Anna Nordqvist will walk inside the ropes as a competitor for the last time this week, and then she will not put her clubs away. She will fly to the Netherlands, put on a captain’s polo instead of a player’s bib, and try to lead Team Europe to the Solheim Cup at Bernardus Golf from September 11 to 13. The FM Championship at TPC Boston, the tournament she is playing this week, is the final stop of an 18-year professional career that took her from Eskilstuna to Arizona State to three major championships in three different decades. She announced it herself, in a letter posted to her social media and shared by the LPGA Tour and the Ladies European Tour, and she made a point of saying she wanted it to land on her own terms.
A career that never really slowed down
Nordqvist turned professional at the end of 2008 and won a major in only her fifth start on tour, the 2009 Women’s PGA Championship, a result that got her picked for her first Solheim Cup that same year. She has not missed one since. Nine appearances, five winning teams, and a piece of Solheim history nobody else can claim: the first hole-in-one in the event’s history, made on the 17th at Colorado Golf Club in 2013 during an alternate-shot match with Caroline Hedwall. She added two more majors either side of a strange, cruel loss at the 2016 U.S. Women’s Open, where a bunker-rake infringement she did not know about until midway through a playoff cost her the title. The Evian Championship in 2017 and the AIG Women’s Open at Carnoustie in 2021 rounded out a résumé of three majors across three decades, a distinction that, among players born outside the United States, belongs to her alone.
Why she is stopping now, and not after
Nordqvist was named European captain in February 2025 and has spent the past two seasons as a playing vice-captain, competing at the highest level while also learning the job she was about to inherit in full. She told reporters in Boston this week that carrying both roles into the Netherlands never sat right with her. “I said when I took the captaincy job that I wanted to do this journey with the girls, and this is basically the last event before the Solheim Cup, so I feel like I’ve done and I’ve given my all and I’ve been there for them along the way,” she said. She also pointed to a version of herself that had only recently come back into view. “This year I finally started feeling like myself again inside the ropes, and I wanted to finish my career at a note when I was enjoying the game.” At 39, and with the world ranking having drifted outside the top 200 after a difficult two-year stretch, she chose to stop while a comeback was still working rather than wait for the game to make the decision for her.
The timing was not without its complications. Getting from a tournament in Canada to Boston for the start of retirement week took her 22 hours, cancelled flights and all, and she described sitting on the terminal floor in Toronto in tears at the thought of missing her own retirement dinner with her team. The commissioner let her skip a scheduled player meeting so she could make it in time. It is a small detail, but it says something about how much the LPGA membership wanted to be there for this particular goodbye. Annika Sorenstam, Jessica Korda and Auston Kim were among those who replied publicly to her announcement, and Sorenstam’s tribute in particular carries weight coming from the only Swede with a bigger LPGA résumé than Nordqvist’s.
The team she leaves the tour to captain
None of this changes what happens next. Nordqvist’s European side is set: Charley Hull and Carlota Ciganda lead a group of automatic qualifiers that also includes Lottie Woad, Maja Stark, Céline Boutier, Linn Grant and Nanna Koerstz Madsen, with Leona Maguire and three rookies in Julia López Ramírez, Nastasia Nadaud and Mimi Rhodes filling out the picks Nordqvist announced last week. They travel to Bernardus as challengers, trying to take the cup back from an American side that beat them 15.5 to 12.5 in Virginia two years ago and arrives at Bernardus defending, with Nelly Korda fronting a US team completed by captain Angela Stanford’s picks of Megan Khang, Rose Zhang and Lindy Duncan.
Whatever happens at Bernardus, Nordqvist’s playing career closes with the kind of resume that gets a plaque somewhere at LPGA headquarters. What is harder to put a number on is the way she chose to end it, in public, on a week she picked herself, still competitive enough that the decision was hers to make rather than one made for her. Golf does not always let its best players leave like that. This one got to.