Danielle Kang is about reaching goals, not revealing them

Danielle Kang is coming off a career year in 2020, when she won twice on the LPGA Tour and secured the Vare Trophy for the lowest scoring average on tour.

Yet ask her how she feels about her game, and you get inside the mind of an elite athlete.

“I’m a golfer,” Kang said. “We’re never really satisfied.”

She’s certainly not happy with the way she played in the first full-field event of 2021 last week, missing the cut by a single shot at the Gainbridge LPGA. That’s a rare occurrence these days for the fifth-ranked woman in the world, who last missed a cut in September 2019.

“Where my game’s at is still a work in progress,” Kang said prior to leaving her Las Vegas home for the Florida event. “I still have a lot of things I need to work on, and I’m really working hard to tune those parts up.”

To the outside eye, her game appears to be next to perfect. She’s not a bomber, ranking 43rd last year in driving distance, but the rest of her game is elite. She’s a phenomenal iron player and putter, one reason she usually is found on the leaderboard.

“There’s about four things that I want to get better at,” she said. “It’s in the overall game on how to approach and how to handle certain situations.”

But don’t ask her to reveal those four things.

“I don’t really share them,” she said of what she is working on with coach Butch Harmon. “I don’t want people to know what I’m weak at.”

It’s a philosophy she’s embraced. She doesn’t talk about goals, either, even though she has reached so many at a young age. Just 28, she has five wins, a major championship victory, two appearances on the U.S. Solheim Cup team and leads the standings for this year’s team.

“I have yearly goals, I have short-term goals, I have long-term goals,” she said. “I’ve accomplished some, and others I haven’t. Why I don’t share what my goals are is because when people believe you’ve failed a goal, you’ve failed.”

Failure has never been part of Kang’s career. She won back-to-back U.S. Women’s Amateur titles in 2010 and 2011, turned pro the next year and made it to the LPGA Tour on her first try. It took a few years for the first victory to come, but once it did, there has been no stopping her.

Kang has wins in four consecutive seasons and climbed as high at No. 2 in the Rolex World Rankings after back-to-back wins last summer when play restarted following the coronavirus halt.

She’s spent the past year going back and forth with Nelly Korda for the top spot among Americans, a gap that got a little wider this week when Korda won the opener in Florida.

It’s not hard to imagine her leapfrogging Korda and the three other players in front of her to reach No. 1 in the world, but she won’t say if that’s on her list of priorities for 2021.

Instead, it’s all about doing the work.

“I don’t really mind the end game, it’s more the process of getting toward the goal,” she said. “How I can get there, and how I can give myself a chance to reach that goal? That’s what’s really important to me.”

Chip Shots

• With his win at the WGC Workday Championship on Sunday, Las Vegan Collin Morikawa moved to No. 4 in the Official World Golf Rankings and third in the U.S. Ryder Cup standings. It is his fourth win in 20 months.
• Angel Park Golf Course has launched its annual Cloud Nine leagues. The first sessions begin this week, with leagues available on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday on the par-3 layout. A second session will begin in May, and a third in July. Fees are $480 for walking or $680 for riding for a foursome for the eight-week session.

Greg Robertson is a freelance reporter who covers golf for the Review-Journal. He can be reached at robertsongt@gmail.com.