The top two ranked players in the Rolex Rankings, Nelly Korda and Jeeno Thitikul, are up for ESPY awards Wednesday. The ESPYs, created in 1993 and broadcast on ESPN, are an award show designed to honor the best in sports over the last year. The nominees are released and then voted upon by fans via an online vote.
Thitikul and Korda are both nominated in the same category of “Best Golfer” alongside Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler.
In this case, it seems that the LPGA Tour players should be in contention to take this honor. In the qualification window, McIlroy has one win, a major at The Masters, and a handful of top-10 finishes. He has two additional runner-up finishes.
Scheffler has been more impressive, winning four times in the window, including a major, and routinely finishing in the top 10 on the PGA Tour.
Thitikul is the only player nominated without a major, but she does have four wins like Scheffler and won the Tour Championship at the end of 2025. She also has a couple runner-up finishes in the timeframe.
Korda, from a pure statistical view, should be the winner here. Korda has 10 top-five finishes in the qualification period with four wins, including two major championships. She also has three runner-up finishes since then.
Fan voting will probably skew toward Scheffler, who has a larger profile, but Korda has been the best player in the world, regardless of Tour, over the past year.
Korda isn’t just nominated in the golf category though, she is also nominated for “Best Female Athlete.”
Korda’s competition here isn’t as straightforward, as it includes players from other sports. She is going up against WNBA star A’Ja Wilson, hockey player Hillary Knight and skier Mikaela Shiffrin.
Wilson continued her dominance of the WNBA, winning her fourth MVP award and third championship. Knight dominated in the Rivalry Series in 2025 and was the captain of the 2026 United States Olympic team that won the gold medal, she became the all-time Olympic goal scoring leader for the United States and had the game-tying goal in the gold medal game. Shiffrin won gold at the slalom event in Italy.
It is tough to compare across sports but I would say what Korda did was equal to Wilson and probably ahead of Shiffrin. It becomes more interesting with Knight, who dominated once again thoroughly in her fifth Olympic games. Once again though, Korda has a long way to go in the fan voting against two Olympic fan favorites and one of the most popular women’s athletes in the world.
The ESPY’s air Wednesday night on ESPN.
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