When Nelly Korda curled in a 2-foot, 10-inch putt to win the U.S. Women’s Open at Riviera earlier this month — her second major and fourth victory of the year — questions arrived before the champagne had even dried on the 18th green.
Can she win three in a row? Will she check off the career Grand Slam or Super Slam this year? When will she punch her ticket to the Hall of Fame? This is the LPGA’s biggest moment since…?
For LPGA commissioner Craig Kessler, his first thought was happiness for Korda, who achieved a lifelong dream by summiting a mountain she’d set out to climb when she made her U.S. Women’s Open debut as a 14-year-old at Sebonack on Long Island’s East End. But he also had a question of his own.
How can the LPGA make the most of the transformative gift Nelly Korda has given them?
“Part of my job is to figure out how do we take these moments that are once-in-a-generation moments — Nelly winning four times in the first half of the season, two consecutive majors — how can we parlay that into something that’s great for Nelly and also great for the tour?” Kessler told GOLF in a phone interview Tuesday ahead of the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship.
KESSLER HAS BEEN ON the job for almost a year. A golf lifer who came over from the PGA of America, he took over the LPGA with a vision to transform a sports league that had fallen behind other major women’s sports in terms of what the sum of its parts — world-class athletes with dynamic personalities, during a women’s sports boom and a time where there’s increased interest in golf, both professionally and recreationally — said it could be or should be. That is, a league at the forefront of a cultural explosion, not one that has lagged behind over the past decade.
What Kessler found when he arrived was a challenge bigger than even he thought, but one with clear avenues for quick, positive change if the focus and attention were in the right place.
“I think I was surprised by two things,” Kessler said. “One, just how much opportunity there is here, even more than I had anticipated. And the intensity of the challenge. This is not an organization looking for a single solution. This is an organization with so much opportunity that it requires just an enormous amount of focus across multiple fronts: the broadcast, creating stars, creating an amazing fan experience, reimagining our schedule.”
If you want to understand where Craig Kessler wants to take the LPGA and how he plans to get it there, you have to start with what he has learned about himself since taking the reins.
“My dad used to always say there are a lot of people who think they’re smart and have no problem telling you that,” Kessler said. “But true intelligence comes in the form of questions, in curiosity, in knowing what you don’t know and not being afraid to, well, ask. The people who went far, he said, those who made a difference, big or small, were the ones who were adaptable and open-minded, and more interested in doing something right than in being right.”
Kessler has a vision for where the LPGA should be in five or 10 years. He has ideas and thoughts and flywheels about how to get it there. He arrived and delivered a massive broadcast change that has seen every round shown live for the first time in 75 years. That broadcast has come with enhancements such as drones, more tracers, more cameras, and additional features and improved content to tell the players’ stories. It has been successful. It can improve. Nothing is perfect. He added a new tournament through a deal with Golf Saudi and the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, with a $4 million purse. He plans to reshape the schedule and said the 2027 slate will feature “unbelievable golf courses we’ve never played before.” He wants to elevate every part of the tour for his players, from purses to player dining to social-media content and personal brands.
His first year also has come with mistakes and missteps, most notably the shortening of the Tournament of Champions to 54 holes due to freezing temperatures. It was a decision that Kessler regrets and said kept him up at night for weeks, fearing that he had lost the trust of his players.
But he hasn’t, because Kessler is always asking questions of everyone. Because he’s open and honest and accountable. Because the vision isn’t in concrete, it’s still being shaped, not just by him but by everyone. On tournament week, you’ll find him walking the range talking to players from all parts of his tour, hanging around the Golf Channel set, talking to the media. One thing Kessler wishes he knew when he took this job was how valuable that time is.
“Just be present, be prepared to have authentic conversations, and come in with an open heart and an open mind,” Kessler said. “I wish I had left even more time for myself to do those things.
“I think a year into the job I’m hopefully a better decision-maker and more importantly a better question-asker.”
When Kessler took over, the LPGA was in the middle of a season defined by historic parity. Korda didn’t win in 2025, and at the season-ending CME Group Tour Championship, the question of whether the LPGA needed a dominant star to capture eyeballs was at the forefront. Consensus among the players was that having a deeper tour is better for the overall health of the LPGA, but having a dominant star would be valuable as the league looks at the bigger goal.
“Even if you don’t play golf, you know who Tiger Woods is,” Hall of Famer Lydia Ko said. “Like having that kind of a figure is, yes, very important.”
