How the U.S. Women’s Open is rectifying Mike Whan’s LPGA TV ‘regret’

Sometime, we would speak about Nelly Korda’s second spherical at this U.S. Ladies’s Open because the second her profession modified.

For Nelly, a victory at Erin Hills can be the crown jewel of her in any other case glowing profession, bringing her 60 p.c of the way in which to the grand slam and furthering her climb to the summit of the ladies’s sport. Her 67 on Friday, to maneuver to 5 beneath for the event and properly inside second-round chief Mao Saigo, can be the catalyst that began all of it, surging her up the leaderboard.

For now, although, we’re speaking about Nelly Korda’s second spherical on the U.S. Ladies’s Open as a result of we are able to see it. All of it. Each single broadcast shot. Totally free, too — coming to us dwell on the U.S. Ladies’s Open Twitter feed.

On Friday afternoon, Korda’s second-round 67 at Erin Hills earned the so-called “Masters” therapy from the USGA’s content material group: A 16-minute superclip of each shot from her spherical that lives on the USGA social media channels (as Augusta Nationwide does with all rivals within the Masters app annually). By nature, the video is nothing particular — however like so many different core items of the golf “content” world in 2025, it’s the actual form of catnip that lands as music to the ears of golf’s hardcore followers.

“But they also get about a tenth of the network opportunities of men’s golf,” Whan mentioned. “I am not really sure if it’s [the] chicken [or the] egg. I’d love to have two seasons where women are on network TV for 37 weeks in a row and see what that looks like, but we never really had that opportunity. I have that regret.”

Whan’s second of readability on the subject of tv was revealing of his strategy to each jobs: his earlier and his present.

Within the case of his earlier job, Whan approached the difficulty of tv as an issue that wanted fixing. If girls’s golf had too few hours on community TV, then the simplest resolution was merely to … get extra community TV hours. Sure, the LPGA’s viewership is inarguably decrease than most males’s skilled golf (although it does routinely out-rate LIV), however the variety of hours the LPGA spends yearly on nationwide TV networks pales compared to the PGA Tour.

The query Whan confronted in his efforts to resolve the issue was simply as he posed it: Hen or Egg? Is the supply of the LPGA’s lack of main TV hours lackluster TV viewership, or is lackluster TV viewership for the LPGA being attributable to a scarcity of main TV hours?

On the USGA, although, Whan appears to have shifted his perspective: The TV downside just isn’t an hours concern, it’s a quantity concern.

Sure, the U.S. Ladies’s Open holds further weight in rights negotiations, making it simpler to have extra hours on NBC. However any golf fan will let you know that televised hours are just one element of an excellent event. For years, the Masters had probably the most restricted televised window in golf whereas concurrently serving as the game’s most beloved occasion.

The important thing to Augusta Nationwide’s success — and to a lesser extent, the U.S. Ladies’s Open — is making probably the most out of these hours. That is the strategy that seems to be dominating Whan’s USGA because it heads into the weekend from Erin Hills: Not simply extra, however higher.

This week’s U.S. Open telecast could have probably the most hours of any occasion this yr on community TV and the complete weight of the NBC weekend golf timeslot. It is going to even have NBC Golf’s full bag of toys: a bunch of drones and distinctive graphics packages to associate with the primary utility of Drone Tracer expertise within the girls’s sport. Becoming a member of these additions is probably the most sturdy digital media providing ever on the U.S. Ladies’s Open, with clips like Korda’s 16-minute spotlight reel and teaser movies shot by the USGA’s in-house video group.

On their very own, these modifications are hardly sufficient to maneuver the needle. However collectively they kind a form of volume-focused strategy to girls’s golf protection that makes the event protection really feel extra important — and that’s not nothing.

Is it sufficient to show the tide for ladies’s golf? The USGA and NBC can solely management so many items of the puzzle. As Augusta Nationwide chairman Fred Ridley identified on the 2024 Masters, a part of the explanation for the WNBA’s groundswell within the Caitlin Clark period is the existence of a very transcendent celebrity. Ladies’s golf won’t have its Caitlin Clark — or Tiger Woods — determine but.

However it does have Nelly Korda, who enters the weekend at Erin Hills with an actual probability at a career-altering victory. A Sunday afternoon on NBC with Korda firing bullets in competition would go a good distance towards delivering the form of viewership and story that each sports activities league craves.

A Korda victory can be an end result befitting the trouble the USGA and NBC have put forth into this championship. However because the solar units on Friday, all we all know for positive is that we’ll be capable of see all of it. That’s a step in the best path for the hen or the egg.