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

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — Nelly Korda doesn’t want to think ahead. She’s a graduate of the same school as Scottie Scheffler. Sunday? We’ve got Saturday first. 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.

Yes, but … she has a 3-shot lead at halftime of the AIG Women’s Open at the Old Course in St. Andrews. Legacy-defining moments don’t just manifest suddenly on the final hole of a tournament. They percolate, from Tuesday to Thursday to Saturday morning and Sunday night. Korda’s moment is percolating.

That the 26-year-old, undisputed best-golfer-on-the-planet sits atop the leaderboard may not surprise you. That’s been a theme of the entire season. That Korda has ripped around with just a single bogey is impressive. That she’s doing it with a putter she picked up Wednesday is, too. But when it’s happening and where it’s happening and what’s happened before this is important. It’s been a very weird summer for Korda. And it’s blowing a hoolie, as the Scottish 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. She failed to break 80 in two different majors. She went on vacation. She contended for a medal at the Olympics before a puzzling ejection down the stretch. Then she spent a week in Prague with her family, “recharging” her batteries and showed up to St. Andrews no longer the betting favorite. The reason for that isn’t so much about recent play as it is 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, parkland course north of London. It was about 20 degrees warmer. No one talked about the wind. 

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A tournament like this in a place like St. Andrews — where gusts are regularly breaching 35 mph and greens are being slowed down just to make them playable — is golf’s closest thing to the way grand slam tennis championships are played on different surfaces. In order to be an all-timer in tennis, you have 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 Bermudagrass comforts of sweaty Florida, but to be an all-timer you have to do it at an Open, in the wind and the rain and the unpredictable bounces of a firm links. 

Roger Federer won just one French Open on the slippery clay of Roland Garros but damnit he figured out a way to do it, just the once, in 2009. (Rafael Nadal took over from there.) It took Andre Agassi 13 tries to win there but he got it done, too. Iga Swiatek, the No. 1 women’s player in the world, is aptly nicknamed the Queen of Clay, but she can’t cut it on the Wimbledon grass. In the other three slams, she wins at an 85% clip. In southwest London, she 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 tour. Seb is really good, not-yet-great, ranked 16th in the world. The instant he wins a slam — on any surface — the next question will be, can he win on another one?

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

I asked Nelly about that idea Friday. Winning is great everywhere, but could it be more validating to do it right here, right now?

“For sure,” she replied. “I think just this year in general, I’ve won on just so many different types of grasses in different types of conditions that you just kind of always have to adapt. That’s the same thing in tennis, same thing in life. You’re always adapting to your situations at hand, and I think that’s what’s so fun about links golf is you’re literally starting it 30 yards left of your target. I’m not a fade player but I’m hitting massive fades. I think it’s fun hitting these little low drivers, too.

“I’m having fun, and I enjoy links golf a lot. Obviously every year that I get to play it, I learn a little bit more about it, too.”

Korda sounds like other golfing greats when she talks like that. Like Rory McIlroy missing three straight U.S. Open cuts before five straight top 10s. Or Phil Mickelson taking two decades to learn how to control the ball along the ground in linksland. When it finally all 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.