Staff WriterThe Ford Championship served up the golfing equivalent of a brilliant sequel: familiar stars, sharper tension, and a finish that felt both inevitable and fiercely earned.
Hyo Joo Kim defended her title at Wild Horse Pass with a 28-under total of 260, holding off Nelly Korda for the second straight week and turning an already crowded LPGA leaderboard into a private duel between two of the cleanest strikers on the planet.
That same one-two punch, in back-to-back weeks, had not been seen on the LPGA Tour since Annika Sorenstam and Se Ri Pak in 2001. Which tells you this was not ordinary spring golf in the Arizona sun.
This was elite players trading blows with the sort of control most golfers only achieve in dreams, usually right before waking up in a mild panic.
Kim turns a title defence into a statement
Title defences are awkward things. Everyone tells you it is just another week, which is like saying a dentist’s chair is just another seat. Kim handled it with the calm of someone reading a menu.
She arrived off a win at the Fortinet Founders Cup and somehow found another gear, becoming the first player in LPGA Tour history to shoot 61 or lower twice in the same tournament. Her scoring line was outrageous, her control even more so. She set the 54-hole and 72-hole tournament scoring records at the Ford Championship, made 27 birdies, added three eagles, and never looked like she was borrowing confidence from anybody.
More telling still, Kim finally did something she had never done before on the LPGA Tour: win back-to-back starts. For a player with a major championship, nine career victories and a reputation for being as tidy as a surgeon with good sleep, it was another reminder that excellence in this game does not always shout. Sometimes it just keeps taking the middle of the clubface hostage.
Kim herself admitted that defending a title is no simple business, and her explanation landed with the plain honesty of someone who knows exactly what she had pulled off:
“It’s super hard as a player to become a defending champion. But I took the great energy from last week and the course and all of that into this place here and I want to carry that on to next week.”
That was the week in a nutshell. No fuss. No theatre. Just momentum, bottle and a score that looked as though it had been assembled with a calculator rather than a golf club.
Korda keeps knocking on the door
If Kim was the winner, Korda was the shadow that never went away.
She finished runner-up again, her first back-to-back second-place finishes, after posting 25-under 262 to tie her career-best 72-hole score. There was nothing flimsy about it. Korda made 22 birdies, four eagles and hit 63 of 72 greens in regulation, the second-most in the field. On plenty of other Sundays, that combination gets you the trophy, the photos and a very pleasant dinner.
Not this time.
The American’s week had real bite. Four eagles in a tournament is serious work, and there was a sense throughout the Ford Championship that she was only half a breath from turning the whole thing on its head. But Kim never blinked, and Korda was left with the peculiar frustration of playing beautifully while being asked to admire someone else’s masterpiece.
Still, her perspective was revealing. Rather than sulk at another near miss, Korda sounded like a player who trusts the direction of the thing, even if the timing has been mildly inconvenient.
“I would say it’s still really good. There’s times when I’m going to get frustrated. I’m a human being, so I’m going to get down and I’m going to get a little frustrated. But I’m trying to get over that as fast as possible. I’m just very grateful. If you’d have told me this time last year the finishes that I would have right now, I would be super happy with the game that is trending.
Last year I just felt so weird with my game. Nothing was kind of going my way. I’m really happy. I’ve put in a lot of work, and that’s the best thing about golf is that you can always improve and you can have someone like Hyo Joo that’s going to test you and push your buttons but in a really good way to improve.”
There is a lot buried in that quote. Gratitude. Competitive irritation. Perspective. And, perhaps most importantly, a player who knows her game is trending in the right direction even if Kim keeps appearing in the doorway holding the silverware.
The Ford Championship became a birdie festival
This Ford Championship was not so much a grind as a glorious sprint.
Lydia Ko opened with a 60, the best 18-hole score of her career, and finished fourth after another week that confirmed she is never far from the thick of things. Minami Katsu, bogey-free in the final round, took third after leading the field with 28 birdies and needing just 104 putts for the week. In Gee Chun, meanwhile, rolled back the years with a top-five finish in only her second start of 2026, her best such result since the 2022 AIG Women’s Open.
It was that kind of leaderboard: major champions, proven closers and players with enough firepower to scorch a place if they caught the right gust of confidence.
Ko’s tournament was especially interesting because it began in a blur and then settled into something a touch more complicated. An opening 60 can distort the week that follows. Everything after it feels as though it is happening underwater. Yet Ko still found plenty to admire in her golf, even if the greens demanded more concentration than she might have liked.
“Yeah, I started off with a bang, and I think when you have a round like that, the rest of the week feels very slow in that sense. But I feel like I played really solid. I missed quite a lot of actually short putts over the last couple days. But the greens, I found it very difficult. Putts where you normally don’t really think about it, you just walk up and hit, I felt with the greens getting firmer and faster, you had to put a little bit more attention to it. But other than that, I played really solid overall. It’s been a while since I’ve played three weeks in a row, so next week is going to be, I think, fun, but hopefully momentum going into Vegas.”
That sounded about right. Ko was good enough to contend, sharp enough to know where it slipped, and experienced enough not to confuse a strong week with a perfect one.
Records, aces and the sort of week people remember
The tournament record book took a proper hammering.
Ko’s first-round 60 set the new 18-hole mark. Korda’s 128 claimed the 36-hole record. Kim then took over from there with 191 through 54 holes and 260 for the week. Between them, they turned the Ford Championship into a statistical demolition job.
There were fireworks elsewhere too. Jenny Bae and Nasa Hataoka both made holes-in-one during the week, with Hataoka’s ace earning her a 2026 Ford Bronco Badlands. Bae’s was the first of her LPGA Tour career. CME Group’s donation tied to aces also pushed more money toward St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, adding a decent note of substance to all the noise.
And that is often the mark of a good tournament: the numbers are gaudy, the leaderboard strong, and the week leaves behind something more than a few scorecards and sunburn.
What this win means now
For Kim, this victory does more than pad an already impressive résumé. It puts her at No. 1 in the Race to the CME Globe, gives her two wins in four starts this season, and makes her the first repeat winner of 2026. More than that, it gives her momentum that feels sturdier than a simple hot streak.
She has now won on the LPGA Tour in five of the last six seasons. That speaks to range, durability and a game that ages well because it was never built on panic in the first place.
For Korda, the takeaway is equally significant, if less glamorous. Her game is trending, her ball-striking is powerful, and her patience appears to be improving. Runner-up finishes can be maddening, but they are also often the last stop before a win.
As for the Ford Championship itself, it got exactly what any tournament wants: star power, scoring, drama and a finish with consequences. Kim defended. Korda threatened. Ko dazzled early. Katsu and Chun pushed hard. The leaderboard had weight to it, and the golf had teeth.
In other words, this was not one of those forgettable weeks where everyone smiles for the sponsor boards and scurries off to the airport. This one lingered.
And in the end, the Ford Championship belonged once more to Hyo Joo Kim, who currently looks like the kind of player every field dreads: calm, precise and entirely unimpressed by the pressure that makes everyone else chew their sleeves.
