“Your job as a top player is to help build this tour.”
—Stacy Lewis, to Golfweek, in 2022
Christina Kim does not accept the premise. The 22-year LPGA veteran is a Nelly Korda supporter, full stop, even as she jokes that she has been on tour almost as long as Korda has been alive. The concept that Korda should be doing more than simply tearing up the circuit at a historic rate—she comes into this week’s U.S. Women’s Open having won six of her last seven starts and is the favorite at Lancaster (Pa.) Country Club—strikes Kim as absurd.
“I’ve always been a fan of people being true to who they are,” Kim said. “And Nelly Korda is, in a word, chill. What’s wrong with someone finding joy and happiness in what they do, and having that sense of wholeness in who they are?”
As to the concept that she’s leaving exposure on the table, Kim balks.
“If anything, she’s the perfect ambassador for our game,” she said. “She has integrity, she will absolutely murder you on the golf course, and there’s no gamesmanship, no snark. She has a good and kind soul.”
This rousing endorsement of Korda can be seen as Exhibit A for the defense. Pitted against that perspective is the quiet but growing concern in certain corners of women’s golf that Korda does bear a deeper responsibility for promoting her sport, and that by resisting a bigger stage—turning down media opportunities both small and massive, and maintaining a wary distance in those she accepts—she has failed to capitalize on an unprecedented moment. And Kim’s perspective as a colleague is different from what you might hear from those in marketing or the media. What she sees as “chill,” others see as insularity or detachment. Both arguments have their compelling points, and definite answers are hard to come by.
Team Korda opted not to participate in this story, which is fair enough; she’s not the first high-profile athlete to turn down an interview around an important event. What’s remarkable about the Korda team writ large, though, is how effectively they’ve built a wall around themselves, how tough it is to penetrate that wall even for journalists who have worked the LPGA beat for years and how their emphasis on privacy clashes with her emergence in 2024 as a superstar in a sport that greatly craves exposure.
She is the greatest player in today’s game by far, and she may be on a journey to becoming one of the greatest ever. Yet in a social media age, at a boom time for women’s athletics, the 25-year-old has defied the odds and remained a cipher even within professional golf.
“So sad seeing golf media, yet again, shred Lexi,” Jessica Korda tweeted, and many saw this as another example of how some figures in women’s golf purport to want equal treatment, but react defensively when that treatment becomes even vaguely critical.
Jessica Korda’s tweet shines a light on the general Korda attitude toward golf media, but many conflicts have taken the less dramatic form of simple abstention. Issues arose in the past with Nelly opting out of pre-tournament press conferences, and at the 2021 AIG Women’s Open, her first appearance after winning the gold medal and just two months after her first major victory, her absence was so glaring that a British journalist brought it up with R&A chief executive Martin Slumbers at his own presser.
“This is a massive week to promote women’s golf. Is it disappointing that the World No. 1 … is not giving a press conference this week?” the journalist asked.
Slumbers responded that Korda would be doing interviews after her rounds and it was most important that she felt rested, but the problem persisted for some time before a tentative truce was reached.
Again, Korda is not alone among her fellow LPGA players when it comes to a perceived lack of engagement. In 2022, Terry Duffy, the CEO of the CME Group, a title sponsor of the LPGA, went public with remarks to Golfweek that he was “embarrassed” and “exceptionally disappointed” when no players showed up to a year-end dinner at the Tour Championship, Korda included.
“As a top American, as No. 1 in the world, you’re going to be asked to do a lot of things,” Stacy Lewis told Beth Ann Nichols of Golfweek. “You’re going to be asked to do a lot of interviews that you don’t want to do. You need to do it because it’s what’s best for the tour. It will be productive for you; it will be productive for the tour. It creates more exposure, and that’s your job. Your job as a top player is to help build this tour … the current generation needs to hear it, needs to be taught it.”
But while Korda is far from the only offender, her status and success have made some of her recent choices look questionable. She criticized TV coverage at the Chevron Championship—“I feel like we just need a stage. We need to be put on TV. I feel like when it’s tape delay or anything like that, that hurts our game”—but multiple sources also confirm that in the wake of her victory, she had an offer to appear on “The Today Show “in New York, and had other discussions about a guest spot on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” She appeared on neither.
