Maria Fassi topped the list last year at 279 yards.
Maria Fassi topped the LPGA’s driving distance category last year with an average of nearly 280 yards. The year prior, Anne van Dam clocked in at 291 yards, a full six yards ahead of her nearest competitor.
As the women’s game gets longer, stronger and deeper with each passing year, it’s interesting to note that some of the most powerful players in the game also often happen to be ranked No. 1.
Conversely, there are a handful of names on this list that might be new to casual fans.
The LPGA tracks driving distance on two holes each week, and there are times when the holes selected are designed in such a way that promotes the longest players on tour to hit a fairway metal or hybrid. In other words, the numbers below could’ve been even higher.
Here’s a look at the biggest hitters on the LPGA over the past 20 years:
Former World No. 1s Yani Tseng, Jiyai Shin and Ariya Jutanugarn were among those who attended the wedding.
Lydia Ko capped off a dreamy 2022 by marrying her sweetheart on Dec. 30 at the Myeongdong Cathedral in Seoul, South Korea. The current World No. 1 shared several images from the ceremony on Instagram, as did a number of top players who attended the wedding.
Ko confirmed her engagement to Jun Chung, son of Ted Chung, vice chairman and CEO, Hyundai Card, Hyundai Commercial, over the summer. Jun Chung works in finance for Hyundai and has a home in San Francisco.
He watched Ko win in person for the first time at the season-ending CME Group Tour Championship, where the Kiwi clinched the Rolex LPGA Player of the Year Award, Vare Trophy for lowest scoring average, the money title and her third LPGA victory of the season. She’s now only two points shy of the 27 needed to qualify for the LPGA Hall of Fame.
“I think he motivates and inspires me to become a better person and a better player.” said Ko after the CME win.
Former No. 1s Yani Tseng, Inbee Park, Jiyai Shin and Ariya Jutanugarn were among those who attended the wedding in South Korea.
The LPGA season kicks off Jan. 19 with the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions at Lake Nona Golf and Country Club in Orlando, where Ko has a home.
Here are a few Instagram social snaps from Ko’s special day:
A record-setting six players crossed the $2 million mark this season on the LPGA and 27 players won seven figures.
Almost any other season, Minjee Lee’s $3,809,960 earnings would’ve topped the LPGA money list. But with the CME Group Tour Championship offering a record-setting $2 million first-place prize, Lydia Ko’s season-ending victory pushed her to the top of the list for 2022 at $4,364,403. Lee finished second.
Ko moved up to fifth on the LPGA career money list with $16,695,357, ahead of Lorena Ochoa. Annika Sorenstam, Karrie Webb, Cristie Kerr and Inbee Park are the four players ahead of Ko.
A record-setting six players crossed the $2 million mark this season on the LPGA and 27 players won seven figures.
Where do Ko’s season earnings rank in history? Read on:
No cliché is more kindly yet bromidic than the assertion that a slumping star will win again simply because he or she is too good not to.
Among the plentiful clichés permeating golf commentary, there is none more kindly yet bromidic than the assertion that a slumping star will win again simply because he or she is too good not to. It’s a polite fiction, peddled about almost every prominent professional who achieved early success only to plunge into, if not obscurity, then at least irrelevance. As analysis, it lies somewhere between sentimentality and sycophancy, but nowhere close to sound.
Golf’s recent run of resurrections began—appropriately enough, for those particular to the low-hanging fruit such narratives represent—on Easter Sunday, when Jordan Spieth won the Valero Texas Open for his first victory in almost four years. A week later, Hideki Matsuyama’s Masters triumph ended a drought of similar duration. And on Saturday, Lydia Ko completed the trifecta (or trinity) with a seven-stroke romp at the LPGA’s Lotte Championship after three years wandering the desert in search of a title.
These comebacks—particularly those of Spieth and Ko—are welcome positives for their respective Tours. Both are likable and engaging personalities whose lack of form never once manifested itself in a lack of class or professionalism. All slumps are relative, of course. The results posted by Spieth and Ko suggest they were more searching than wholly lost, with the odd encouraging hint of familiar brilliance amid too much mediocrity.
Jordan Spieth walks off the first tee box during the third round of the 2021 Valero Texas Open. (Photo: Daniel Dunn-USA TODAY Sports)
But whatever led them back to the winner’s circle—determination, talent, hard work, perseverance—it was assuredly not the mawkish twaddle that they were just too good not to be there again.
Just as cemeteries are full of indispensable people, lesser Tours and broadcasting booths are peopled with those thought too good not to win again. Some of the falls from grace were so precipitous as to become shorthand reference points even for casual fans.
