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It wasn’t until the last moment that we remembered. About 10 minutes after the completion of the women’s Olympic golf competition at Kasumigaseki Country Club, 1:45 a.m. on the East Coast of the United States, we were reminded why we stayed up so late and watched for so long.
That was the moment when Nelly Korda, Mone Inami and Lydia Ko moved onto a platform and stood at attention while a member of the Tokyo Olympic Committee handed each of them a medal. Then, less than a week after coming out of retirement to win the U.S. Senior Women’s Open half a world away, Annika Sörenstam, president of the International Golf Federation, handed bouquets to each of the medalists.
But that wasn’t the moment that hooked us. The nut of the two weeks – the second that punched everyone in the chest and said, “Oh, yeah, Olympic golf is an enormous deal”’ – came seconds later when all three medalists turned to their left, backs straight, chins high, as the flags of New Zealand, Japan and the United States were raised. When the first notes of Francis Scott Key’s familiar refrain wafted through the humid air, Nelly Korda, who has the normal facial expression of a bored teenager being forced to go to dinner with her parents, slapped her hand over her heart and cried.
That was it. That was the golden moment when it all came together; when we all realized that the arguments against golf in the Olympics – the game has all these major championships that are more important; it’s just another 72-hole stroke-play event; no kid grew up standing over a putt saying, “This is to win a gold medal” – couldn’t have been more wrong. Even without fans; even with golfers staying in a hotel and having little interaction with other athletes; even with officials going all "sicktatorship" on us, requiring everyone to download an app so their movements could be tracked, the Olympics were and are big and glorious.
If you watched, or even if you didn’t, here are just a few of the reasons why:
Korda, the No. 1 player in the Rolex Rankings and a player who is meeting every lofty expectation, came within one birdie of shooting a 59 in her second round. She stood on the 18th tee 11 under for the day on the par 71. The fact that she hit her tee shot under a tree and made double bogey to shoot 62 didn’t take away from the enormity of her talent or the glimpse she gave us into the future of women’s golf. Tall, powerful, fundamentally flawless and with a solid short game, Korda carries herself with an air of cool that borders on indifference. She’s not Dustin Johnson with his gunslinger swagger. She’s Dirty Harry, shooting all the bad guys while eating a hotdog.
The only time Korda appeared fallible was the seventh hole of the final round, a par-3 where she missed the green left into a collection area and flubbed two chip shots that came rolling back to her feet. She made her second double of the week and temporarily shared the lead. But that’s when, in her words, “the fight” came out. One hole later, she made a 30-footer for birdie and then reeled off two more birdies in a row to regain command.
If that doesn’t stir your Olympic spirit, you might want to walk away from sports and record some Real Housewives of … episodes.
You also saw Inami, whose mother named her after Claude Monet without paying much attention to how the French spelled such things. It’s hard to imagine how much pressure the 22-year-old felt playing at home. On Saturday, before the start of the final round with a tropical storm bearing down on Tokyo, Paige Mackenzie, working for Golf Channel, asked one of the Japanese officials, “What’s the forecast?” In a classic lost-in-translation moment, the official said, “Matsuyama Hideki could not win a medal so we are hoping that Inami can come through.”
She almost did, holing an 18-foot birdie putt on the 17th hole of the final round to temporarily tie Korda. But Inami made bogey on the final hole of regulation, and then parred that hole again to beat Ko in a playoff for silver.
Speaking of Ko, golf has been in the Olympics twice in the past century and only one player, man or woman, has stood on the podium both times. The silver medalist from 2016 finished one shot behind Korda and had a putt on the final green to force a playoff for gold. She then found a fairway bunker in the playoff that she thought she could clear and made bogey to end up with bronze. Afterward, she said, “Yes, I wish I could have brought (back) a different color medal. But overall, just to bring (home) the medal for New Zealand, I hope everyone back home is proud. I felt so much love and support from them. So, this is for New Zealand.”
Finally, we all saw fourth-place finisher Aditi Ashok, a 23-year-old from Bangalore, India, who caused millions of countrymen and countrywomen to get up at 3 a.m. and follow a sport many of them had never seen. Ashok won every heart, in part because of her humility – her mom, who has never swung a club, caddied the stand-bag for her all week while Ashok got all her own yardages – and in part because of her tenacity. She finished the week 59th out of 60 players in driving distance. She pounds a driver about the same distance that Rory McIlroy hits a 6-iron. But she led the field in putting, holing one save after another to remain in the mix until the final hole.
“When I started golf, I never dreamt of being in or contending at the Olympics,” Ashok said. “Golf wasn't even an Olympic sport (then). So, sometimes you just pick it up and work hard and have fun every day. And sometimes you get here.”
So, yeah, golf is an Olympic sport, on par with tennis, badminton, gymnastics and track-and-field. It doesn’t yet have the legacy. But history has to start somewhere.
Two Olympics in, with medalists who will champion the cause, golf fans should look forward to the Paris Games in 2024. By then, hopefully, a lot of kids will have had 3-footers on the putting green “to win the gold medal.”
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