Nelly Korda faults putting in third-round 1-under 71 performance at KPMG Women's PGA Championship
Nelly Korda said her putting was to blame for her 1-under 71 third-round performance at the KPMG Women's PGA Championship.
Video Transcript
Of course, we are still tracking Nelly Korda.
She's trying to become just the third player in history to win the first three majors of the season, and she is still there, people.
She's still in- striking distance.
Now, she's four back going into tomorrow, and looking at her chasing record, four of her LPGA wins have come from behind after 54 holes.
They were all part of her seven-win 2024 campaign.
She's never come back from more than two, though, so she's left herself a fair bit of work to do tomorrow.
But she knows after today she left some shots out there on the course, and let's hear from the world number one.
Nelly, what would If you had to point to one thing today that didn't get you the round that you wanted, what would it be?
What do you think?
The putting.
Okay.
Thank you.
yeah, I just m- left a few putts out there.
Mm-hmm.
The one, the one on 16, how far was that?
What happened on that one?
I, I don't know.
I just had the wind kinda It was a left to right putt, just left, left edge, and the wind was kinda gusting off my right, and, yeah, just, just, didn't make a very confident stroke.
Beth Ann?
How aggressive do you think you can be tomorrow?
It just depends on the weather.
I mean, you know, you The greens are pretty slick.
they don't have too much grass on 'em, so, the short putts are pretty difficult.
putting in general, I mean, when it gets this windy, you have to calculate in the wind, too, and a gust here and there.
So sometimes, you know, you just aren't as confident with your lines.
Is it fair to say that, winning at Riviera f- has freed you up a little bit?
Or does it feel just the same as it always has- It feels the same in the hunt?
Yeah.
I'm always wanting to be in the hunt, so I feel the, honestly, the exact same.
Yeah.
So after her round today, we saw Nelly on the practice putting area with her sister, Jess.
And Amanda, it's a familiar sight seeing her back out with her big sis just to try and figure things out.
Yeah.
really, Jess has become that second set of eyes that she really relies on, whether it's with the swing or being here on the putting green or even just kind of a soundboard, an emotional support, but also trying to figure out.
You can see that clearly she's upset, like she's frustrated with how her putting went, and is trying to try to figure something out.
Because a few putts here and there, we'd be talking a completely different story how Nelly Korda is right now on the top of the leaderboard.
Well, and, you know, we can go through and, and look at some of her, some of her missed putts, and there was a lot of them that were those little left to righters, those little tough slidey putts, that can make a, that can make or break a round.
But on this golf course in particular, I played on Tuesday in the pro-am.
I played with Alison Lee, and between the pair of us, we were struggling to read some of these putts.
There is an element of insane frustration when you're playing out there.
You're hitting your spots.
The ball's not going in the hole, and then it kind of magnifies itself.
And you'd heard her talk about the wind a little bit there, but this is what we're gon- this is what we're talking about.
This was on the seventh.
This was a little slider to the right, misses it low.
And, and as a player, you, you know that those are the hard putts, right?
The, the right-handed players miss these left to right as low.
There's another one, left to right putt, missing low.
This was on, 16.
Oh.
Missing on the low side.
And all left to right.
That was the one she talked about with the wind.
This one was slightly different.
She thought this was gonna break to the right.
It kinda stays straight and through.
Now, the question is, why does this happen on, on left to right putts?
And this is the, the most common question that I get, you know, when I'm playing golf in pro-ams or anything else, and it's because on left to right putts, as a right-handed golfer, you can still see the hole in the corner of your eye and, and it's, it's kinda your, in your periphery vision.
But on right to left putts, it's kind of almost out of sight, out of mind.
So the tendency is that if there is any doubt in the line, you kind of can guide it towards the hole a little bit and don't kind of get that putter face closing.
You can see what she's doing here.
She's using those tees so that she's getting the making sure that the ball's starting on line and getting a clean stroke on it.
So And the frustration that you saw in her in the press conference is because she knows that she wants to hurry out to that practice putting green.
She doesn't wanna waste any time.
She just can't wait to get going, to, to work on it, to fix it.
Yeah.
We heard it in her press conference.
She said She was asked, where does she think perhaps she was the weakness in her game today, and she said, "Well, what do you think?"
So you could hear the frustration, Amanda.
How does she kind of try to turn that around for tomorrow?
Well, I mean, it's, great.
Right now she's getting it out.
She's gonna be on the putting green trying to figure it out, maybe even laugh with, Jess, get Grayson out, at, back at their house to kind of relax a little bit, but turn that frustration into energy for tomorrow.
Yeah.
So it's a third round at 71 for the world number one, Nelly Korda, as she goes into tomorrow's final round, four back, as she tries to continue her quest for history here on the LPGA.
