The demise of World No. 1 Nelly Korda at the U.S. Women’s Open was the second-most surprising thing to happen in the sport this year (just slightly behind Scottie Scheffler’s arrest outside of Valhalla Country Club).
On her third hole of the tournament at Lancaster Country Club on Thursday, Korda carded a seven-over 10 on the par 3 12th en route to shooting a 10-over 80.
Korda, who tied an LPGA record with five consecutive wins earlier this season and has won six times on tour in 2024, won’t be playing the weekend after carding a 70 on Friday to miss the cut by two shots. Korda’s absence from contention in the U.S. Open is unexpected to say the least, with her missed cut even more shocking considering her dominant play all year long. Korda captured the first major of the year in April—the Chevron Championship—by two shots and entered the week at the U.S. Women’s Open as the odds-on favorite to capture her seventh win of the season and second major of 2024.
Instead, Korda will be heading home, looking to regroup after one disastrous hole buried any hopes of contention this weekend.
Near the end of Friday’s second round, American Andrea Lee and Thailand’s Wichanee Meechai lead the U.S. Women’s Open by two shots.
Nelly Korda’s opening round at the U.S. Women’s Open was a shocking divergence from her stellar play to date in 2024.
The No. 1-ranked women’s golfer in the world who entered the tournament having won six of her last seven starts, including the year’s first major, shot 10-over-par 80 at Lancaster (Pa.) Country Club, matching her highest-ever score on the LPGA Tour.
Korda, who won the Chevron Championship in April, had tied an LPGA record by winning five consecutive tournaments earlier this year before winning her last start two weeks ago.
“Not a lot of positive thoughts, honestly,’’ Korda said. “I just didn’t play well today. I didn’t hit it good. I found myself in the rough a lot. Making a 10 on a par-3 will definitely not do you any good at a U.S. Open.’’
The 12th gave the entire field fits and was viewed in pre-tournament interviews as one that could be a problem for the field. When the U.S. Women’s Open was played at Lancaster in 2015, the results were similar, with 31 double bogeys for the week.
It didn’t help that when Korda’s group arrived on the tee, there was already a long wait with two other groups yet to play the hole. She said she was between clubs and used a 6-iron which flew into a back bunker.
From there, she played her second long and watched it roll into the water fronting the green. She then dropped on the other side of the water and hit two wedge shots short, both ending up wet. She hit her eighth shot onto the green and then two-putted for the 10, her highest-ever score on a hole.
“Just hit some really bad chips over and over again,’’ she said.
Korda ended up shooting 45 for her first nine holes and bogeyed the last hole, the ninth, to shoot 80.
“I just didn’t really want to shoot 80,’’ she said of her mindset when making the turn. “And I just kept making bogeys. My last two rounds in the U.S. Open Women’s Open have not been good. I ended Sunday (last year) at Pebble (Beach) I think shooting (80) ,and then today I shot 80.
“I’m human. I’m going to have bad days. I played some really solid golf up to this point. Today was just a bad day. That’s all I can say.’’
In addition to the seven-over 10, Korda had six bogeys and three birdies.
Korda was not alone in tough conditions. When she finished as part of the morning wave of players, she was one of seven players who shot in the 80s, including Lydia Ko who also shot 80.
On Tuesday at the U.S. Women’s Open at the Lancaster Country Club, Lexi Thompson announced that she was retiring from the LPGA Tour at the end of the season from full-time competition. In her 18th consecutive start in the championship, the 29-year-old Thompson is exiting just as Rose Zhang settles into her first full year as a professional. Thompson turned pro at 15 years old and won her first LPGA event just a year later, so she never amassed much of a resume in amateur golf. But Zhang racked up amateur trophies, including a U.S. Women’s Amateur, an NCAA individual title at Stanford and the Augusta National Women’s Amateur while spending a record 141 weeks as the top-ranked female amateur in the world.
Last June in her first event as professional, the Mizuho Americas Open, Zhang beat Jennifer Kupcho in a playoff to become the first woman to win her pro debut since 1951. Earlier this month, Zhang added a second win at the Cognizant Founders Cup. The women’s game is hurting for American superstars beyond Nelly Korda, who has won six of her last seven tournaments, and is the overwhelming favorite this week to earn her third major championship.
Yet the 21-year-old Zhang is as talented as anyone to challenge Korda for years to come for the top of the women’s game. But let’s give her some time to get used to professional golf before we label her as the next No. 1 player in the world and a future Hall of Famer. The teenage success of Thompson, Michelle Wie and Lydia Ko and so many other young women has led us to forget the speed at which things come at young players when they are suddenly thrust into the limelight. Zhang was a few years older than these women when she turned pro, but she’s still very inexperienced in the business of professional sports. Coming off of last year’s success, where she had a victory and four other top 10s in 14 starts, the Irvine, Calif., native has momentum, but she will also likely endure the growing pains that come with life at the highest levels of professional sports. Becoming a great tour player is as much about assembling everything from the right equipment to the right caddie to right accountant to the right agent, as it is about playing tournament golf.
