Jeeno Thitikul has won eight times on the LPGA Tour, held the world number one ranking, and collected a Rolex Player of the Year award along the way. The one thing missing from that list is a major championship, and on Thursday at Royal Lytham & St Annes she went about closing the gap in the most emphatic way available to her: seven birdies, no bogeys, and a round of 64 that is the lowest ever recorded at the AIG Women’s Open in fifty stagings at this course. She leads by two.
The old record at Lytham had stood at 65, shared by several players over the championship’s long relationship with this stretch of Lancashire coastline. Thitikul did not scrape past it. She played the front nine in steady, unhurried fashion, then turned for home and simply kept making putts, the kind of round where the card looks tidier with each hole rather than more dramatic. There was no rescue par, no eagle to paper over a mistake. Just eighteen holes without a single dropped shot, which on a genuine links course, in a genuine major, is its own kind of statement.
A Career Missing Only One Line
Golf has a habit of remembering major winners and forgetting nearly-major winners no matter how much silverware sits between the two, and Thitikul knows the arithmetic better than anyone. She has been the best player in the world by ranking without being able to claim the title that actually proves it, a gap that has followed her through several close calls at these championships before. A round like Thursday’s does not close that gap by itself, but it does something almost as valuable: it puts her in position to spend three more days playing with the lead rather than chasing it, which is a very different kind of pressure to carry into a Sunday.
Ryu’s Bid for a Third Straight Major
Two shots behind, in a tie for second with Shiho Kuwaki, sits the player with the most compelling story of anyone in the field regardless of what Thitikul does this week. Haeran Ryu has won the last two women’s majors in succession, closing out the Women’s PGA Championship at Hazeltine in June before beating Brooke Henderson in a playoff at the Evian Championship in July, a round that included an 11-under 60, the lowest score ever shot in an LPGA major. Win at Lytham and Ryu becomes the first player in the modern history of the women’s game to take three consecutive majors in one season, a feat that would sit alongside anything achieved on either tour in recent memory. Her 66 on Thursday, five birdies against a single bogey, was the round of someone who has clearly not run out of nerve.
Nelly Korda, who opened the year with wins at the Chevron Championship and the U.S. Women’s Open, had a Thursday to forget by comparison. Two early bogeys were not the problem, she answered those with birdies at the sixth and eighth, but a scrappy back nine turned a promising start into a two-over 73 and a leaderboard position that will require a low Friday just to stay in touch. Lottie Woad, by contrast, played the sort of quiet, error-free round that tends to matter more as a championship wears on, a bogey-free 69 that leaves her five back and squarely in the group any leader would rather not see charging on the weekend. Charley Hull sits further back still, but at a course this demanding, five shots is not the gap it would be anywhere else.
What Lytham Still Asks of Everyone
Royal Lytham does not hand out low scores easily even in kind weather, which is what made Thitikul’s round so striking rather than simply lucky. The course’s bunkering off the tee and its firm, canted greens have humbled better fields than this one, and the fact that four different rounds of 65 exist in the championship’s history at this venue, and none lower until Thursday, tells you how rarely anyone gets away with a mistake-free eighteen here. That the lowest round in the tournament’s history at Lytham arrived in the same year Ryu is chasing an unprecedented third straight major is the kind of coincidence that makes a golf season worth following rather than simply tracking.
Nothing is decided after one round of a major, and links courses have a well-earned reputation for punishing anyone who assumes otherwise once the wind picks up. But Thitikul now has three days to defend a record round and finally answer the one question her career has left open, while the player two behind her is doing something no one else in the women’s game has ever managed. Either story finishing on Sunday would be worth the four days it took to get there.