Lydia Ko of New Zealand imitates a selfie after winning the Mediheal Championship at Lake Merced Golf Club on April 29, 2018. Photo / Getty Images.
Lydia Ko of New Zealand imitates a selfie after winning the Mediheal Championship at Lake Merced Golf Club on April 29, 2018. Photo / Getty Images.
Lydia Ko won a golf tournament today.
It wasn't a major, nor a major surprise, given she's won the Mediheal Championship twice before when it was the Swinging Skirts Classic. Yep, that was a thing.
In time this might be remembered as one of the remarkable Ko's most famous victories. If nothing else, it halts work on The Decline and Fall of a Child Prodigy, a perennial classic of the sports writing genre.
Not that Ko, who has just blown out 21 candles, ever really fell. A minor stumble or two perhaps, but The Continuing Near-Excellence of a Child Prodigy is nowhere near as sexy a tagline.
One of the great misconceptions of our sporting times is that development is linear. Only once you stop to think of everything Ko had to deal with as a child do you start to understand how ludicrous the expectation of her has been.
She started winning professional tournaments before she was fully formed in either a physical or mental sense. Ko was 14 when she won her first professional tournament, 15 when she won her first LPGA event.
Lydia Ko of New Zealand reacts after making an eagle to win the Mediheal Championship at Lake Merced Golf Club. Photo / Getty Images.
The most frequent question she fended off was how she felt about all the money she couldn't collect because of her amateur status. Ko always seemed bemused by the question, as befitting someone at an age when $300, let alone $300,000, feels like a fortune.
The other question she had to deal with too often was whether she would switch her allegiance back to her native Korea from her adopted New Zealand. That line of inquiry highlighted just another facet of her complicated development: she was dealing with cultural adjustments as much as she was physical and swing alterations.
This would have been difficult to process as an adult, let alone a kid living an unrealistic life in an unfamiliar land.
Yet she was brilliant; some say the best teenage golfer in history. She had won 19 professional tournaments, including two majors, and banked millions of those same dollars she once had to forego, before she left her teens.
Lydia Ko, of New Zealand, waits to hit from the 16th tee of the Lake Merced Golf Club during the first round of the LPGA Mediheal Championship golf tournament. Photo / Getty Images.
Ko spent more than a year-and-a-half as world No 1. She won an Olympic medal. She did this all as a diminutive teen with poor eyesight who watched older, bigger players crush the ball miles past her off the tee. That is the unbelievable part of the story. What happened next is utterly plausible.
Golf is a fiendishly difficult sport to master but when excellence is delivered so often so early, any interruption to that pattern is met with grave intonations.
Rather than continuing to trend upwards on an impossible path towards immortality, she just, kind of, sort of, became normal. The field caught up to her. A few of them passed.
Ko changed caddies (more than once it must be said), she changed clubs, she changed coaches. This was interpreted in some quarters as the malign hand of overbearing parents, but what if it actually indicated a growing independence?
As she moved from child- to adulthood, it would have been natural that for Ko to figure out what swing she preferred, what equipment she wanted to use and what sort of human she wanted handing her clubs.
Today's win provides grounds for optimism that she's getting comfortable with the changes.
And it should make the rest of us feel more comfortable that she knows what she's doing — and that's there are plenty of lines left to be written in her ascendant story.