In 2022, Zhang signed with Callaway while still at Stanford. For young players, solidifying a formal relationship with a club and ball manufacturer has long been the most fundamental step toward life in professional golf. In 1996 when another former Stanford legend turned pro, Nike became an inseparable part of the lore that grew around his game. On TV commercials and playing Callaway’s ball and clubs, Zhang is linking herself with a giant in the golf industry. She’s also linking herself to Tiger Woods by signing with his agency, Excel Sports Management, where the 15-time major champion’s long-time agent, Mark Steinberg, is a partner.
But having confidence with your equipment and an agent that you can trust is just the on-ramp to success in tour golf. "Keep the main thing the main thing" is a popular mantra across sports—a focus on the on-field performance—but that’s easier said than done for most professional athletes.
“There's a lot that I want to accomplish,” Zhang told Sports Illustrated. “But in order to do so I realized how important it is to manage my time, my team, and my presence in being able to play. So it's more so focusing on just one thing at a time and allowing myself to be able to compete in the best way that I can.”
The LPGA Tour and women’s golf need Zhang to succeed as it attempts to grow its brand in a golf world currently fractured by the ongoing saga of the PGA Tour vs. LIV Golf. The pressure that Thompson must have felt—pulling her away from the game that she loved at the tender age of 29—is something that Zhang may contend with as she ascends.
“There's a lot more coming at you,” Zhang says. And there's a lot more noise surrounding you. So at least for me, it's important for me to realize how I want to prioritize taking care of my body and health.”
During the offseason, she took on the role of a CEO, assembling those pieces of her team to form her own enterprise. She’s got a couple of years left to finish her degree at Stanford, and she’s similar to the graduates coming out of the school to start lucrative careers as entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. There are a lot of people not just counting on her to succeed, but looking for her to lead and make decisions that she’s never had to make in her life.
“For me the hardest thing has been building my team,” Zhang says. “When you’re coming out of college you have a profession and an obligation to make golf your career. I am essentially my own boss. Putting the right people around me to help me build myself to the best potential is very crucial.”
Zhang’s team includes a caddie, a swing coach, trainers, sports performance specialists and a CPA to help her pay her taxes. To varying degrees, most current players have some semblance of this organization. The most fickle and unstable of these roles are the caddie and the swing coach: jobs that often last at the mercy of a player’s performance in tournaments, preferences and quirks. After working with George Pinnell for nearly decade, Zhang recently began seeing Todd Anderson, who has worked with several PGA Tour players, including Billy Horschel and Brandt Snedeker. Pinnell would always be her mentor, she said, but she needed an instructor who could meet her at events and help with the transition to the LPGA Tour.
No matter how many times Zhang heard other players discuss the challenges of being a professional athlete, she had to experience it for herself to fully appreciate the intricacies of the process. “These are things that I was able to understand early on, but I was never able to experiment on the whole process until I was actually in the thick of it,” she says. “This entire process takes a lot more brain work, but once I build myself around a great team and great people, that's when I can really focus on what I have to do. I've received a lot of great advice from people and I've taken this into my own stride but it's still all a very big learning process.”
For Zhang, a major part of that learning process is seeing where her game stacks up against other top players. Nelly Korda has emerged as perhaps the most dominant player in the women’s game, perhaps since Annika Sorenstam won 11 times in 2002. To win this week in the U.S. Women’s Open or any week for the foreseeable future, Zhang will have to beat Korda, who is still just 25 years old.
“I think there's a lot of expectation in terms of how I should perform, but in my opinion. that’s all noise,” Zhang says. I definitely feel like I am capable of being at the top. But to get to that level it requires everything from a good team to a good practice and good preparation routine. And managing everything involved with the mental and physical side of golf. So I think I'm getting there.”
The U.S. Women's Open is set to begin Thursday at Lancaster Country Club in Pennsylvania.
As expected, Nelly Korda is a massive favorite to win her second Major of the year after having won five of her last six starts. If you want my best bets to win this weekend, you can find my full betting preview here.
In this article, we're going to focus on the opening round. If you don't have the patience to wait for all four rounds to see if your bet is going to win, consider betting on the "First Round Leader" market. It gives us something to cheer for on Thursday so can make the opening round more exciting.
Let's take a look at the first round leader odds and then I'll break down my best bet.
When targeting a golfer to lead after the first round, we want someone who can rack up birdies in a hurry who maybe we don't trust to do it all four rounds. Minjee Lee fits that description perfectly. She leads the LPGA in strokes gained approach (+1.69) but her short game is bound to let her down at some point during the tournament, which keeps her from the winner's circle.
Lee has also had her best stuff in the opening round this season. She's seventh on the LPGA in total strokes gained in Round 1.
Finally, she has historically excelled at the U.S. Open. She won this event in 2022 and finished T13 at the U.S. Open last season.
I'll back her to be the first round leader at 35-1.
Odds refresh periodically and are subject to change.
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