NAPLES, Fla. – Jin Young Ko has won the past two CME Group Tour Championships at Tiburon Golf Club, and if she were to three-peat and collect the record-breaking $2 million first-place prize, she’d buy a yellow Ferrari.
While Ko, 27, won last year’s CME in heroic fashion, clinching the Rolex Player of the Year award while playing hurt, that Ferrari seems far from a sure thing.
Still plagued by the left wrist injury that kept her from warming up at this event in 2021, Ko comes into this week off a missed cut and a withdrawal from the BMW Ladies Championship after shocking rounds of 80-79. The pain is worse than it was last year at the CME but better than it was last month at the BMW. On a scale of 1-10 (with 1 being the worst), Ko said it’s about a seven or eight now. It was a two at the BMW.
She feels pain from the moment she touches the club, on every shot.
“It’s hard,” she said, “but only (thing) I can do is just medicine and just tape on it. Just trying to play, yeah. Nothing to do.”
Ko wasn’t sure if she even wanted to come back to the U.S. for the last two events in Florida. Ultimately, she changed her flight to come in earlier, arriving the Thursday before the Pelican LPGA Championship. After missing the cut last week, she took more time to rest, getting out on the course for the first time on Tuesday.
A 13-time winner on the LPGA, Ko has been ranked No. 1 for 145 weeks since 2019. She’s understandably concerned how long this injury might last. This week she’s icing it, but when she returns home to South Korea, she might try a blood-spinning treatment, a procedure used to shorten the time it takes for an injury to heal.
“I heard it’s really painful,” she said, “so I’m worried.”
Ko, who won her first event of the season in Singapore at the HSBC Women’s Champions, hasn’t posted a top-10 finish since July at the Amundi Evian Championship when she tied for eighth. She hasn’t made a cut since the Trust Golf Women’s Scottish Open in late July.
At this time last year, Nelly Korda and Ko were in the midst of a promising budding rivalry, trading blows up til the end of the season, with Ko coming out on top.
Injuries brought that rivalry to a screeching halt, however, with Korda taking months off with a blood clot scare that required surgery. Korda won her first LPGA title of the season on Sunday at the Pelican.
“For me, the uncertainty of that was the scariest,” said Korda of her health scare.
Ko feels the same, noting that her problems were likely caused by overuse.
“I think a lot of players has injury on this tour,” said Ko, “so I don’t want to say, like – I don’t want to say I’m sick more than any player is like this. This is my fault because this is my body.”
Ko, who has dropped to No. 4 in the world, said this is the first time in her life that she has faced such adversity. She believes good things will come from the struggle, but that doesn’t diminish the physical pain.
When asked to name the biggest challenge of the year, Ko laughed as she said, “Just patience with my game and don’t cry – big smile.”
