How did Lydia Ko summit the mountain again? She explains everything

LYDIA KO INVITES US IN, BUT UNDER ONE CONDITION: Shoes off at the door, please. It makes sense when we step inside. Ko’s Orlando home, in the luxe community of Lake Nona, is suspiciously tidy on this February morning; like an Airbnb rental waiting for guests to arrive. 

A lonely teapot sits on the sprawling white island that bisects the kitchen, but she shuffles it to the side, where tea fixings are neatly arranged on trays. Yellow rubber gloves hang over the faucet. There are no picture frames to be seen, no wedding invites tacked to the fridge. A vase filled with sunflowers decorates one countertop, but that’s it. And that’s how it’ll be for awhile, because when the No. 3 female golfer in the world is done entertaining us on this February morning, she’s heading west and won’t be back for at least a month, maybe two. Season 13 on the LPGA Tour beckons, and, as ever, she isn’t sure how many more will follow. 

Despite Ko’s minimalist inclinations — likely a nod to her Korean roots — one spot in the house remains unkempt because it’s constantly being added to: the trophy room. Clues about her life abound there, from the set of clubs she rode to Olympic silver in Rio to the paintings of Lake Merced — where she’s won three times — leaning against the wall. Even the bite marks on the windowsill mean something, but more on that later. 

“I think I have a putter obsession,” Ko says, walking her fingers through the dozen or so mallets that fill two staff bags. Like a pop star’s framed platinum records, 10 different bags, each from a different season, line one wall, boxing her Peloton into a corner. Lining another are (most of) the trophies she’s claimed over the years. Some are relegated to the floor. Win 23 times and you run out of space.

Each piece of hardware comes with a story, but none of that silver is as eye-catching as the framed caricature of 15-year-old Ko that sits near the room’s entrance. In the drawing, her face is overwhelmed by the boxy eyeglasses she used to wear more than a decade ago, when the sport first fell in love with her. She half-snorts when I point it out.

“What do you think of when you see this version of yourself?” I ask.

“My mom says I was a better golfer then,” Ko says with a laugh.

“Was she right?”

She pauses, smiling. “Yes,” she finally says, conceding that just maybe golf was easier for her back then.

UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE, the odds of Ko, in the same season, pulling off three particularly spectacular feats were, in her mind, less than slim. “If there’s a word that’s under slim, under zero, that’s where I was living,” she says. 

We’re back in the kitchen now, discussing 2024 and the most triumphant hat trick and summer of her life: winning gold at the Paris Olympics, punching her ticket to the LPGA Hall of Fame and then taking the Women’s Open on the Old Course at St. Andrews. Ko has had six months to process that stunning run, but she still sounds a little untrusting of it all. Perhaps it’s what you’d expect from a player who has experienced countless ups but plenty of confounding downs, too.

Even so, the perks keep coming. Before posing for GOLF Mag, she had, a few months earlier, slipped into the luxurious threads of Italian designer Loro Piana for the March cover of Vogue Korea. The Golden State Warriors dished out courtside seats for the game in which Steph Curry tossed up his record-breaking 4,000th trey. And there was that celebratory night in Napa at The French Laundry. Chef Thomas Keller threw all three Michelin stars at Ko — a major foodie — and her husband, Jun Chung, on an evening themed around her Olympic triumph. Ko quotes were taped to the kitchen’s immaculate workstations as cooks scurried about. Keller comped the meal, then played golf with Ko later that week, where she took his money on the course too. Sheepishly, it should be noted. Ko is regarded as one of the kindest souls in the sport. She jetted from last weekend’s Chevron Championship in Houston to caddy for Danielle Kang in her U.S. Open qualifying attempt Monday morning in San Francisco. 

“I’ve never heard of a player who does not like Lydia,” LPGA vet Mel Reid says. “She’s literally the perfect representation of a woman athlete.”

Her homeland agrees. At the end of 2024, New Zealand — the country Ko and her family emigrated to when she was four — officially designated her Dame Lydia Ko, which has prompted fellow pros to playfully curtsy whenever she comes around. “When I got that I was like, ‘Wow, I kinda feel like I’m 60,’” says the just-turned 28-year-old, New Zealand’s youngest dame ever. She’s been just that — the youngest — at virtually everything she’s done in golf. Youngest to win an LPGA event (the 2012 Canadian Women’s Open, at age 15), youngest to be named Player of the Year (in 2015, at 18), youngest to reach World No. 1 (in 2015, at just 17). Also at 17: the youngest to promise that she’d retire by the time she turned 30.

