SAINT-QUENTIN-EN-YVELINES, France — Lydia Ko was
crying in hotel rooms. Frequently, too. Whenever she’d get home from a
disappointing round, tears were bound to follow. When she’d kick off a
tournament with a 65 and follow it with a 72. When she was ranked 10th in the
world and playing like 110th, thinking to herself, What’s going to be
at the end of this tunnel?
But this wasn’t 15-year-old Ko, a green LPGA rookie. It
wasn’t 22-year-old Ko, battling her first wave of career struggles. It was
26-year-old Ko, just last year, at the Staybridge Suites in northwest Arkansas,
chasing after the LPGA Hall of Fame.
The LPGA’s Hall is a different beast. You don’t get voted in
by accumulating first-team awards or by thumping your chest in a team event.
You earn it with victories. Solo victories. Each win is worth a point — majors
are worth double — and year-long, singular awards add to your total.
Twenty-seven points gets you in, 26 doesn’t. (Laura Davies is in the World Golf
Hall of Fame, but not the LPGA’s.) All of which puts very accomplished female
golfers in a tricky position: the closer you get, the more everyone knows about
it and asks about it, the more tantalizing that checkpoint becomes. It played
with Ko’s mind.
Ko earned her 25th Hall of Fame point after a thrilling 2022
season — when three wins elevated her to No. 1 in the world for the first time
in years. Then came 2023 and the worst season of her career. Between March and
September, she missed four cuts and had no top 30s. She’d go to events and see
pictures of her former self holding trophies and it would feel like a distant
memory. The HOF circled in her head. Other LPGA legends would talk to and
commiserate with her about it.
When Ko arrived at Le Golf
National, she promised that were she to add the only medal she’s missing,
she would demand the others back. She’d clear out her trophy room — maybe even
make a new trophy room for the Medal Slam (a feat that may not
take place for what, another 100 years?). It was a fun thought. A fun visual. A
fun acknowledgement that in the age of One Shot at a Time, there’s
still room to plan out your dreams, no matter their likelihood.
“You say those kinds of things and until it really happens,
it’s not really factual,” Ko said. “You know, it’s something that you keep
going towards, too.”
She began her third Olympics with an even-par 72 Wednesday
before quietly carving out a 67 Thursday, just trying to keep pace with Morgane
Metrex’s sizzling, eight-under start. When I asked Ko about the Hall of Fame at
the halfway point, she punched back with a bit of sarcasm. In short, this
course is too hard to think about anything else, but “It’s really cool that if
I did win the gold, I could get in the Hall of Fame, and it would stop all
these questions, like from you, in the future.”
She smiled because she knew the query was coming. The closer
you get, the more we’re going to talk about it. But when Ko shot 68 Friday to
tie for the 54-hole lead, there were no Hall of Fame q’s. We were transfixed by
her admission that she deleted Instagram off her phone for the week — during
the most Instagram Mable sporting event on earth — and had drawn inspiration
from a Simone Biles documentary. She even wrote a Biles
quote in her yardage book as a reminder:
“I get to write my own ending.”
Conveniently on Saturday, half the contenders began to write
the ending for her. At a course setup that rivaled major championships, on
which everyone in the field stressed patience all week, aggressive pursuits of
the podium began backfiring. Hannah Green and Rouning Yin were staring down
bronze when they both hooked tee shots into water. Miyu Yamashita tied Ko early
but then played Wedge Ping-Pong from the opposite sides of the 9th green. Nelly
Korda, trying to follow Scottie Scheffler with her own best-player-in-the-world
comeback, made two birdies in her first three holes, but got loose off the tee
and left her medal hopes in the water, too. Le Golf
National was reaching out and grabbing players. Nary a
single scorecard was spared.
Ko walked off the 11th tee at 11 under and saw the carnage
had built her a five-shot lead. But when she doubled 13, her advantage was just
three. And by the time she reached the 15th fairway, it was just one. Esther Henselian
was relaxing in the clubhouse, feet up in front of a television, at eight under
par.
Ko’s ending was written not with a pen but with patience. She
labored through nervy three-footers on 15 and 16, all while being timed by
rules officials. A few times, her playing partners waited out her putts from
the next tee box.
“We practice a lot of [three-footers] when we are training,”
Ko said. It was the last thing she did before teeing off Saturday. “But you
don’t realize how important those are until you’re in those kinds of
circumstances and you have multiple in a row.”
At 17, she backed off a tee shot as spectators raced by
above, and then roasted a drive that led to a par. The final hole at Le Golf
National was changed to a par-5 for the women, and Ko played it exactly how you
should with a one-shot lead. Fairway, layup, green.
When the birdie putt dropped, her hand was already covering
her mouth. Tears were already in her eyes. Tears were a theme of the day, for
bronze medalist Xiyu Lin, burying her face in
her partner’s shoulder. For Mariajo
Uribe, her eyelids swollen after finishing her career with an eagle. And
then more tears for Ko, when she finally got a view from the top level
of the podium, streamed down her cheek, using her chin as a ramp. When she
visited the press tent, she admitted, yes, it’s great that any further Hall of
Fame questions will be along the lines of When do we celebrate?
“For it to have happened here at the Olympics, unreal,” she
said. “I do feel like I’m a mythical character in a story tale. It really
couldn’t have gotten any better than I could have imagined. I’ve had so many
grateful things that happened in my career so far, and this really tops it.”
Shortly after Ko offered that insight, she was ushered away
to other engagements, photos, drug-testing, you name it. First, though, she and
her team dropped by the Olympics family lounge. Inside was a lovely surprise:
27 white roses that this time she could pick up and hold.
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