I don’t know what excites me more: a dominant, popular figure in sports getting it done again, or a player who’s been quietly chipping away at her place in this world finally breaking through on one of the biggest stages the LPGA has. And she didn’t just win. She won on the second playoff hole, after surviving an errant shot on the first that could have easily ended her chances.
Let’s talk about that for a second, because I don’t think people who don’t follow golf closely understand what winning a major actually does to a person’s life.
There are hundreds of tournaments on the LPGA Tour calendar every year. Five of them count as majors. That’s it. Win one of the other events and you’re a winner, sure, people clap, you cash a nice check, you move on to the next week.
Win a major and something different happens. Your name gets carved into a list that includes every legend who ever played the women’s game. Sponsors that wouldn’t return your agent’s calls last month suddenly want a meeting. You get an exemption into the tournament for years, sometimes for life. Little kids in your home country start googling your swing. It’s the difference between being a really good golfer and being someone history remembers. That’s why players talk about majors the way they do, like it’s this separate category of pressure. Because it is.
So when I tell you a 23-year-old nobody had heard of just won one, on the biggest stage the women’s game has, in a playoff, after being five shots behind, I need you to understand that her entire life just changed in one afternoon.
Her name is Shiho Kuwaki. Remember it.
Here’s the thing about Kuwaki that I love. She’s not some manufactured prodigy story with a stage parent and a Nike deal since she was twelve. She’s from Okayama, a city in Japan most Americans couldn’t find on a map, and she picked up a golf club at four years old, just a little kid swinging at stuff in her backyard probably having no idea what any of it would turn into. She won some amateur titles as a teenager, the kind of wins that get a paragraph in a local paper and nothing more. She turned pro in 2021 and did what most pros do, which is grind on her home tour, the Japan LPGA, trying to figure out if she was actually good enough. In 2024 it clicked. Three wins that year, including the tour championship. That’s the year you could tell something was building.
This was only the seventh major of her entire career. Seventh. Most players go their whole lives and never sniff a major win, and she got hers on try number seven, at Royal Lytham, one of the oldest and most demanding golf courses on the planet. And she didn’t win it easy. She won it the hard way, the way that actually means something.
Sunday, she’s five shots back after five holes. That’s the kind of deficit where you’re just trying to salvage a good finish and go home. Instead she claws back, birdies at nine and thirteen, and drags herself into a tie for the lead by the end. Then the player she’s tied with, Esther Henseleit, drains a 40-foot bomb on the 72nd hole to force a playoff. A 40-foot putt. On the last hole. To stay alive. Whoa. Drama anyone?
They go to a playoff. On the first extra hole, Kuwaki’s tee shot leaks right into the thick rough behind a bunker, the kind of spot that ends most people’s day. She hacks it back out into the fairway, then floats a third shot from 108 yards that ends up three feet from the cup, and makes the putt to save par and keep herself alive. Second hole, Henseleit hits an errant drive into the gorse, makes bogey, and just like that, Kuwaki two-putts for par and it’s over. She’s a major champion. First LPGA win of her career, and it’s a major.
A kid from Okayama who started swinging a club at four years old just beat all the best players in the world on one of golf's biggest stages, on her seventh try, after being five shots down, and after nearly losing it all in the playoff. You didn't know her name last week. You do now. And somewhere in Okayama, some other four-year-old just watched that and picked up a club for the first time too.
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