Such is the life of a prodigy, something we know so little of until one of them agrees to talk about it. Lucky for us, Lydia is an open book. Here’s her story about turning 12: “I had to play 36 holes or something on my birthday for the New Zealand Stroke Play, and I shot, like, 79-79. I was like, I suck! I hate golf! I hate me! I remember eating dinner — Korean black bean noodles — and just crying.”

She laughs now about that tear-filled bowl of noodles, but it’s the flip side of being the youngest. The world doesn’t wait for wunderkinds to mature; it asks them to give their birthdays to the golf course. And their friends’ birthdays too. Going to college is viewed as a barrier, not a pathway, to brilliance. And summer jobs? Ko couldn’t attend summer camp because it meant going three days without practice. As a kid, the only other sport she tested was netball. She’s been doing this — golf, and nothing but — since the age of five. Her earliest passwords? Mini Tiger.

“Golf was such a huge part of me,” she says, looking back. “I took things personally. To this day, I still do when I have a bad day.” 

It’s a straitjacket pro golfers wrestle themselves into at an alarming rate: How much of them can be devoted to the life of Score Maker? The highs are like summiting Everest: You can stay there for an hour, but a descent is inevitable. The lows are like quicksand: filled with panic, because some careers never stop sinking.

“The identity,” explains Sean Foley, Ko’s former coach who still plays a mentoring role in her life, “basically, ‘I’m playing good, I’m a good person; I’m playing like s–t, I’m a bad person. I’m playing good, everyone’s saying hi; I’m playing bad, no one’s saying hi.’ You learn that at a young age, and you start to identify who you are with your score. The problem with that is you can hit the best shot of the day and the wind can change by five miles an hour and you make triple. In a game where so much of your score is based on things you don’t control — to identify with that, that’s tricky.”

IT’S DIFFICULT FOR KO TO CITE THE LOWEST of the low points, but not so difficult for her sister, Sura. The woman Lydia calls her “second mom” has upended her own life to help realize her younger sister’s dreams — as a doting manager who crosses the Pacific multiple times a year from her home in Korea. The low, for Sura, came in Vancouver, in August, at the 2023 Canadian Women’s Open. 

“Vancouver is where our journey started,” she says, thinking back to 2012 and Lydia’s first LPGA win — at the Canadian Women’s Open. But Vancouver ’23 featured a career-worst round of 82, en route to a last-place finish. It was the nadir of a confusing summer for Ko, who’d won Player of the Year honors in 2022 but felt her game — and a critical goal — was slipping away. 

Four months earlier, she’d missed the cut at the first major of the season and went searching for ball-striking answers she didn’t need. Ko focused so intently on improving one element of her game that “everything else became irrelevant,” she says.

Soon, cracks showed in her all-world short game. And Sura was there to witness. “I felt so useless that I couldn’t help anymore,” she says. “There was nothing I could do to make things better.”

She’d had slumps before, once going nearly three years — from 2018 to 2021 — without a win. Foley helped pull her out of it. “As good as she is,” he says, “she should just never be bad at golf.”

And yet Ko felt this one was different, perhaps because of the narrative she’d scripted for herself years ago. At 17, she told reporters that, despite amassing the greatest start to a career women’s golf had ever seen, she had zero interest in playing into her 30s. But eight years later, inching closer to that age, she feared that her shot at the Hall of Fame might be fading.

The LPGA boasts the most tantalizing — and discriminating — Hall in sports. Entry is based not on the whims and wobbly math of subjective voters but on a rigid points system that rewards wins, majors and annual awards. Twenty-six points means you’re out; 27 points means you’re in.

In Vancouver in ’23, Ko’s 19-win, two-major career tallied 25 points. She nudged that to 26 with a victory in January 2024, prompting an eager LPGA to create a highlight reel awaiting just one last Hall of Fame-clinching flourish. Superstitious as ever, Sura refused to watch it. To her, the Hall was a ghost they couldn’t catch. Every time Team Ko talked about it, she says, it seemed to be “running away further from us.”

IT DOESN’T TAKE MUCH TO FIGURE OUT whose teeth have taken a bite out of the paint in Ko’s trophy room. Kai, her one-year-old Shiba Inu, has the zoomies as we walk Lake Nona’s quiet streets. In fairness to the dog, GOLF staffers with video gear have been trailing Mom all day, but if he’d slow his roll long enough to turn around he’d see that she’s beaming — even off camera.

