Nelly Korda gave LPGA a needed moment. Now the hard part

When Nelly Korda’s testy, 2-foot-10-inch putt slid into the hole at Riviera Country Club on Sunday, she not only achieved a lifelong dream by winning the U.S. Women’s Open but also delivered the LPGA the breakthrough moment it has needed.

Now comes the hard part.

Back in November, new LPGA commissioner Craig Kessler sat at the dais in Naples at the CME Group Tour Championship and fielded questions from reporters about his plan to elevate women’s golf in the same way that the WNBA, NWSL and other women’s sports have exploded in recent years. Kessler showed he had a vision and ways to get the wheels turning. A new T.V. deal arrived that week, putting every LPGA round on live T.V. 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 grab and keep attention was clear.

Kessler didn’t have all the answers that week. And the biggest question concerned something he had no control over. It seemed unanswerable at the time, but it was clear it would eventually determine how successful his plan would be and the pace at which it would deliver results: Could the LPGA break through to a larger audience with depth and parity? Or would it need a star to transcend the game and reach a wider audience?

“No silver bullets to creating stars,” Kessler said that week.

“You have the best players, you have the most marketable players, and you have the ones who are actually willing to lean in and do the work. It’s the handful of players at the center of that Venn diagram that we are going to invest our resources against in order to create global superstars and create that player and fan connection.”

That Kessler faced these questions the week after Caitlin Clark, who lit the fuse for the WNBA’s explosion, played in the pro-am for the Annika was purely coincidental but it was a sign of what the LPGA likely needed to achieve the growth it desires and the women’s game deserves: a superstar who grabs eyeballs by winning, winning a lot 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 resurgent Korda, who went winless in 2025, could be to the league’s popularity, especially in America. The depth and parity are great for the global health of women’s golf. But for American fans and American television audiences, especially those who aren’t golf diehards, stars sell.

“As a tour and even from a fan perspective, yes, it’s great to have somebody like Nelly that was so dominant last year,” Hall of Famer Lydia Ko said in November. “Catches a lot of attention, especially with her — in Nelly’s case, being an American player. That catches a lot of different attention. In the case of even if you don’t play golf, you know who Tiger Woods is. Like having that kind of a figure is, yes, very important.”

Seven months later, Nelly Korda has delivered on her part.

She snapped her winless drought with a 54-hole, weather-shortened win at the Tournament of Champions and then went 2-2-T2 before running away with the year’s first major. She followed that with a win in Mexico, then arrived at the U.S. Women’s Open, the women’s game’s marquee event, held at a world-renowned venue, and won when everyone expected her to and wanted her to.

She has now won the year’s first two majors and should head into the KPMG PGA Championship at the end of the month with a world of hype surrounding her. A win at the Evian or the AIG Women’s Open later this summer will give her the LPGA’s career Grand Slam (four out of five). If she wins both, she’ll be a Super Slam winner, or she’ll have what Ko and others call the real Grand Slam.

Nelly Korda winning the biggest prize in women’s golf, the tournament she has long craved and seemed born to win, and doing so in dramatic fashion on a famed course is a moment for women’s golf. Per NBC, Korda’s U.S. Women’s Open win had an average of 1.3 million viewers on Sunday, peaking at 2.2 million when her final putt narrowly lipped in. That’s the second-highest-rated U.S. Women’s Open since Michelle Wie’s 2014 win at Pinehurst No. 2 (2 million). Only Allisen Corpuz’s win at Pebble Beach in 2023 (1.6 million) has had more average Sunday viewers.

Stars and venues are the LPGA’s ticket to the dance that has been the women’s sports boom of the past few years. Nelly Korda is a superstar and has been for some time. She first reached World No. 1 status 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 far outside the world of golf. 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 predate Kessler and the new brain trust — ones they are trying to remedy.

Nelly Korda is a once-in-a-generation American talent, armed with a picture-perfect swing and a charismatic personality that is coming out more and more. She’s winning everything in sight right now and 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 world-beating golf has created. There should be a full-sell hype machine around Korda over the next few weeks in the lead-up to the KPMG and it should continue into the summer. Putting her on the Pat McAfee Show on Tuesday, the second time she has joined this year, is the type of move that’s needed to help introduce her to a larger, non-golf-centric audience that the LPGA is hunting.

Back in November, Kessler was adamant the LPGA didn’t want to put everything on one player or personality to push the game and league higher. “If we are reliant on one person, whether it’s a star or a celebrity, to carry the weight of the Tour on their backs, I think we’ve missed the boat,” Kessler said. “There’s so much magic happening on the LPGA and we have to bring all of it to life.”

That’s a long-term, big-picture view that’s reasonable and measured. The LPGA is indeed littered with great stories and talented, charismatic athletes like Charley Hull, Ko, Rose Zhang, and potential budding stars in Megha Ganne (who just turned pro) and amateurs Asterisk Talley and Kiara Romero. But as Ko noted, “everyone knows Tiger Woods.” Just like 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 on Sunday.