Opinion: Nelly Korda, LPGA whiffing on chance to lift women’s golf

As Nelly Korda continues to dominate, generating new interest in women’s golf should be one of the easiest sales jobs the LPGA will ever have.

Last Sunday, a peak audience of 1.9 million people tuned in to NBC and watched Nelly Korda record her fifth consecutive tournament victory at the Chevon Championship, the first major of the LPGA season.

It’s not a Caitlin Clark rating, but for a sport that has been plagued by poor television coverage, lack of breakthrough stars and questionable management, it was one of the better days women’s golf has seen in quite some time.

In theory, the LPGA should be in prime position to reap some of the benefits being generated by the recent surge of interest in women’s sports.

For one thing, their counterparts on the men’s tours have turned off scores of fans thanks to the interminable struggle between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf and the odious greed driving so much division and dissatisfaction.

After years of unfairly blaming the prominence of Asian players for struggling to connect with stateside audiences, the LPGA now has a 25-year-old American from a prominent sporting family dominating the sport.

And given that fewer than 100 days remain before the Olympics, where Korda will be defending her gold medal from Tokyo three years ago, this should be one of the easiest sales jobs women’s golf will ever have to generate real, enduring new interest in what has always been a very good and watchable product.

The door is open. There are no excuses. The time is now.

But is women’s golf truly ready for this moment? I’m not so sure.

Up until now, three things have been undeniably true about women’s golf and its struggle to break through outside of its small, niche fan base:

• The LPGA has failed to craft a compelling narrative for why people should watch, outside the mere fact of its existence
• Some of its stars, including Korda prominently, haven’t gone above and beyond to promote the game and make themselves familiar to large audiences
• And television has struggled to give the product its due, both in terms of exposure and quality of broadcast

The third point, in particular, was disappointing Sunday. While NBC should be given credit for putting the Chevron on its over-the-air network and not stuffing it on Peacock or the Golf Channel, it would have been jarring this weekend to flip between the LPGA and the concurrent PGA Tour event being shown on CBS.

While the latter featured sharp graphics, high-tech camera angles and shot-tracing gizmos that are now standard in men’s golf broadcasts, the NBC coverage looked like a penny-pinching, outdated endeavor – the bare minimum to get these women on TV.

At a time when we’re now used to a women’s basketball broadcast on ABC or ESPN looking and feeling the exact same as a men’s broadcast, it was actually jarring to turn on NBC and see something that was so technically inferior to what the same network does when it shows the Players Championship or the U.S. Open.

And because NBC clearly didn’t devote as many camera crews as it would have for a men’s major championship, it couldn’t show much of what was happening in the groups ahead of Korda. As a result, the broadcast felt like it dragged along at a glacial pace because there just wasn’t much action in-between Korda’s shots.

While NBC may be happy with the rating and proud of giving women’s golf an opportunity to be shown on network TV, it should be embarrassed by the way it presented the product. The magnitude of Korda’s achievement and the moment for the LPGA were simply not done proper justice.

But this is more than a television issue.

Korda has been a potential gold mine for the LPGA ever since she won her first event at age 20 but has been known for being quite discerning about how much time she’s willing to spend doing the kind of extra promotional work that the sport badly needs.

Whether you attribute it to her preference for privacy or wanting to focus only on the birdies and bogies, the reality is that it’s hard for women’s golf to maximize this moment when its biggest star is not known to be particularly media-friendly or willing to promote something other than her golf swing.

It was interesting before the Chevron that Stacy Lewis, a two-time major winner, said point-blank that Korda had a responsibility to be more visible and more accessible in service of the LPGA.

“Every week, she needs to be in here (with the media) talking about it and talking about how good she’s playing, and I don’t know what that’s going to be, what that looks like for her,” Lewis said. “I’ve been in her shoes, I’ve been No. 1 in the world, I’ve been the top American and you’re asked to do a lot of things.

“But give the media a couple hours every week. That’s what she’s going to have to start doing. But her playing great golf, that’s what pushes us more forward than anything.”

It was notable that Korda, shortly after her victory Sunday, showed up for a brief chat on the “No Laying Up” podcast that is particularly popular with younger golf fans. That was a positive step. On the other hand, it wasn’t so great that Korda pulled out of this week’s JM Eagle LA Championship, citing exhaustion from winning four events in five weeks.

While it’s hard to criticize an athlete for being cautious with their schedule and their body, it’s also true that Korda skipped the LPGA’s Asian swing in February and early March and won’t have another tournament to play until May 9. Barring an injury, there’s an argument to be made that Korda should have at least tried to give it a go as the LPGA stops in the nation’s second-biggest media market.

The responsibility on star women’s athletes to both perform and promote can often seem unfair, and maybe it is. Does Scottie Scheffler get the same scrutiny for how many media and promotional commitments he takes on or which tournaments he skips?

That’s a legitimate conversation, but if the LPGA and its players aspire to capitalize on the wave of enthusiasm for women’s sports and Korda’s historic streak, they need to show more readiness than we’ve seen so far.

Korda needs to do better. The LPGA needs to do better. And television networks definitely need to do better.