“He’s given me a lot of happiness,” Ko says as Kai stops for potty break No. 1. Her frequent travel allowed little time for a dog, but, a year ago, after missing the cut at the Mizuho Americas Open in New Jersey, she spotted Kai in a pet shop window across the river in Chelsea and wouldn’t leave town without him. Now, he travels with her to almost every domestic stop on the LPGA calendar, and when they’re not on the road he provides much-needed company during practice sessions in Orlando or at the Stanford range in Palo Alto.

“After awhile I realized there was more to life than just golf,” Ko says. “That’s what Kai proved to me. That’s what my husband has proven to me.”

Ah, yes. The two-legged man in her life. With all due respect to the pooch, every person in Ko’s camp highlights the calming effect Jun has had on her. The couple met through a friend in 2021, but when they first started dating the act alone made Ko uneasy. They’d be at the beach and she’d be stricken with guilt. Her Instagram feed was full of practice videos posted by fellow pros. She’d ask members of her team, Is it… okay to take a day off?

“I was pushing her toward him,” says Foley, who DM’d Chung to clarify his intentions and quickly concluded that the fit was right. “That’s taken up like half our range session,” Foley continued. “Talking about Jun, trying to get them to go on vacation. Like, ‘Yo, there is way more to life than this.’”

It helps that Ko’s husband is an unapologetic golf sicko. His idea of a getaway is more Bandon Dunes than Bali. At first, Ko didn’t like the idea of cozying up to a golf obsessive but soon realized it was the best way to breathe life into a relationship without hurting her career. She gives Jun a few strokes per side, and they play matches for push-ups or açai bowls.

Ko’s friends think it’s Jun’s personality more than his passion that softens her edges. She works best with a plan; he’s been the first person to help her feel like a day can begin without an itinerary and end without an achievement. 

“Golf takes up a lot of time, and my identity is so connected to it,” she says. “Jun has made me realize I am more than just the golfer Lydia Ko.”

IT WAS AFTER 71 AND A HALF HOLES at the Paris Games that Ko knew she was going to get tatted again. “Until then,” she says, “I was shaking.”

She’d arrived in the City of Lights with eight tattoos, unsure if she’d ever get a ninth. But she enjoys speaking things into existence and told a reporter that, having won silver in Rio in 2016 and bronze in Tokyo in 2021, she’d consider getting inked one last time if she took home gold.

What started the week as a cute storyline blossomed into a fairy tale. After round one, she trailed by seven; after round two, the deficit was two. For reporters at that point, Hall of Fame queries were irresistible, and Ko gave as good as she got.

“If I [do] win the gold,” she told me that week, “I could get in the Hall of Fame and it would stop all these questions, from people like you, in the future.”

After round three, she was tied for the lead. With just seven holes to play in the deciding round, Ko looked up at the leaderboard and saw her name next to a five-shot lead. The watery graveyard that is the last four holes at Le Golf National becomes a lot less scary when you can dunk a few and get away with it. Ko locked into a different level of focus in that moment and swears that, in a crowd of 30,000 spectators, she was able to spot her father-in-law screaming her name. With the gallery at its loudest as she walked toward the 18th green, she began talking to herself.

“‘I am really proud of overcoming my doubts,’” Ko recalls saying. “Now, it doesn’t matter what you write about me or what my next-door neighbor says about me. If I don’t think it, it’s irrelevant. But what goes on between the two ears — that can get scary.”

She finished her Olympic career with a birdie, climbed a steep hill behind the green and found her sister, floating.

“I don’t think I can put the emotions of that day into words,” Sura says. “It’s something I have not felt before — more like spinning in the universe. That day was just unforgettable.”

And the night was a rush. Ko received a bouquet of 27 white roses from then-LPGA commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan — one for every point she’d earned as the newest, and youngest-ever, LPGA Hall of Famer. Then the Ko sisters were whisked off to the New Zealand Olympics house to celebrate. Lydia had been asked to be the Kiwi flag-bearer at the Opening Ceremony, but had to decline because of her playing schedule. Now, she had her own personal closing ceremony, where New Zealand dancers perform a haka for the greatest Olympic golfer of all-time as she was serenaded with songs from her childhood. She wishes it could have lasted longer. 

