slightly different form than this year’s earlier wins.
Korda was named Rolex Player of the Year on Monday, a formality of statistics finally aligning rather than a majority vote from her peers. But what it tells you right now isn’t so much that her season was the best season, but that it was unequivocally dominant. She did more in just 14 events than other dominant players have accomplished in 20.
In recent months you could have poked holes in Korda’s 2024 CV and argued for someone else instead. Lydia Ko won the biggest events — at the Olympics and the AIG Women’s Open — and finalised her place in the LPGA Hall of Fame as a result. Jeeno Thitikul has a slight edge over Korda in scoring average and Strokes Gained. Korda is the only player who has earned more than $3 million on course this year, but others are bound to join her over the next few weeks.
All of that is good for the LPGA product — some parity in the face of one dominant force — but the counting stats and the timing of events tends to forget that Korda has played just 14 tournaments this year. And in those 14 weeks, she won nearly half of the time. And with three tournaments remaining, it doesn’t matter if Lydia Ko or Ayaka Furue shoot 30-under every time they tee it up. They won’t accrue enough points to steal the LPGA’s year-end honour.
Unlike the PGA Tour or countless other sports leagues who choose a Player of the Year or MVP, the LPGA dishes out points for specific achievements during a given season. Whoever finishes with the most points at year-end is the POY. It’s the most meritocratic system you can imagine, one that doesn’t take into account a player’s relationship with the media or their peers, and it simply pushes forward the player who checked the most boxes the most times.
Over the course of a season, players earn POY Points for every top-10 finish they have, with first place earning 30 points and second place earning 12, all the way down to one point for a 10th-place finish. Those points are doubled during the five major championships. And during most seasons, the race for POY goes down to the wire, with the winner typically amassing 160 to 240 points at season’s end.
Korda has been sitting on a winning tally greater than that for over two months now, and mostly hasn’t had to play any extra golf to cement her status. Korda earned 180 points in six wins from January through May alone, which would have been good enough to win her the POY award in 2022 and 2017. Add in her three other top 10s and she’s built up 244 POY points while barely leaving the United States.
That last part is context that will be forgotten over time, but is part of what makes this season so impressive. Korda notably did not play any events in Asia this year, a longtime staple of the LPGA schedule. She’s been battling a neck injury in recent weeks, which kept her homebound, and she passed on tripping to Asia in the beginning part of the year, too — in favour of family and training time in the Czech Republic.
While some of her peers ground through another arduous season of travel, Korda only played three tournaments from late May through late July in part due to a dog bite injury. That stretch included three missed cuts (two of them coming in majors), before she righted her ship with a second-place finish at the AIG Women’s Open at St. Andrews.
Both Ariya Jutanugarn and Jin Young Ko have clinched the award this early in recent years, but they did it while playing 26 and 21 events, respectively. Korda did it in just 14. She’ll make two more starts this month in Florida, running her total to 16. A truly dominant 16, better than anyone else, no matter what happens between now and the CME Globe Championship over Thanksgiving, capping off a season we won’t soon forget.