When Nelly Korda’s test shot, 2 feet 10 inches, slid into the hole at the Riviera Country Club on Sunday, she’s not alone achieved a lifelong dream by winning the US Women’s Open but it also gave the LPGA the breakthrough moment it needed.
Now comes the hard part.
In November, the LPGA’s new commissioner, Craig Kessler, sat on the floor in Naples at the CME Group Tour Championship and fielded questions from reporters about his plan to elevate women’s golf the same way the WNBA, NWSL and other women’s sports have exploded in recent years. Kessler showed he had a vision and a way to turn the wheels around. A new television deal arrived that week, putting every LPGA round on live TV and promising an enhanced broadcast. He brought in Aramco to sponsor a big-money event in Las Vegas, talked about reworking the schedule and moved the Chevron Championship to Memorial Park. The plan to attract and hold attention was clear.
Kessler didn’t have all the answers that week. And the biggest question was about something he had no control over. It seemed unanswerable at the time, but it was clear that it would ultimately determine how successful his plan would be and the pace at which it would deliver results: Could the LPGA penetrate a larger audience with depth and equity? OR would it take a star to beat the game? and reach a wider audience?
“There are no silver bullets for star-making,” Kessler said that week.
“You’ve got the best players, you’ve got the most marketable players and you’ve got the ones who are actually willing to lean in and do the work. It’s a handful of players at the center of that Venn diagram that we’re going to invest our resources into in order to create global superstars and create that connection with the players and the fans.”
That Kessler faced these questions the week after Caitlin Clark lit the fuse for the WNBA implosion, played in the pro-am for Annika it was just coincidence, but it was a sign of what the LPGA likely needs to achieve the growth it wants and the women’s game deserves: a superstar who is winning, winning big, and doing it in a way that demands attention.
The most likely candidate to do this was, of course, Nelly Korda; even her contemporaries noted how vital a revived Korda, who did not win in 2025, could be to the league’s popularity, especially in America. Depth and parity are great for the global health of women’s golf. But for American fans and American television audiences, especially non-golf die-hards, the stars sell.
“As a tour and even from a fan perspective, yeah, it’s nice to have someone like Nelly who was so dominant last year,” Hall of Famer Lydia Ko said in November. “It gets a lot of attention, especially with her — in Nelly’s case, being an American player. It gets a lot of different attention. Even if you don’t play golf, you know who Tiger Woods is. Like having a figure like that is, yeah, very important.”
Seven months later, Nelly Korda has delivered on her part.
She snapped her winless drought with a weather-shortened 54-hole win at the Tournament of Champions and then went 2-2-T2 earlier walking away with the first degree of the year. She followed that up with a win in Mexico, then arrived at the US Women’s Open, the women’s games event held at a world-famous venue, and won when everyone expected and wanted her to.
She has now won her first two majors of the year and should head into the KPMG PGA Championship at the end of the month with a buzzing world around her. A win at Evian or the AIG Women’s Open later this summer would give her the LPGA career Grand Slam (four of five). If she wins both, she will be a Super Slam winner, or have what Ko and others call the true Grand Slam.
Nelly Korda winning the biggest prize in women’s golf, the tournament she has long coveted and seemed born to win, and to do so in dramatic fashion on a famous course is a moment for women’s golf. According to NBC, Korda wins the US Women’s Open averaged 1.3 million viewers on Sunday, peaking at 2.2 million when her latest free-kick went in narrowly. Michelle likes this 2014 win at Pinehurst no. 2 (2 million). Only Allison Corpuz’s win at Pebble Beach in 2023 (1.6 million) has had more average Sunday viewers.
Stars and environments are the LPGA’s ticket to the dance that has boomed the women’s sport in recent years. Nelly Korda is a superstar and has been for some time. For the first time, it reached the status of no. 1 in the world five years ago, has a gold medal, now has four majors and is two points away from the Hall of Fame. She should already be a star away from the golf world. That she hasn’t already reached the level of Clark, A’ja Wilson, Simone Biles and others speaks to the issues within the LPGA that precede Kessler and the new brain trust — ones they’re trying to sort out.
Nelly Korda is a once-in-a-generation American talent, armed with a perfect swing and a charismatic personality that is increasingly coming to the fore. She’s winning everything in sight right now and she just had a monumental win on a course people know well.
Now it’s up to the LPGA to make the most of the opportunity Nelly Korda’s golf has created. There should be a full selling machine around Korda in the coming weeks before KPMG and it should continue through the summer. By putting it on The Pat McAfee Show on Tuesday, the second time she has joined this year, is the kind of move needed to help introduce her to a larger, non-center golf audience that the LPGA is hunting.
In November, Kessler was adamant that the LPGA didn’t want to put everything on one player or personality to push the game and the league forward. “If we’re relying on one person, whether it’s a star or a celebrity, to carry the weight of the tournament on our backs, I think we’ve missed the boat,” Kessler said. “There is so much magic happening on the LPGA and we have to bring it all to life.”
This is a long-term, big-picture, sensible and measured view. The LPGA is truly filled with great stories and talented and charismatic athletes like Charlie Hullis, Rose Zhangand potential budding stars in Megha Ganne (who just turned pro) and amateurs Asterisk Talley AND Kiara Romero. But as Ko noted, “everybody knows Tiger Woods.” As everyone knows Caitlin Clark, Michael Jordan and many others who have elevated their sport and brought new fans into the picture by being a gateway to it.
Nelly Korda can do the same as long as women’s golf and the LPGA make the most of what her 2-foot, 10-inch putt delivered Sunday.
