The champagne shower Maja Stark received after winning the U.S. Women’s Open Sunday at Erin Hills seemed like the perfect punctuation after a long, grueling week that produced a champion who didn’t see this coming until it happened.
Stark’s two-stroke victory over Nelly Korda and Rio Takeda had a sense of inevitability as the 25-year-old Swede played the closing holes of her first major championship victory, but nothing about it came easily.
That’s not the way of the U.S. Women’s Open.
Stark won by doing what U.S. Opens tend to ask – balancing aggressiveness with patience while avoiding the big number. With changing weather conditions and rounds that sometimes stretched to six hours, Stark maneuvered her way through four grinding days and looked largely unfazed by the situation.
She started the final round with a one-stroke lead and never trailed, eventually building a big enough advantage that she could bogey the last two holes and her 7-under-par 281 total was still at least two clear of everyone else.
“It feels so surreal. It felt like it was so far away just a couple of weeks ago. Just last week my confidence was so low. I had a friend tell me I need to be confident and trust yourself. That’s what I tried to do,” said Stark, who became the third Swede along with Liselotte Neumann and Annika Sörenstam to win the U.S. Women’s Open.
“I think that no one has ever played well when they’ve been playing scared, and I think that’s been my habit before, to just kind of try to hang on to it.”
“Then obviously with the pressure and everything, your mistakes get bigger, but it felt like I could just like control anything that was thrown at me really today.”
The subtext of this U.S. Women’s Open was Nelly Korda’s continuing quest to win the American national championship. It has been an unsolvable puzzle for Korda to this point but her tie for second was a bit of a breakthrough considering it was her first top-five finish in 11 U.S. Women’s Open starts.
Korda was within one stroke of the lead during the final round but could never grab the outright lead.
“I’m very happy with what I have in my life right now. I think just having the security for the future, I think I’ll just be very happy about that.”
Maja Stark
“It’s still very complicated,” Korda said of her relationship with the championship. “It’s an absolute heartbreaker. That’s golf. You lose more than you win but you learn a lot.”
The top-ranked player in the world, Korda is still chasing her first victory in 2025.
“I hit it so good off the tee. I wasn’t in one bunker this week. I feel like that’s pretty impressive out here. I was thinking about that going into the round today. I was like, don’t think about it. It’s going to happen if you think about it,” Korda said.
“I was just striking it really well. When you strike it really well and you give yourself so many opportunities, it does get at the end of the day frustrating. It comes down to your putting, right?
“I wasn’t hitting bad putts. Not at all. I wasn’t pushing them. I wasn’t pulling them. … Just kind of as many weren’t falling as I hoped for.”
Erin Hills was a central character in the U.S. Women’s Open story, offering a sprawling, tumbling test with putting surfaces that were dangerously slick and speedy.
“It's 100 percent more exhausting like mentally, physically,” Minjee Lee said. “It’s just such a long walk this week. It just feels like uphill after another uphill. So, yeah, I just think it’s just grueling.
“And it should be. It’s a U.S. Open and our top major.”
Four players ranked in the top 10 – Lilia Vu, Jeeno Thitikul, Hyo Joo Kim and Lauren Coughlin – missed the cut, as did defending champion Yuka Saso, who failed to make the weekend for the fifth time in her last six LPGA starts.
For Stark, who has been chasing her breakthrough moment, it was a life-changing result. She did not realize until someone told her that she had won $2.4 million Sunday.
Asked what she might do with her windfall, Stark was still coming to grips with what she had accomplished.
“Maybe move out of my studio apartment can be one thing,” she said.
“I don’t know. I’m very happy with what I have in my life right now. I think just having the security for the future, I think I’ll just be very happy about that.”
E-MAIL RON
Top: Stark balances aggressiveness with patience to win the U.S. Women's Open.
LOGAN WHITTON, COURTESY USGA