PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. — The competitive course record at Riviera Country Club’s inaugural U.S. Women’s Open had been reset twice before Charley Hull even reached the 18th green Saturday afternoon. Jennifer Kupcho held it briefly with a 66 on Thursday. Asterisk Talley matched it early in the third round. Then Hull, playing a few groups behind, made it irrelevant.
She finished with a 65 — seven birdies, one bogey, the lowest score any woman has ever posted at Riviera Country Club — and when the afternoon wave of leaders came home, the Englishwoman sat three back of co-leaders Nelly Korda and Sei Young Kim with 18 holes remaining. A week that had felt on the edge of slipping away had suddenly become something else entirely.
Hull had arrived in Los Angeles not feeling great about her golf. She said so plainly after the round, without a hedge. She had missed multiple cuts in a single month for the first time in three years, and although she won in February and briefly climbed to No. 3 in the world, the weeks since had been turbulent enough that she was watching swing videos on her phone at night, she said, lying awake trying to recapture a feel she could not quite locate. The first two rounds at Riviera — she made the cut but couldn’t make putts — had not much improved the picture.
“Just couldn’t get a putt, so kind of just stuck in there and just went at everything today,” she said Saturday, pausing before the summary of her third-round approach: “Just thought, f— it.”
That phrase, in Hull’s delivery, is not resignation. It is permission. She does not look at pin sheets. She does not carry a yardage book. When the aggressive instinct is fully unlocked, the result is a round like Saturday’s — darts into 6 and 7, a drive to the fringe on the par-4 10th, an approach to four feet on 14, a two-putt birdie on the par-5 17th and another precise iron on 18. The one blemish, a bogey on 3 after running past the green, did nothing to alter the momentum.
She is now at 3 under for the tournament — tied for fifth at the time of signing her scorecard — while Korda and Kim share the lead at 6 under. In Gee Chun, who briefly led Saturday afternoon, sits at 5 under. Hull begins the final round in a pairing with Ruoning Yin at 3:05 p.m. local time.
Whether the 65 holds as a course record for long may depend on what happens Sunday. But its implications for the championship are concrete: Hull entered the day seven shots off the lead and exits it within realistic striking distance of a first major title. She has three LPGA Tour victories. She has been ranked as high as No. 2 in the world. A major has not come, though she has contended in them. Sunday at Riviera will be the closest she has stood to one entering a final round.
She credited the week’s off-course activity as much as anything she changed in her swing. Her cousin Jodie had been with her all week, and Friday night the pair made an excursion to Malibu — because, Hull explained, going to Malibu had always been the cousin’s dream. The destination had been built up in the cousin’s imagination, partly by the 2023 film Barbie, as a place of impossible glamour: surfboards, ocean vistas, blonde convertibles. The reality of Malibu, at least the stretch they visited, fell somewhat short.
“She thought it was gonna be like the ‘Barbie’ movie, you know, where you see people walking around with surfboards going out in the ocean,” Hull told reporters after the round, her cousin standing just off to one side. “We got down there and I was like, ‘We’re in Malibu.’ She’s like, ‘No, we’re not.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, we are.’ She was like, ‘My lifelong dream is being crushed.’ She was devastated. It was absolutely hilarious.”
Hull said she had warned her cousin that Malibu wasn’t what she had pictured. The cousin told her to be quiet. So they went, and Hull spent the rest of the evening, as she put it, unable to stop laughing.
The story captures something that the leaderboard alone does not. Hull’s following — she has nearly 830,000 followers on Instagram — is built partly on a willingness to share exactly this kind of detail without any PR varnish. She once described lying awake “panicky” watching her own swing videos; she describes bad stretches as bad stretches. The authenticity is not a performance. It is, apparently, also a coping mechanism that works. Saturday night plans were straightforward: Mexican food with her boyfriend. No swing videos, she suggested, though she stopped short of promising.
What Hull could not yet say after Saturday’s round was whether she had found the feel she had been chasing all month, or whether Saturday was an outlier. “I’ve got my feels now, just keeping it simple, trying not to think,” she said. But the feel she described is provisional — something she stumbles into rather than controls. That uncertainty is, in a way, the honest account of where her game is. The 65 is real. Whether it carries into Sunday, against a Korda who has been building steadily and a Kim who held a share of the 54-hole lead, is the question this tournament still has not answered.
What the round did answer is that Riviera Country Club, hosting women’s elite play for the first time, has produced a genuinely open championship. Alison Lee led after 36 holes with her infant son watching from the ropes. A 16-year-old Canadian amateur, Aphrodite Deng, reached 4 under through six holes in the third round before fading. Talley set an amateur record for the lowest weekend round in tournament history at 66. And Hull, nursing a slump that had begun to look structural, shot a 65 and made everyone recalculate.
Nelly Korda came into the week chasing the one major she has never won, and she enters Sunday with a share of the lead after birdying the final three holes in her third round. Kim, the 2020 U.S. Women’s Open champion, is in the same position. Hull, three back, would need to shoot something in the range of Sunday what she shot Saturday. According to Golf Digest, the women’s course record at Riviera now stands at 65. Whether Hull extends it, or whether it is her ceiling here, is what the final round is for.
Hull’s 65 is a statistical data point with no precedent at this venue. The U.S. Women’s Open has been played at Augusta National, Pine Needles, Pebble Beach, Shoal Creek. Riviera is new to this list. Major championships at historically male-only venues have a way of producing their own records simply because there is no prior baseline. Hull happened to produce the one that will sit at the top of this column, at least until someone shoots lower at a future Women’s Open here. Whether that comes this Sunday, and whether it comes from her club, is the only remaining question of the week.