One LPGA reporter referencing these incidents painted a sharp contrast between Korda’s claim that playing well would create its own promotional opportunities and the subsequent refusal to seize those opportunities. Another media figure pointed out that LPGA players don’t get a lot of chances at exposure on the national level, and to pass up the rare times when it comes around costs the sport a potentially significant chunk of new viewers.
Nelly Korda’s attendance at the Met Gala in May surprised many given her proclivity for such public appearances.
Others interviewed expressed sympathy for Korda, arguing that it’s unfair to ask her to become Caitlin Clark, or even a charismatic figure in the women’s game like Nancy Lopez. (“She’s not Caitlin Clark, and she’s never going to be,” one said.) There’s a heightened expectation that rises to a double standard, one writer told me—Korda now reliably does press conferences at tournaments, she appears on TV after rounds, she dips her toe into independent media and tries to grow the game in smaller ways like working with junior golfers. If she were a man, she might not be expected to do anything more, but the underdog status of women’s golf creates expectations for its stars that might be viable for someone like Michelle Wie West, but can be crushing for an introvert.
“You’re on a razor’s edge,” Kim, the LPGA veteran, agreed, “trying to balance what’s best for yourself against what’s good for the greater game of golf. There’s a bit of a double standard.”
“In some ways,” one journalist said, “this is where we’ve always been with the LPGA. We get one of these potentially transcendent stars, and we want to squeeze the ever-loving blood out of the turnip, because we don’t know when we’ll get it again.”
Still, to stiff-arm even giant national outlets makes her unique. Plenty of players prioritize TV over print media due to the opportunity for broader exposure, but Korda has even shut down the biggest names. It’s her prerogative, of course, but it’s easy to understand the frustration this creates within a sport that is thirsty for exposure.
My first interaction with either Korda sister came at the 2021 KPMG Women’s PGA Championship, when Jessica Korda seemed annoyed at what I thought was an innocuous, even positive question about her clinching a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. More than a year later, at the LPGA CME Group Tour Championship in 2022, Nelly Korda’s coach Jamie Mulligan gave an interview to Golfweek in which he went in depth on Nelly’s blood-clot scare earlier that year, and how harrowing the first day had been (She was eventually sidelined almost three months after surgery). At the pre-tournament press conference, Nelly Korda was clearly displeased.
“I was not very happy with that article,” she said. “I’m very private about my medical history, my medical issues.”
When I asked if she was upset that Mulligan had given those details, she didn’t quite throw him under the bus, but she did emphasize the value she put on privacy, and that she had “nothing to say” about her coach. Mulligan still works with Korda, but the message was loud and clear.
In both cases, it was tempting to wonder why the reactions were so severe. Why get upset about a question about making the Olympics? Why be so secretive about a medical detail that emphasizes your strength and resilience, and would seemingly garner sympathy from the public? Why the almost compulsive retreat to privacy? It’s easy to ask these questions when you don’t share their experience of intense media exposure, but it still feels as though the suspicion is so deeply ingrained that they end up fighting unnecessary battles.
This insularity, and whatever mistrust the family holds for the press, all play a part in keeping a star like Nelly Korda behind a veil. There have been recent attempts to seek exposure in alternative ways, like videos and podcasts and her surprising appearance at the Met Gala, and she’s proven adept at navigating these situations despite her inherent shyness. It may be impossible to know her, but when she allows herself to be seen just a little, people tend to like her.
As to the larger issue of what Korda owes to her sport—a discussion which will inevitably be re-litigated this week at the U.S. Women’s Open—we’re at an impasse, if not an outright stalemate. Is it her job to broaden her appeal? Is the LPGA’s job to market her more effectively? Is it ridiculous to compare a niche sport like golf with the surge of interest in women’s basketball? And to what extent does the walled-off Korda family make all of this a moot discussion?
For now, what anyone wants from Nelly Korda is beside the point; she will give what she’s comfortable giving, and in the meantime, she’ll thrive in the space of zero ambiguity—the golf course itself, where the shyness and the suspicion give way to the spectacle of a great champion. In that arena, complications vanish, and there is no one in the world whose expectations exceed her own.