The obvious one is David Duval. He won 13 PGA Tour titles in under four years, culminating in his Open Championship victory at Royal Lytham 20 years ago. A few months later in Japan, two days after his 30th birthday, he cashed his last winner’s check.
The Claret Jug can seem a poisoned chalice for some of its recipients. Ian Baker-Finch won it a decade before Duval, but six years later he wept in the locker room at Royal Troon when he couldn’t break 90 in the opening round. That afternoon he withdrew from the Open and quit tournament golf.
Seve Ballesteros won three Opens but was only 38 years old when the victories dried up, his swing and body decayed beyond repair. A friend of mine once asked Seve—a man not given to modesty—who would win if Europe’s ‘Big Five’ of the ‘80s faced off at their best. “Sandy would win,” Seve replied firmly. “But I would be second.” Yet Sandy—as in Lyle, Open and Masters champion—was finished even earlier than Seve, at age 34, not counting a European Seniors win and a couple of hickory events in his native Scotland.
Lyle’s Open came at Royal St. George’s, where the championship makes its overdue return (pandemic permitting) in July. Four years earlier at RSG’s, Bill Rogers won the Jug, one of seven worldwide titles the 30-year-old Texan claimed in ’81. By ’88, Rogers was working in a San Antonio pro shop, burned out and far removed from his last win. Yani Tseng won two Women’s British Opens among her five majors and 15 LPGA titles, all in a four-year span. She was 23 when the slump started. She’s now 32 with a world ranking of 1,025th. We can reach back further. Ralph Guldahl: 16 wins, three majors, done at 29.
Every one of those stars met the treacly threshold of being too good not to win again,
Ko’s win proved that fine players can rediscover the magic, but if you knew where to look the same week bore reminders that that many simply can’t, no matter how hard they try. Martin Kaymer was third in the European Tour’s Austrian Open on Sunday. The German hasn’t won since the very day he was proclaimed golf’s dominant force—June 15, 2014, the day he won the U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2 by eight shots, a month after having won the Players Championship. He was 29 years old with two majors on a 23-win résumé. He’s now 36 but the résumé requires no updating.
Men with lesser records sail on, their careers glorious wrecks of what was once promised. Luke Donald was runner-up in the RBC Heritage five times, but this week he missed the cut for the 15th time in his last 17 starts. The former world No. 1 is almost a decade distant from his last W, and ranked 584th. Matteo Manassero won the British Amateur and made a Masters cut at age 16, and had four European Tour wins at 20. He’s now playing now on the Alps Tour, not a circuit anyone wants to play his way back to.
None of the aforementioned are working less assiduously than did Spieth and Ko, and stand as testament that talent and determination is not always sufficient for reward at the highest level. This is a capricious sport, and the road back to relevance will prove impassable for most. After her victory, Ko credited Spieth with inspiring her. She knew he had been tilling fields that had lain fallow for several seasons before his win in Texas. Perhaps hers will in turn spark someone else who knows they are good enough to win again, and who understands that none are too good not to.
Yani Tseng, a 15-time LPGA winner and former World No. 1, was once at the top of the game and an icon in her native Taiwan. What happened?
Yani Tseng has not won on the LPGA for 3,243 days. She hasn’t competed for 663 days.
Where in the world is Tseng and what happened to her?
The first question is easy to answer. She’s back in San Diego gearing up for her return to the LPGA at a place that couldn’t be more familiar. The 2021 Gainbridge LPGA at Lake Nona later this month gives 32-year-old Tseng a chance to ease back into competitive golf. In 2009, she bought Annika Sorenstam’s old house at Nona, with big plans on how to fill her enormous built-in trophy case.
Two years ago, Tseng sold that house and moved back to California, where her journey in America first began and where it’s an easy flight back to her aging father in Taiwan.
“I didn’t sell it for a good price though,” said Tseng, smiling behind her mask during a recent FaceTime call. She was at The Farms Golf Club in Rancho Sante Fe, her bag slung over her shoulder as she headed over to the practice area.
The second question – What happened to Yani? – takes more time to unpack.
At the end of 2012, Tseng finished the season No. 1 in the world. Five years later, she’d fallen to 102nd. At the end of 2018, she was 328th. She’s 919th going into the Gainbridge LPGA event.
“I was playing really good during practice rounds,” she said, “but once it got to the tournament like my mind, I was losing control of my mind, my swing, my body. I don’t trust as much.”
In the spring of 2019, Tseng suffered a back injury that sent pain shooting down her left leg. She opted to rest rather than have surgery and was set to return in 2020 at the Founders Cup in Phoenix, but the COVID-19 pandemic instead sent her back to Taiwan, where she remained until the start of this year.