“It took me back to my roots,” Ko says wistfully. “When I left home [for the U.S.] in 2013, I think I missed it. But I got so used to living in a great place like [the U.S.] and you don’t really miss it as much — I just miss the people. But then you go back — I was there over Christmas — moments like the New Zealand house, you’re like aww. It’s a very complex relationship.”

Soon after, she messaged her favorite tattoo artist, a man in Seoul by the name Playground, who only takes requests by DM, but who also gave Ko her first Olympic tat: the five rings etched on the inside of her right bicep. Tattoo No. 9 is just as elegant but hidden on Ko’s right rib cage. It’s a thin, single streak of ink outlining, podium-like, the iconic landmarks of her three Olympic cities: Rio’s Christ the Redeemer, Tokyo’s Mount Fuji and, standing tallest of all, Paris’ Eiffel Tower.

THE OLYMPIC WIN IN FRANCE WILL FOREVER be Ko’s favorite — she jokes that she now has “the full steak-knives set of medals” — and whenever she’s asked about it her answers run long. But they cut into the time we have to talk through St. Andrews and the Women’s Open, the 2024 breakthrough Ko still has trouble believing.

Every morning that week, she ate breakfast in the Rusacks St. Andrews hotel, just off the 18th fairway, and stared at the painted portraits of past Old Course champions. “They had Lorena [Ochoa] and Stacy [Lewis], and then an empty spot. I was like, I wonder who that’s gonna be?”

It took all 72 holes — and a nervy, 20-minute wait — to sort it out. Much like in Paris, the contenders ahead of Ko failed to break par in the final round. She plodded her way around the venerated track, posted a 69 and sort of stumbled into a two-stroke win.

“It shouldn’t have happened,” she says, laughing. 

Still, it was born, at least in part, of a looseness that had long alluded Ko. All week, she went out for dinner, toggling between Thai and pizza, and spent more time walking through the ancient town than she had during her first Old Course Open as a teen. When the skies opened and began pelting her with rain on the 71st hole, she started laughing. The exquisite 3-wood she played through that downpour on the Road Hole was one of the best shots of her life and has given her reason to return to St. Andrews another day. She needs to see that portrait.

“I feel like I’m in the cool kids club,” Ko says, which dawned on her during a late-night, private tour of the R&A clubhouse.

Look at the past 13 years and that’s all she’s done — join increasingly cooler clubs and increasingly impressive company within the sport. At some point, though, she’ll reach her fill of it, and that’s the last item on the docket today. We’ve transitioned to the pool deck at Lake Nona’s elite golf and country club for a quick bite before she bolts to the airport, and she already seems to know what’s coming.

“Does the big R-word get annoying to hear about,” I ask.

“Retirement? Or Rebel?” she responds, cheekily.

As someone who’s asked about retirement every week of every month, Ko handles the subject grudgingly but well. “I want to go out at a time that I want to,” she says, offering no specifics. Her voice rises when she talks through things she looks forward to achieving off the course but slumps when she contemplates missing her LPGA friends. She wonders what she’ll do to fill the void of the only pursuit she’s ever known.

“I don’t want to get into a moment of identity crisis,” she says. There’s the I-word again. 

Eventually, she arrives at a perfectly vague and perfectly fine answer: “It’s coming sooner than later.” She has already pulled her name out of the running for the 2028 Olympics, but wants to be in Los Angeles in some capacity for New Zealand Golf, possibly as a team captain.

Until then, Ko is operating in the present, with the greatest sense of normalcy she’s ever had … and it continues to deliver results. Her trip west began with a pro-am appearance at the PGA Tour’s Genesis Invitational, continued with a few grinding weeks of practice with coach Holton Freeman and finished in Singapore at the 2025 HSBC Women’s World Championship — where she won by four. The trophy room grows and shrinks at the same time.

Before I get the chance to ask about her next goal, she volunteers it. She wants the career Grand Slam and secretly always has. That would mean wins at the KPMG Women’s PGA and the U.S. Women’s Open, events she hasn’t fared well at in recent years. Then again, she never thought the Women’s Open would happen, and it did. So she pivots our existential conversation with a youthful kick of innocence.

“Like, why not, right?” she says.

Call it Ko Logic.

This story originally appeared in the May issue of GOLF Magazine. Comments can be shared with the author at sean.zak@golf.com.