The LPGA Tour closed the curtain with an undisputed winner, Thailand’s Jeeno Thitikul. The world number one completed the season with her third title, the CME Group Championship, endowed with four million prizes to the winner, the most important check distributed in any sport in the women’s sector after that achieved by Yelena Rybakina (5.25) in the final of the WTA this November. Only Japan’s Yamashita, with two, has also won more than one tournament among the 31 held by the world’s best circuit in its most democratic course.
The 22-year-old Asian repeated for the second consecutive year as the best player in the league’s earnings list, underlining the quiet dominance that the golfer has exerted in the last year and a half, in which she has won five titles to complete a bank account in four years of professionalism of $17.36 million, which places her seventh in the all-time ranking.
In addition, the Dallas-based player set a new scoring average record on the LPGA. She completed the year at 68.68 strokes per round, surpassing Annika Sorenstam’s 2002 mark of 68.697. “Winning the Vare Trophy (Rolex Player of the Year) gives me goosebumps because it’s joining a group where the best in history are.”
Thitikul, a golfer who drew from a very young age, before the age of 13, that she would be a star in the professional ranks – she was world amateur number one for 12 weeks – also suffered blows. She told about it in the press conference afterwards
“I remember the day I got to Dallas after the Kroger,” in September last year after having given away the title with four putts on the last hole. “I put a cold compress on my eyes because I cried a lot. That’s what I remember. And then, voluntarily, I took a picture of myself like that. I wanted to remind myself that the day you get there, or the day you enjoy happiness in your life, there will also be days of sadness. But neither one nor the other defines who I am.”
In the CME Group, the tournament where she revalidated the title held in Naples (Florida), Thitikul, who has not yet won a major, won by four strokes over her compatriotPajaree Anannarukarn and six over Nelly Korda, the American who she has snatched the world golf crown from. Carlota Ciganda, in the year in which she returned to victory in the LPGATour, finished 39th. “How will you celebrate?” they asked the champion. “I don’t know, I think I’ll go shopping,” she said.
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