Nelly Korda just took the lead. Here’s why this time is different

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland – Nelly Korda doesn’t want to think ahead. She is a graduate of the same school as Scottie Scheffler. on sunday? First we have Saturday. One shot at a time. Results don’t define me. They come from trusting my process.

“I’m just trying to stay very present,” she offered Friday afternoon.

Yeah, but … she has a 3-shot lead at halftime AIG Women’s Open on the old course at St. Andrews. Legacy-defining moments don’t just appear out of the blue on the final hole of a tournament. They break through, Tuesday through Thursday through Saturday morning and Sunday evening. Korda’s momentum is flowing.

That the 26-year-old, the undisputed best golfer on the planet, sits atop the leaderboard should come as no surprise. This has been a theme all season. It is impressive that Korda only grabbed one bogey. That she’s doing it with a pitcher she picked up on Wednesday is, too. But when it’s happening and where it’s happening and what happened before is important. It has been a very strange summer for Korda. And it is blowing a hoolias the Scots say.

Three months ago, Korda won the Mizuho Americas Open for a barely believable sixth victory in seven events. She played three times in the next five weeks and missed the cut in all three. it failed to break 80 in two different branches. She went on vacation. She claimed a medal at the Olympics before a strange extrusion down the stretch. She then spent a week in Prague with her family, “recharging” her batteries, and appeared in St. Andrews who was no longer the betting favourite. The reason for this has less to do with the endgame than the setting. Her best finish in a Women’s Open came five years ago – her only top 10 – when she finished T9 at Woburn Golf Club, an inland course, north of London. It was about 20 degrees warmer. No one talked about the wind.

A tournament like this in a place like St. Andrews – where the tees are regularly breaking 35 mph and the greens are being slowed down just to make them playable – is the closest thing golf has to the way the Grand Slam tennis championships are played on different surfaces. To be an all-time tennis player, you need to win on hard courts, grass courts and clay courts. In Melbourne and Paris and London and New York. In golf you can win on the comforts of sweaty Florida Bermudagrass, but to be an all-time player you have to do it at the Open, in wind and rain and on the unpredictable bounces of a hard-link.

Roger Federer won just one French Open on the slippery clay of Roland Garros, but damn he found a way to do it, just once, in 2009. (Rafael Nadal took over from there.) Andre Agassi needed 13 try to win there but he also did it. Iga Swiatek, the world’s No. 1 women’s player, is aptly nicknamed the Queen of Clay, but she can’t wait for it on the Wimbledon grass. On the other three shots, she wins at an 85% clip. In south-west London, it wins just 69% of the time. If it confuses you, imagine what it does to her.

Korda would understand the comparison better than most; both her parents were professional tennis players. As she travels from tournament to tournament, Nelly tunes in to watch her brother, Sebastian, play the various stops of the men’s tennis tournament. Seb is really good, not great yet, ranked 16th in the world. Once he wins a slam – on any surface – the next question will be, can he win on another?

His older sister has won basically everywhere. However, the whole family knows that a win in St. Andrews would be different.

I asked Nelly about that idea on Friday. Profit is great anywhere, but could it be more valuable to do it right here, right now?

“Sure,” she replied. “I think just this year in general, I’ve won on so many different types of grass in different conditions that you just always have to adapt. It’s the same in tennis, the same in life. You’re always adapting to your available situations, and I think that’s what’s so fun about golf links, that you’re starting it literally 30 yards from your target. I’m not a fade player, but I’m hitting massive fades. I think it’s fun to hit these little drivers too.

“I’m having fun and I really like golf. Obviously, every year I play it, I learn a little bit more about it.”

Korda sounds like other golf greats when he talks like that. Like Rory McIlroy missing three straight US Open cuts before five consecutive top 10s. Or Phil Mickelson needing two decades to learn how to control the ball along the ground at Linksland. When it all finally came together in a win at Muirfield in 2013, he called it his greatest achievement. Because triumph after repeated failure feels better than triumph on its own.