Nelly Korda wasn’t too concerned Friday when asked about the pressure of carrying a weighty lead into the weekend at The Chevron Championship.
Her attitude was: If I make a mistake, so be it. Move on (her language was a little more colorful).
That attitude was tested Saturday at Memorial Park Golf Course.
Korda led by as many as eight and never fewer than five, shooting 70 to reach 16 under and carry that latter advantage into the final round of the season’s first major. Patty Tavatanakit, playing alongside Korda in Round 3, scrambled to a 3-under 69 to post 11 under.
Ruoning Yin (66) and Pauline Roussin-Bouchard (67) share third place at 10 under.
“I played really solid on the front and then just kind of — not may have lost concentration, but the wind started picking up and then I just put myself into great positions,” Korda said. “Didn’t kind of execute really well.”
Korda began the day with a six-stroke lead and birdied four of her first six holes to move eight clear of the field. But then the well — or, rather, the putter — ran dry. She had a hard lip-out to make bogey at the par-5 eighth, had a three-putt bogey at the par-4 13th, and had several missed birdie efforts inside 12 feet, including at the 14th, 15th and 16th holes.
Her final birdie putt of the day at the par-4 18th also drifted wide.
Notably, all the misses were to the right. But the attitude held up.
“I mean, at the end of the day I’m learning so much about myself, too. I mean, on the back nine I learned that I needed to stay in it and not to kind of focus so much on my mishits with my putts,” she said.
“So I just needed to keep giving myself opportunities, which I was. I don’t want it to bleed into the other parts of my game where then I start to get so frustrated that it affects my driver, affects my irons. Just didn’t want that at all. I wanted to continue giving myself opportunities even if I want holing them.”
Tavantankit had her own issues, continuing to miss greens – she’s hit only 31 of 54 through three rounds – but she made only one bogey (her first of the championship) in maintaining that second-place position.
“You just do what you got to do. It’s a major championship. It’s playing tough. You’re not going to always have your best, but you just got figure out what’s in front of you,” she said.
Tavatanakit won this championship in 2021, the same year Korda won her first major title at the KPMG Women’s PGA. Korda won major No. 2 at the 2024 Chevron Championship.