Hyo Joo Kim shot 61 in her first major championship start. She was 19 years old, playing the 2014 Evian Championship, and nobody outside South Korea knew who she was. That round set the record for the lowest score in a women's major. She won the tournament.
Twelve years later, at the Ford Championship in Phoenix, she did it again. Twice. Rounds of 61-69-61-69 for a 28-under total, an LPGA 54-hole scoring record, and a two-shot win over Nelly Korda. It was her second straight victory over Korda, having also won the Founders Cup the week before.
Sixty-one keeps finding Hyo Joo Kim, or maybe she keeps finding it.
The stretch nobody saw coming
Two back-to-back wins wouldn't normally qualify as a surprise. Korda did it. Jin Young Ko did it. But Kim hadn't won multiple tournaments in the same season at any point in her LPGA career. Not once in 10 years on Tour.
She'd been good. Consistently good. The kind of good that earns a comfortable living and zero headlines. Eight LPGA wins spread across a decade, the major title from 2014, a few other close calls. She'd hover around the top 20 in the world rankings, occasionally pop into the top 10, then fade back again. The sort of career where people say "she's talented" without ever finishing the thought.
Then March 2026 happened.
At the Founders Cup, Kim went wire-to-wire and held off Korda by a stroke. Impressive, sure, but single-week heaters happen. Players get hot for four rounds and then return to normal. The next week in Phoenix would tell the real story.
She opened with 61.
Two 61s in four days
The first one looked like a fluke. The third-round 61 erased any doubt. Seven consecutive one-putt greens. A birdie-birdie-eagle-birdie stretch on the back nine at Whirlwind Golf Club's Cattail course. Twenty-five putts total. The kind of round where the putter feels like it weighs nothing and every read is obvious before you crouch down to look.
Her 54-hole total of 25 under broke the all-time LPGA record by a stroke. Four players had shared the old mark. None of them had gotten there by shooting 61 twice.
The final round was a 69, which sounds like a letdown until you remember she was protecting a four-shot lead and still won by two. Korda shot 66 on Sunday and lost ground. That's how far ahead Kim was playing.
Why the Korda angle matters
Beating the best player on Tour once is a good week. Beating her twice in a row is a statement.
Nelly Korda finished second both weeks. She didn't play poorly. Her 21-under total at the Ford Championship would have won most LPGA events by multiple shots. Kim just happened to be seven shots better.
There's an argument that Korda's presence made these wins mean more than the scores alone suggest. It's one thing to run away from a leaderboard of players ranked 30th through 80th. It's another to do it while the world's best player is chasing you with rounds in the mid-60s every day.
Kim seemed unfazed. After the Ford Championship, she told reporters she "couldn't believe it." The quote felt genuine. Players on runs like this often describe the experience as watching themselves play from outside their own body, a stretch where mechanics and results just line up without any obvious explanation for why now and not six months ago.
The 61 connection
Here's what makes the number stick. Kim's 61 at the 2014 Evian Championship was the lowest round in women's major championship history. She was a teenager playing in her first major, on a course she'd never seen, in a country far from home. She birdied eight of her first 12 holes and never looked back.
That record still stands. No one has matched it in 12 years.
Now she's 30, a veteran by LPGA standards, and she reached 61 twice in the same week. The number functions almost like a signature. Most golfers have a career round they talk about forever. Kim has three of them, and two happened in the same tournament.
There's no mystical explanation for it. Sixty-one is just what happens when Kim's putter goes quiet and her irons find the right shelf. But the repetition is unusual enough to notice. Great players tend to cluster their best rounds in a narrow band, say 62 to 64. Dropping to 61 once is rare. Doing it repeatedly across different courses, different decades, and different stages of your career suggests something about how she plays when everything clicks. She doesn't have a gear between "really good" and "historic."
What this means for the rest of the season
Kim won her ninth LPGA title with the Ford Championship. She's won two of the first six events in 2026. If she keeps anything close to this form, the Chevron Championship in April becomes a real storyline.
She hasn't won a major since that first one in 2014. A dozen years between majors would be a long gap, but long gaps get closed all the time. Phil Mickelson waited 13 years between his first and last. Henrik Stenson won his only major at 40. The LPGA has its own examples, and Kim at 30 is squarely in her prime playing years.
The back-to-back wins also raise her profile in a way that consistency alone never did. Eight wins over 10 years made her a respected pro. Two wins in two weeks, with a scoring record thrown in, made her a talking point. The LPGA needs those. Women's golf has more talent and depth than at any point in its history, and the stories that break through tend to be the ones with a clean hook. "She beat Korda twice in a row and shot 61 twice in the same event" is about as clean as it gets.
The quiet career, interrupted
Hyo Joo Kim turned pro at 17 after winning on the Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese tours as an amateur. She won a major at 19. She's been on the LPGA Tour for a decade. And until last week, you'd have been forgiven for not knowing much about her beyond the name.
That's partly the nature of the LPGA, which fights for attention in a golf media ecosystem built around the PGA Tour. It's partly Kim's personality, which is reserved and workmanlike. She doesn't have a social media brand or a shoe deal that generates headlines. She just plays.
But sometimes the golf itself is loud enough. Two 61s in Phoenix were impossible to ignore, even for fans who only check LPGA scores when someone texts them about it. Kim might go back to quiet consistency after this. She might not. Either way, March 2026 belongs to her, and the number 61 is hers in a way it doesn't belong to anyone else in the women's game.
