Nelly Korda won The Chevron Championship, captured her third major and returned to world No. 1. She closed with a 2-under 70 and finished five shots clear of the field, the largest winning margin in this major in 18 years.
Korda spent the final 29 holes at Memorial Park playing steady golf and holding a big lead. No one got closer than four shots the whole weekend. “It’s not easy going in with that big of a lead,” said Korda, “I think that was the challenging point with like, where do I still play like Nelly and where do I play a little defensive?”
She made the key par putt from 7 feet to seal the victory. The win sends her back to No. 1 in the women’s world ranking for the first time since August. She celebrated by jumping into the 4 1/2-foot pool built to the right of the 18th green, keeping with the tradition that dates to 1988 at Mission Hills. “Feet first,” she said with a smile, dressed in the winner’s white robe. “I knew it was 4 feet, so I was expecting to hit the ground very fast.”
Korda led by five shots at the start of the day and played with a mix of aggression and caution. She opened with two quick birdies and added two more on the back nine to put the finish within reach. Playing it safe left her with a couple of shorter par putts. She made one on the 11th but left the next one short and her lead was down to four shots.
Her caddie advised a conservative line on the tricky 13th green, but Korda went for the flag. “I actually just sent it at the pin and I had a tap-in birdie,” she said. She then hit a 3-wood close to set up another birdie. Later on the par-5 16th she chose to lay up instead of risking the water, hitting a gap wedge and then a lob wedge to 25 feet for a two-putt par.
The victory was Korda’s 17th on the LPGA and 21st worldwide. Not since Meg Mallon in 2000 had an American reached three majors in her career. Korda shrugged off comparisons to her 2024 run when she won seven times. This season she has been in the final group in all five starts, with two wins and three runner-up finishes, and she led the final 57 holes of this major.
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Much of the late drama centered on a longstanding scoring mark. Korda finished at 18-under 270, one shot short of Dottie Pepper’s 72-hole record set in 1999. She missed a few short putts Saturday that worried her, but she refused to let them take hold. “What I was telling myself was I really want to hoist this trophy because I want to show the kids at home that it’s OK to miss short putts and still win a major championship,” she said with a laugh. “You’re going to make mistakes. You have to mentally still be in it 100%, and that’s really what I wanted show. “I wanted to show it to myself and I wanted to show it everyone looking up to me.”
Ruoning Yin (69) and Patty Tavatanakit (70) tied for second. Yin went 56 holes without a bogey before one on the 17th. Tavatanakit made a 25-foot birdie on the sixth to close within four, but a bogey on the eighth ended her charge. Korda earned $1.35 million and heads next to the Gulf Coast of Mexico. She planned to take Monday to celebrate and be back at work on Tuesday. “I want to go out and play golf. Whatever happens — if I jump into that pond, if I have the trophy in my hands at the end of the day — then great. I gave it 100%. If I don’t, then I have next week. I have the week after. “That’s going to be my mindset for the rest of the year.”
