Lydia Ko fired the best round of her LPGA Tour career at the Ford Championship, taking a one-shot lead after the opening round in Phoenix.
Ko opened with four straight birdies and closed with two more, posting a 12-under 60 on a day of extreme low scoring. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually started a round with four birdies, so it was nice to take advantage of the good start and continue that on my back nine,” she said. “Like every golfer, when things go well you also think about the things that could go terribly wrong. I feel like I stayed patient and was rolling it really well.”
Defending champion Hyo Joo Kim shot a 61, making it the first time since the 2003 Kellogg-Keebler Classic that two players were double digits under par in the opening round. Kim started on No. 10, shot 28 on the front nine and finished birdie-eagle-birdie, including a hole-out from the fairway on the par-four eighth.
Ko, in her 13th season, said a recent putter change helped her find a rhythm on the Cattail course at Whirlwind Golf Club. The idea of shooting 59 — a mark Annika Sorenstam alone has reached in LPGA history, 25 years ago in Phoenix — entered her mind when she birdied the 14th and 15th holes, but she missed a seven-foot birdie on the par-five seventh. “That would have been nice to hole that one,” Ko said. “But who knows? Maybe if I holed that one I might not have holed the other two. You can’t think about ‘what if?’ Birdied some other ones that I didn’t expect, so kind of just evens out in that sense.”
Ko’s 60 was the ninth round of 60 or lower in LPGA history, the most recent before this being Lucy Li at Pinnacle Country Club in Arkansas in 2024.
Nelly Korda, who began the year with a 54-hole win in Florida and was runner-up last week in California, holed out from the 18th fairway for eagle and shot 63, one of her career bests. They all played in the morning; no one in the hotter afternoon waves — when temperatures approached 38 degrees Celsius — was able to catch them. Frida Kinhult of Sweden posted a 64, the low score of the afternoon, while Jeeno Thitikul, the world No. 1 in women’s golf, opened with a 69.