Nelly Korda shot a 65 in Round 1 at the Chevron Championship. She then started the second round with a back-nine 31 that included five birdies. Korda came to Houston with one title under her belt and three more runner-up finishes this season in four starts. You would expect a sold-out gallery or a fairway-deep crowd following every shot from the World No. 2. There was only a half-empty gallery and eerie silence.

TV broadcast exposed the stark reality. The venue of the Chevron Championship was changed, the tradition of pond-jumping was preserved, and the prize money has grown by nearly $6 million since 2022. Yet the scenes around the top players at the austere first LPGA major told a very different story. Of the LPGA’s failure to market one of its biggest events and draw a decent number of fans to the course. And it didn’t go unnoticed by fans and analysts.

Golfweek’s Beth Ann Nichols bluntly shared her experience following Korda on the greens. She dubbed it a quiet affair, even when Nelly shot 31 on the back nine. This one sentence captured what the cameras were already showing at Hole 7: an empty space where a crowd should have been. It is more alarming because one aim of the venue change was to fix exactly this problem.

The 2025 edition at The Club at Carlton Woods in The Woodlands drew somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 spectators across the week, with reports describing small, scattered crowds and a course layout that made fan movement difficult. The hope in shifting to a more central, publicly accessible venue in Houston that also hosts the PGA Tour’s Houston Open was to replicate the energy the event generates.

To put it into perspective, the Texas Children’s Houston Open drew the record attendance numbers since 2019. The field wasn’t the PGA Tour’s strongest. By comparison, this is the first major of the LPGA season, which obviously has a loaded field of top female golfers. So far, through the first two rounds, the contrast is jarring.

“We have to find a solution to the Chevron Championship. I don’t know what that is, but I know this crowd for the most popular female golfer in the world isn’t it,” wrote journalist Ryan French of Monday Q Info, with a picture of a half-empty gallery at Memorial Park. What makes it harder to ignore is the investment made in the LPGA Tour this year.

The purse is $9 million, up $1 million from 2025. The winner receives $1.35 million. An artificial pool near the 18th hole was built to preserve the winner’s jump tradition, which was natural at Mission Hills in California. Some of the players didn’t like it, while others openly said they hoped it would stop. Nevertheless, the LPGA plans to make the winner jump into the pond. However, they were unable to fix the attendance issue. There is also a broader context worth noting.

Television viewership for LPGA majors has been inconsistent. When Nelly Korda won her fifth consecutive LPGA event in 2024, NBC drew 936,000 viewers for the final round, a slight dip from the 941,000 who watched Lilia Vu win the year before. Those are not numbers that suggest a runaway growth story.

The 2025 KPMG Women’s PGA Championship hit a nadir, averaging 428,000, down from 867,000 in 2024. On-site attendance at top LPGA events averages around 60,000 for an entire week at the elite level, a fraction of what the PGA Tour’s biggest events generate, with the Phoenix Open routinely exceeding 200,000 for the week.

Nelly Korda is currently at -8 through two rounds at Memorial Park, holding a three-shot lead over Patty Tavatanakit and Somi Lee, both at -5. The golf is exactly what this event needs. Whether the crowds will show up for the weekend rounds remains the bigger question hanging over Houston.

The thin crowds at Memorial Park were not just noticed by journalists on the ground. Fans watching online had plenty to say, and most of it pointed to the same frustration.

Fans were not silent upon seeing Nelly Korda’s reality at the Chevron Championship

“Parking for Memorial Park is pretty annoying; the weather hasn’t been the best, and the advertising in Houston has been almost non-existent. I might go Sunday if I have nothing else going on,” said one fan.

Memorial Park’s general admission parking is limited to specific designated lots, with vehicles paying $35 per entry, and the tournament had no visible advertising presence across the city despite it being the first year at a new venue designed to attract exactly this kind of casual, local crowd.

“Exactly! Wish there was more enthusiasm for women’s golf, especially when you have Nelly Korda leading!” chimed in another fan.

Nelly Korda is one of the prominent names in 2026 with a win at the season-opening Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions and three consecutive T2 finishes. Moreover, she is currently leading a $9 million major by three shots, and still, the stands are not filling up.

“The name is a turnoff. The course isn’t championship-caliber. Houston’s weather is unpleasant this late in the spring. Mission Hills wasn’t perfect, but the Dinah Shore had deep community ties that you cannot build from scratch in this era. It’s not too late to go back,” read another reaction.

The Dinah Shore era at Mission Hills Country Club created decades of tradition and loyal crowds. Since moving to Texas in 2023, first to Carlton Woods and then to Memorial Park Golf Course, the event has had a hard time recreating that connection.

“It’s tough to have 3 golf tournaments in 6 weeks. That’s what Houston has between this, the PGA Tour, and the Champions Tour. Love golf but can’t do them all,” a user commented.

The calendar reality is real and largely unavoidable. Houston is hosting its second tour of the year; first, it was the Texas Children’s Houston Open (March 23–29). Also, with the Masters Tournament and RBC Heritage in between.

The fans weren’t going easy. “The solution is to stop pretending it’s a major championship,” was another reaction.

The two rounds still to come at Memorial Park will decide a champion. But the tournament’s bigger challenge is filling the space around that champion with a crowd that matches the occasion.