The past few months have been great for women’s golf – it is definitely being put on the radar with Nelly Korda being compared to Scottie Scheffler.
I think for a spectator it must be exciting to be watching her dominate the game.
It’s not like her dominance or women’s golf have come out of the blue, though. We’re here, we’re front and centre. I think the men in particular have had blinkers on when it comes to what we do, what we achieve and how hard we work.
We play the Grant Thornton Invitational at the end of the season, which is a fun event when we play with the guys. Nelly was in the field and Max Homa said her swing was the best he’d ever seen. She commented that she’d been playing since she was six and if he’d turned on the TV on any other day he would have seen that.
The LPGA is a world Tour but we’re mostly based in the US, so it does help that an American is at the top; it hasn’t happened in a very long time. The women’s game is huge in Asia; it’s where we have our biggest following. But we need more of it in the US and other countries.
The way Nelly is playing is good for our game in general. It will only bring more eyes, and hopefully more sponsors will become interested and start new tournaments or put more money into existing tournaments.
Some people may say it’s boring for one player to be winning all the time on each Tour and they want more excitement. But Scottie Scheffler is rocking up and doing his job and they don’t understand how hard it is to do that week in and week out. As golfers, we do. But to pitch up and do that is so difficult.
You can put the golf together but they don’t understand the mental side of it, when you’re trying to stay in that elevated concentration for so long. That’s what Nelly said is the hardest part, and that’s why winning the Chevron Championship was so difficult for her – she had to make sure she stayed in her bubble and she couldn’t let outside interference bother her. That’s almost harder than the golf. The average person who doesn’t play at a higher level doesn’t understand that.
It’s more a mental exhaustion than physical, because physically we train to be stronger and in decent shape, but on the mental side you can only do so much. You have to switch off but it’s hard to do that when you’ve got continual outside noise.
The men are finally taking notice; I think they’ve almost been forced to because they’ve been asked questions about the women’s game, whereas before that hasn’t really happened.
Nelly has been through a lot in the past two years. She doesn’t like to make things too public – she’s pretty private – but she had health issues last year. We always said that when Nelly’s healthy, what she might be able to do for the women’s game could be limitless.
The players don’t feel any resentment towards Nelly. Because we know how difficult it is, when someone dominates and brings more attention to our game you can only be happy about it.
There’s huge respect for her, also because she is really well liked among her peers. She is shy and has her cocoon that she stays in, but she’s also very approachable among other players and loves to have a laugh. We all get to the course and do our jobs. But she’s great and is a really good person.
I felt disappointment in a way with Chevron. But my coach Doug came over and we made a few small changes, which I needed to do. They didn’t come off in the first round where I shot 83, I don’t know when I last shot 83! But it was weird because I said to Doug that I’d never felt so upbeat after shooting 83. And he said that’s all he needed to know.
We know the changes are good and we just need to let them run. Sometimes that’s the hardest part about being a professional golfer – you want results now but sometimes you have to stay patient and let what you’re working on work its way in. The next day I shot two under.
I always say this game is so hard – you can play so well for a few weeks, but then if you miss the cut, people will talk about that and not about how you played before. It takes you so long to build up and one bad week can just kill your confidence. That’s when you have to remind yourself that it’s just a bad week and you’ve got to shrug it off. That’s what I did after Chevron, because if I’d let it completely get to me, I would have gone to LA and probably not played well either.
In LA I played really steadily; I felt like things started to pay off. I didn’t even play my best and I finished 13th.
I’m just making little tweaks to my game but because I’d got a little far away from where I was, it feels so different. You’ve got to be OK with feeling uncomfortable for a bit and let it run until you get comfortable.
And it happened. I felt a little more comfortable with every round I played.
I know what we’re doing is working and I just need to keep trusting it, and when it all comes together I’m going to be close to contending. What I’ve learned in the past few years is you can’t chop and change and jump all the time, you have to let things run their process and be patient.
– This column first appeared in the June 2024 issue of Compleat Golfer magazine.
Photo: Andy Lyons/Getty Images
