PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. — The trophy sat in Maja Stark’s room all year. Every morning she looked at it. Every morning it reminded her of the thing she had already done and the thing she needed to do again. When she handed it back at the opening ceremony this week at Riviera Country Club, she wasn’t sad. “It’s more fun to play for it than to have it,” the defending champion said.
Nelly Korda never got to feel that way about this tournament. She has three majors. She has been the best women’s golfer in the world for most of the past two years. She has finished second at the U.S. Women’s Open, missed the cut at the U.S. Women’s Open, and sat alone with the accumulating weight of a title that has refused to come. “It’s still very complicated,” she said Wednesday. “It’s just an absolute heartbreaker.”
The 81st edition of the championship begins Thursday at Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades — the first time in the tournament’s history that it has been staged in Los Angeles County, and the first time the century-old club patronized by Hollywood royalty and the ghosts of Ben Hogan has opened its fairways to women competing for a major. The purse stands at $12 million. The winner collects $2.4 million. None of that is what makes this week feel different. What makes it feel different is that the best player on the planet has declared, without saying it quite so plainly, that this is the one she needs.
“I was just hungry for more,” Korda said of last year’s runner-up finish behind Stark at Erin Hills in Wisconsin. “Last year was just a weird year of kind of not necessarily playing my best, but also when I did, not getting the bounces or just missing by a centimeter here and there. But I also learned a lot about myself. It made me hungrier to be in those positions,” the Associated Press reported.
She has been feeding that hunger at a pace the LPGA Tour has rarely seen. Three wins in 2026, including the Chevron Championship in April — her third major title and second at that event. Three more second-place finishes. A return to the top of the world rankings she now holds with authority. Through the first 13 events of the season, the tour has produced only four repeat winners: Korda, world No. 3 Hyo Joo Kim, Hannah Green, and world No. 2 Jeeno Thitikul. Not a single first-time winner has emerged, a statistical anomaly that underlines how thoroughly the elite tier has sealed off the rest of the field.
Thitikul, who won the Mizuho Americas Open in May and the Honda LPGA Thailand in February, arrives at Riviera still chasing her first major despite holding the No. 2 ranking for most of the past 18 months. She and Korda tee off together in Thursday’s first round alongside Kim, the kind of pairing that renders the rest of the draw almost secondary. Five combined wins this season between two players. One major title between them at this event: zero.
Riviera was designed by George C. Thomas in the 1920s. Arnold Palmer called it one of the greatest tests in the game. Its kikuyu rough is punishing in ways that standard bentgrass setups are not — the dense, wiry grass grabs club heads, shuts faces, and sends shots sideways in ways that are difficult to predict and nearly impossible to practice for. The course stretches to 7,400 yards at a par of 71. It has hosted the 1948 U.S. Open and two PGA Championships, and it will host the 2028 Olympic golf competition. Thursday marks the first time women have competed here for a major championship. The last men’s major staged at a venue making its major debut this season was the PGA Championship at Aronimink, where the field’s reaction to the course’s severity proved as much a story as the golf itself.
Korda has played Riviera once before this week and says she has done almost no advance research on the layout. That is, characteristically, deliberate. “If I’m being honest, I haven’t done research at all,” she told reporters Wednesday. “I had my coach Jamie Mulligan come out here — he’s from this area and he’s been at this golf course millions of times. Sometimes too much information isn’t really good. So I just try to play the golf course and kind of figure it out on my own.” Her husband, Jonnie West, will caddy for her this week. Their six-year-old daughter Makenna will be watching from the gallery.
The subtext of that approach — trust the instincts, limit the noise — is the same philosophy Korda has applied to a season in which she has looked like a different golfer than the one who went winless through all of 2025. Last year she could not turn quality ball-striking into trophies. This year the conversion rate has been ruthless. The gap between Korda and the rest of the field in greens in regulation, proximity to the hole, and scrambling percentage has been measurable and consistent. She has not finished lower than eighth in any start until a T-8 at the Kroger Queen City Championship in May, which registered as a mild surprise given the standard she had set.
Among the others with legitimate claims on the week: Ruoning Yin, the 2023 KPMG Women’s PGA champion who has been playing her sharpest golf of the season after a slow start, with a T-2 at the Chevron and a runner-up at Mizuho to show for it. Lydia Ko, world No. 10, who needs only the U.S. Women’s Open to complete what the LPGA considers the career grand slam — four of the five modern majors. Hannah Green, with two wins already in 2026. Celine Boutier, the most recent tour winner after taking the ShopRite LPGA last weekend, arriving at Riviera with momentum and the confidence of a player who just climbed ten spots in the world rankings in a single week.
And then there is Michelle Wie West, who came out of retirement to play her first tournament since the 2023 U.S. Open. She won this championship in 2014 at Pinehurst — the last time the women’s Open produced a moment large enough to force itself into the broader sports conversation. Wie West is 36, a mother of two, using her final year of exemption. Her caddy this week is her husband. Her daughter is watching. There is an undeniable symmetry between her story and Korda’s, separated by 12 years and one major title each.
Whether this Open produces another 2014 — a generational performance at a setting grand enough to carry it beyond the golf audience — depends on variables no preview can resolve. Riviera’s kikuyu rough has not been tested by a women’s field at major pressure. The course has not been set up for a USGA women’s championship before. What the rough does to Korda’s iron play on the back nine Sunday afternoon, what Thitikul’s short game looks like when a major is four holes away, whether Stark’s rebuilt mental approach survives the pressure of defending: none of it is knowable yet. The men’s game got its own unexpected answer at a storied venue last month, when Aaron Rai shocked the field at Aronimink to claim the PGA Championship. NBC Sports reported that USA Network and NBC will carry coverage Thursday through Sunday, with streaming on Peacock throughout the week.
Korda said she welcomes the pressure. She said there is nothing better, for a competitive person, than being in the hunt on a back nine. She said all the off-week practice, all the grinding, is justified only when it leads to that feeling. She has been in that position at this specific championship before and come away without the trophy. Whether Riviera finally ends her complicated relationship with the U.S. Women’s Open is the question that will organize everything that happens here over the next four days.
