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.
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.
