With her victory at the rain-shortened Volunteers of America LPGA Texas Classic last weekend, Sung Hyun Park, the reigning U.S. Women’s Open champion, becomes the 11th different player to have won the first 11 tournaments that have been contested on the LPGA Tour this season.
If multi-year streaks are your thing, the number is actually 13, including the last two events of 2017.
The list of 13 winners runs the includes four players who have been ranked number-one in the world at one time or another(Shanshan Feng, Inbee Park, Ariya Jutanugarn, Lydia Ko) two first-time winners (Pernilla Lindberg, Moriya Jutanugarn) and nine players who won major championships prior to this year (Feng, Inbee Park, Sung Hyun Park, Ko, Ariya Juntanugarn, Brittany Lincicome, Michelle Wie, Eun-He Ji, Brooke Henderson and most recently, Lindberg at the ANA Inspiration.
The group features three of the top four and 11 of the top 20 players in the world according to this week’s world rankings
The 13 players range hail from seven different countries; China, Thailand, the United States, South Korea, Canada, New Zealand, and Sweden, and range in age from Henderson, who is 20, to Lincicome who is 32. Ten of the 13 are in their 20s.
What do all these numbers mean? First and foremost, that the era of a small handful of players separating themselves from the rest of the tour for an extended period is likely gone for good.
The level of play on today’s LPGA Tour is far too high and the depth of the talent pool, so deep.
While it is far from implausible that Sung Hyun Park, or Inbee Park, or Henderson, or Ko will get on a hot streak this summer and collect several multiple victories, it is far less likely that a single player or handful of players will dominate.
The LPGA Tour is off this week before the players embark on the most grueling stretch of the schedule. The following nine weeks will feature two major championships. The second major championship of the year, the U.S. Women’s Open, is four weeks away, the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship will be played a month after that.
Predicting a winner in either of those events, or in any other LPGA tournament for that matter, is more or less a crapshoot. There are simply too many talented and accomplished players capable of winning.
If an LPGA tournament were a horse race, we would advise interested parties to bet the field.