Tseng, a 15-time winner on the LPGA who is four points shy of the LPGA Hall of Fame, wants to prove to herself and to everyone else that she can still do it again – play golf at the highest level. The powerful yet sensitive player tries not to worry so much about what others think, but it’s still there. Especially when she’s back in Taiwan, where it’s impossible to escape her celebrity status.
“People ask, ‘What’s going on Yani? Why, why, why,’ ” she said. “Sometimes I want to know why too.”
• • •
Two years ago, Tseng wished none of it had happened. That she’d never become the youngest player to win five majors. Never been World No. 1 for 109 consecutive weeks. That’d she’d never dominated a worldwide tour to the point that she couldn’t legally have a beer in her home country without it making the evening news.
“Now that I’m getting older,” she said, “people are telling me to drink more. Maybe they think I need to relax.”
Dips and plateaus are nothing new in golf. Few get to experience the gift of going out on top like Lorena Ochoa or Sorenstam. But Tseng’s downward motion wasn’t a dip. It was a dive so spectacularly awful that she can’t fully explain it.
“I don’t know how many times I cried,” she said, “how many times I cried on the course.”
The seeds of doubt first crept in ever-so-slightly. Tseng’s current instructor, Chris Mayson, said Yani tells a story of finishing fifth in a tournament in Asia, and fielding a “What happened?” question from a reporter. The next week she posted another top 10 and was met with “Why are you in a slump?” As crazy as it sounds, that sent Tseng searching for answers.
When she got to No. 1 in the world, Tseng thought she needed to spend 12 hours on the range pounding balls because, in her mind, that’s what a top-ranked player should do. It wasn’t how she got to No. 1, but that didn’t matter.
“I was looking at (what) I imagined World No. 1 should be,” she once said, “someone much better than I am.”
Stacy Lewis battled against Tseng in her prime and eventually replaced her as No. 1. You could play alongside a rhythmic talent like Inbee Park, said Lewis, and not even realize she’d shot 65.
“With Yani,” she said, “you got caught watching.”
Lewis never sought out a sports psychologist until she reached the top of the game. The unending scrutiny got to her.
“When you get to be No. 1 in the world,” said Lewis, “people just think they can say whatever they want to you. It’s a really tough place to be.”
Add in the element of being a country’s first No. 1, as was the case for Tseng, and the pressure boils as hot as a pot at her favorite shabu-shabu restaurant in downtown Taipei.
Tseng won 12 events worldwide in 2011, and that included an extraordinary victory at the LPGA’s first-ever event in Taiwan, where more people watched her in the first round than the galleries Tiger Woods brought in at the 1999 Johnnie Walker Classic.
Spectators snake up the fairway at No. 9 to watch Yani Tseng and her group during Saturday’s round of the inaugural 2011 Sunrise LPGA Taiwan Championship. Yani Tseng took the lead after the third round. (Golfweek photo)
At a downtown press conference in Taipei, the same security guards who looked after Lady Gaga whisked Tseng from one stop to the next. Fans climbed into trees to get a glimpse of the nation’s newest icon. LPGA player Sophie Gustafson climbed to the roof of the clubhouse to take a picture of Yani-mania. She’d never seen anything like it.
When a victorious Tseng walked off the 18th green on Sunday and into the arms of her 92-year-old grandmother, Cheng-chu Yang, 20,000-plus fans went nuts.
It was a good pressure at first, Tseng said. But looking back, she hadn’t a clue how to handle it.
“My family, nobody knows what’s going on,” she said. “The team in Taiwan, nobody knows. It’s the first time ever and we weren’t ready for it.”
LPGA commissioner Mike Whan said Yani led the league in smiles when she was No. 1. He compared going to Taiwan with Yani to heading to Boston with Tom Brady.
“She literally couldn’t get out of a car without someone taking a picture,” he said. “The press conference was like something out of a presidential election. It was crazy how many cameras were in one room.”
The crowd cheers for hometown hero, Yani Tseng, at the first tee prior to Thursday’s round. Thousands showed up to watch the action. (Golfweek photo)
• • •
Tseng’s first instructor, Tony Kao, told her to focus on one thing at age 10: Hit the ball as far as possible.
By age 12, she could work the ball both ways and carry it 240 yards off the tee.
When Tseng first joined the tour she worked with a kind, mild-mannered coach named Glen Daugherty. One time the 19-year-old rookie forgot to pay her electricity bill at her home in Beaumont, California, and couldn’t see well enough to pack. She asked Daugherty to bring the shirts she had shipped to his house down to Florida for the Ginn Open. There was so much to learn in those early days.
Back then, Tseng held back some of her power in favor of consistency. Daugherty once said that no one on the LPGA had the leg drive that Tseng possessed, but that she didn’t need all that natural strength to succeed on the LPGA.
Yani Tseng during a Golfweek photo shoot at Lake Nona in Orlando, Florida, a number of years ago.
