We have had no shortage of exciting tournaments this year on the LPGA Tour. The West Coast swing of the Ford Championship, JM Eagle LA Championship and the T-Mobile Match Play was a particularly strong run. The tournament of the year so far though is quite simply, the Chevron Championship.
It is hard to define what makes a great golf tournament. Is it great play on the course? A terrific leaderboard featuring the best players in the world? An exciting finish? A great venue?
To me, it is a bit of everything, but most importantly, drama. And the 2025 Chevron Championship was about as dramatic and polarizing as any golf tournament in recent memory, regardless of tour.
We start at the end of course, with 2024 Rookie of the Year Mao Saigo winning her first LPGA Tour event in a playoff with a diverse group of golfers. All five players in that playoff were from different countries and had unique stories. Lindy Duncan, the American long shot, Ruoning Yin the Chinese superstar, Hyo Joo Kim the Korean who entered in fantastic form, Ariya Jutanugarn the Thai superstar of the 2010’s looking for a return to glory and of course Saigo, the up and coming Japanese star.
To get to the playoff, we had controversy with Jutanugarn intentionally using the grand stands as a back stop to avoid water short, a move that many in golf media criticized. The course and the setup came into question all week, but especially in that moment. After doing so, Jutanugarn nearly whiffed her shot out of the rough, taking her completely out of position and bringing the field back into it.
In the playoff, much of the golf didn’t get better, with a bogey from Duncan on a fairly easy par 5 and a bad three-putt par by Yin. Saigo won with birdie, capping off some of the craziest 60 minutes in LPGA Tour history. Was the golf flawless or even that great? No. But it was fascinating to watch the whole way through.
