Amundi Evian Championship

Subterms

    Latest story

    163 Shares135 Views

    The L.P.G.A. Is Getting a New Commissioner. He’s Got Some Work to Do.

    by

    Craig Kessler starts in a few days and knows what he must do to help the tour grow.Women’s golf has been riding a wave of increased popularity over the past five years.At the professional level, golf has a young generation of stars like Nelly Korda, Charley Hull, Minjee Lee and Rose Zhang, who are keeping fans engaged and who are expected to play in this week’s Amundi Evian Championship.Korda, in winning five tournaments in a row last year, transcended golf to become part of the broader sports conversation for her feat.Among amateurs, girls and young women are the fastest growing contingent of golfers. A third of junior golfers are girls — the highest percentage ever — and the number of female golfers has grown by 41 percent since 2019, according to the National Golf Foundation.But unlike the organizations behind women’s soccer or basketball, the largest professional organization behind women’s golf, the L.P.G.A., which runs the L.P.G.A. Tour, has struggled to capitalize on interest in the sport and the star power of its players.Craig Kessler, the L.P.G.A.’s incoming commissioner, said that his goal was to nurture emotional investment among fans.Sam Hodde/Getty ImagesThe league’s newly appointed commissioner, Craig Kessler, who starts on Tuesday, knows that leveraging this interest in the women’s game to create momentum is his remit. He does not shy away from the challenges.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Golf

      Evian Championship: Céline Boutier Returns Home to Defend Her Title

      by

      Last year she became the third Frenchwoman to win a major and the first since 2003.Céline Boutier, the most successful French women’s golfer ever, has spent much of her adult life outside of her home country.At 18, she left France to study psychology and play golf at Duke University, winning the N.C.A.A. team title and becoming the world’s top-ranked amateur.After college, she moved to Dallas to live near her swing coach Cameron McCormick, who had helped Jordan Spieth scale the heights and win majors. Since 2018, she has been a full-time member of the L.P.G.A. Tour, reaching No. 3 in the rankings last year.But Boutier, now 30, made the most of one of her rare moments in France: winning her first major last year at the Amundi Evian Championship by a commanding six strokes and getting doused with Champagne on the 18th green by friends and fellow players.“I think it was the most powerful moment of my career so far,” she said in a telephone interview from Dallas. “Just because it was something that I had wanted to win for so long, and it was a tournament that I really watched when I was young. I was always drawn to it, and so it honestly felt a bit surreal to be the one at the center of this award ceremony that I had watched so often with the trophies and the national anthem.”She was the first French golfer to win the title on the picturesque course at the Evian Resort Golf Club. Boutier became the third Frenchwoman to win a major after Catherine Lacoste at the 1967 U.S. Women’s Open and Patricia Meunier-Lebouc at the 2003 Kraft Nabisco Championship. Lacoste, the daughter of tennis star and entrepreneur René Lacoste, is the only amateur to have won the U.S. Women’s Open.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Golf

      Evian Championship: The Toll of Starting a Golf Career So Young

      by

      In a game full of players who turned pro in their teens, burnout is common.Asterisk Talley was faced with a tricky question after she made the cut at the U.S. Women’s Open, the second women’s major of the year. Would she have time to finish the homework that her teachers back home had assigned?“I have a bunch of homework and it’s all due today,” said Talley, 15, part of a growing number of young golfers playing at the highest level of the game.The admission spurred a raft of suggestions for excuses for why it wouldn’t get done, not least of all that she was teeing off late on Saturday, just a few shots off the lead.When asked after the second round if she was feeling any pressure, Talley responded: “Not really. I feel like I’m kind of used to it.”Women’s golf has been becoming younger for decades, and Talley is nowhere near the youngest player to tee it up in a major like the Women’s Open. Lexi Thompson, who is retiring this year at 29, was just 12 in 2007 when she qualified for her first one. (The youngest ever was Lucy Li, then 11.)At this week’s Amundi Evian Championship, Yana Wilson, a 17-year-old standout amateur from Nevada, is the youngest player in the field. Andy Lyons/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Golf

      At the Evian, Name Calling Takes Practice

      by

      Two friends share the duties of announcing the golfers as play begins. Sometimes they have to ask, ‘How would you pronounce this?’Every summer, during most of the four rounds of the Amundi Evian Championship in France, a major tournament in women’s professional golf since 2013, Evelyn Bayle and Agnès Meneghel do not hit a single shot, nor offer a single word of advice to the players. More