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WHEN KORDA WON SEVEN times in 2024, her success felt like a missed opportunity for the LPGA under the pre-Kessler leadership. The WNBA was in the midst of an explosion, and it felt like Korda could create a similar tidal wave for women’s golf. That didn’t happen. Perhaps the LPGA wasn’t ready. Korda also was reticent to be the kind of standard-bearer the LPGA needed.
So when Kessler took over, there was no hidden manuscript for how to promote a transcendent star on a historic run, should that come to pass.
Of course, you can’t plan for history. It arrives without warning and asks the adaptable to make the most of an opportunity that might not come again.
Korda’s four-win, two-major start this season is a gift for the LPGA. The tour is littered with talented, marketable players, from Charley Hull to Lydia Ko and Rose Zhang. Women’s golf has a stacked group of young amateurs like Asterisk Talley and Kiara Romero, who will arrive shortly. But if you want to introduce them to the masses, if you want to grab and retain eyeballs in a doom-scrolling world dominated by 30-second social-media videos and endless streaming options, you need something to pull them in. You need gravity as an entry point.
After Korda put her name on the Ben Hogan statue outside Riviera, it was up to Kessler, the team at the LPGA and Korda and her team to figure out how to maximize this moment — to use her gravity and stardom to draw in new fans. That included an interview on “The Pat McAfee Show,” a New York City media tour with a stop on the “Today” show, a surprise Nike billboard at Times Square, a visit to the New York Stock Exchange and select interviews with golf media. It’s the first iteration of what Kessler hopes is a roadmap he will regularly employ throughout his tenure.
“Admittedly, this is not a playbook the LPGA had ever developed, right?” Kessler said. “And so we’re building a new muscle, and if I had to describe it in a word, it’s scrappy. It’s calling everyone we know in our network, seeing who has availability, who’s interested, working with Nelly and her team, and figuring out how do we facilitate a process that everybody’s excited about, and my suspicion is every single time Nelly and some of our other stars win, we will get better at this, and ultimately create a playbook that we can replicate every time we have moments where it makes sense to deploy a toolkit like this.”
As Nelly made her way around the Big Apple media circuit, Kessler got a text from someone in the golf space about the moment Korda’s greatness had engineered — one that can and should serve as a foundational building block toward the breakthrough moment the league is trying to capture.
“This is the first time since Michelle Wie West where the LPGA has a global superstar that transcends the sport she’s playing,” Kessler said, recalling the message. “Totally right, I think people are talking about Nelly and the LPGA because she’s found a way to inspire and tap into culture in a way that maybe we haven’t in a little while. Yeah, and that creates an amazing set of opportunities for Nelly and for many of our other stars who are, let’s say, on the verge of breaking through into culture in the same way that Nelly has.”
Where does Kessler want the LPGA to be in five, 10 years? The vision is bold and ambitious, fitting of the current explosive moment in women’s sports. A global sports and entertainment leader that inspires and gives money back to the community. One that has a stable of superstars whose stories transcend golf and are embedded in broader culture. The plan is, to use Kessler’s word, scrappy. It’s resourceful and daring and will take time and more than two hands. He thinks the tour already is “on the path,” but it will “take time to soak in.”
As the African proverb says: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Kessler wants the LPGA to go far. So does Korda.
So the commissioner, who likes to ask questions, and the introspective superstar, who is eager to do her part to boost the LPGA to its desired destination, are forging the path together.
“She’s a deeply thoughtful person,” Kessler said of Korda. “She’s really smart. We’ll have a conversation, and then a day or two later, out of the blue, I’ll get a text or a call, and Nelly says, ‘Hey, I’ve been thinking more about what we spoke about, and here are a few other ideas.’ I tend to ask a ton of questions of our staff, of caddies, of players … and if we have a big decision to make, I often find myself going out and asking questions, and anytime I have a chance to get Nelly’s thoughts, I feel like the tour is better off because of it.
“From our first conversation to sitting next to her at the [KPMG Women’s PGA] Champions dinner last night, she is more comfortable in her own skin, proud of what she represents, eager to inspire women and girls than I’ve ever seen, and what a gift for the LPGA.”
As Kessler speeds toward Year 2 amid the wave of excitement Korda has created and the LPGA’s plan to capitalize on it, his question still hangs in the air: What was the value of the gift Nelly Korda delivered? The answer won’t come next week or even next year. But it will come — and, for the LPGA’s growth, it will be deeply consequential.