Tseng has seen a number of instructors over the years, including Gary Gilchrist, Dave and Ron Stockton, Claude Harmon III and Kevin Smeltz.
In the spring of 2018, when she showed up to work with Mayson for the first time, she was swinging the club 109 mph and tee shots that were going maybe 50 feet in the air were by design.
“She was very, very fast with her backswing and got really long,” Mayson said. “To hit a fade, she was coming way over the top. I hate to say it was a 20-handicapper move, but it kind of was.”
There wasn’t one miss, Tseng said. The ball went everywhere. She started hitting those low bullets hoping to keep it in play.
“It got lower because when you’re scared to hit the ball,” she said, “you’re afraid to see the ball go too far.”
Together they turned around Tseng’s ball-striking, to the point that she felt like she was hitting the ball better than when she was on top of the world.
“She’s by far the best female ball-striker I’ve ever seen,” said Mayson.
But then something else went terribly wrong.
“Did I tell you I got the yips?” Tseng asked.
As Tseng started to find fairways and greens again, the pressure to make putts sent her into another tailspin.
“At the end,” she said, “it felt like I needed to hole my second shot.”
Yani Tseng reacts to missing her putt at No. 17 during the final round of the Kraft Nabisco Championship. (Golfweek photo)
She turned to Derek Uyeda, who works with several PGA Tour pros, including Phil Mickelson and Xander Schauffele, for help. Tseng started to draw a line on the ball, and placed her trust in that line. It’s 70 to 80 percent there now, she said.
Of course, nothing can truly be measured until she tests it in competition.
“I feel like my skills are better than before,” she said, “my ball-striking is better than before … just the mental not quite there yet.”
• • •
When Tseng took a medical exemption in 2019 and went home to Taiwan, she enrolled in a 10-day meditation retreat. No talking, no cell phones, no computers, no eye contact, no food after noon each day.
Tseng cried for the first five days.
“I finally let it go,” she said of the weight of the world and the internal demons that plagued her heart. She had sought the advice of so many over the years, looking for answers. In the quiet, remote dorm room, she was forced to look within.
“I don’t want to live my life so hard,” she said. “I’ve been so hard on myself.”
Tseng also did laundry every day, even though she brought a suitcase full of clothes. The player who pushed and pushed and pushed for so long, struggled to be still.
Tseng left the retreat with a peaceful mind. Her relationships with friends and family got so much better as a result that she went back a few months later.
In the fall of 2019, Tseng went out to the Taiwan Swinging Skirts LPGA event as a spectator and discovered something else.
“You know,” she said, “I still love this game.”
She even missed the pressure.
Yani Tseng is introduced to the media during an LPGA press conference near Taipei 101. (Golfweek photo)
Vision54 performance coach Lynn Marriott vividly recalls watching Tseng play a money game against good friend Suzann Pettersen during a practice round at an LPGA stop near Sacramento. There was a child-like quality to how she viewed competition. Of course, there were not yet any scars.
“It’s called competition, but pure play,” said Marriott, “she totally had it. It was unencumbered.”
When asked what advice she’d give to other phenoms, Tseng said just be yourself.
“I was playing golf for someone else,” she said. “I was trying to be a person that people wanted me to be instead of, this is just me.”
Of course, she continued, it didn’t help that she was trying to find out who she was at the same time. Trying to grow up as a human being while being revered as a superstar can, at times, feel like an impossible ask.
This time around, Tseng wants to take things slow. She’s lowering the personal expectations and trying to let go of all the embarrassment that’s plagued her inside the ropes in recent years. She doesn’t want to set her sights on No. 1 anymore, she just wants to feel comfortable on the course again.
Physically she’s better, but she knows it’s still a battlefield in her mind.
“I just want to get back to the real Yani,” she said.
Now, at least, she knows who that person really is.
Suzann Peterson? Lydia Ko? Ariya Jutanugarn? Golfweek reveals the best 10 LPGA players of the decade.
After Annika Sorenstam and Lorena Ochoa left the game to focus on family, youth mostly dominated the next decade on the LPGA.
A dozen players took a turn at No. 1 after Lorena Ochoa ended her streak of 158 weeks in May 2010.
The global nature of the tour exploded, with players like Shanshan Feng, Ariya Jutanugarn and Lydia Ko blazing trails from all corners of the world.
Golfweek takes a look back on the 10 best players of the past 10 years.
Brooke Henderson at the Meijer LPA Classic. (Al Goldis, AP)
10. Brooke Henderson
A two-time winner in each of the past four seasons, Canada’s darling has been a top-10 machine in her time on tour. With nine total victories, she’s the winningest player in Canadian golf history – male or female. Won an LPGA major at age 18.
