Nelly Korda’s autograph is as distinctive as her swing. She signs her first name only, with a towering “N” followed by wavy letters that could almost pass for markings on a polygraph. Like most of her peers on the LPGA Tour, Korda is generous with her John Hancock. After any given round, the number of signatures she doles out is apt to exceed the score on her card.
Fans approach her with all kinds of items: flags, programs, caps, shirts. With a few pen strokes, ordinary objects become memorabilia. Some are retained as treasured keepsakes. Others turn up on eBay. Still others make their way to places their original owners could never have imagined. Each becomes part of a story.
Take the leather FootJoy glove Korda signed in the Boston area a year ago.
You can see it on Instagram. In a short video montage, a succession of children hold it up, smiling as they deliver messages for Korda.
“Nelly, you inspire us.”
“Nelly, we are grateful.”
“Nelly, you make us dream big.”
The children are from Louveira, a small rural town about 50 minutes from São Paulo, Brazil. How the glove wound up in their hands is a story in itself — about the winding routes the game can take, and the connections it leaves in its wake.
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Brazil is not a hotbed for golf. Out of a population of more than 200 million people, only about 10,000 are registered golfers, and none currently has full-time status on the PGA Tour. While the country’s best-known layout, Olympic Course in Rio de Janeiro — built for the 2016 Summer Games — is open to the public, most Brazilian clubs remain private enclaves, accessible to the privileged few.
The children in the video are not among those few. They are unlikely golfers. The program through which they learned the game is improbable, too.
Projeto Corujinha owes its existence to the family of Pedro Costa da Lima, a third-generation golfer and former Brazilian amateur champion who played collegiately in the United States.
Pedro’s grandfather, Lauro, was an architect and civil engineer who fell hard for golf after designing the clubhouse at São Paulo Country Club in the early 1960s. So captivated was he by the game that he built a course of his own on a coffee farm he owned in Louveira. He carried out much of the work himself, hauling turf from São Paulo Golf Club in the back of his Dodge pickup and planting it by hand on land he had shaped himself.
He named it Coruja Golf Course, coruja being Portuguese for “owl,” a symbol of wisdom, maturity and perspective — all qualities Lauro believed golf helped cultivate.
Lauro taught the game to his son, João, who taught it to Pedro, who parlayed his talent into opportunity. By 16, Pedro was the top-ranked amateur in Brazil. Two years later, he won the Brazilian Amateur Championship, then captured a Faldo Series title on the European junior circuit, earning a scholarship to Georgia College & State University, where he became an All-American.
For a time, he considered turning professional. Instead, he returned home to Brazil and followed in his father and grandfather’s footsteps as a civil engineer.
Now 37, Costa da Lima still competes in elite amateur tournaments. But his most meaningful work in golf happens closer to home, although the seeds were planted long before he returned from Georgia.
Lauro, Pedro’s grandfather, completed Coruja Golf Course in 1975. As the years passed and a back injury made the grounds increasingly difficult to maintain, the layout gradually fell into disrepair. But Lauro’s ambitions for the property extended beyond golf. Before he died, he donated another section of the farm for a public elementary school serving children from families of limited means. The school opened in 1995.
Nearly two decades later, while Pedro was still attending college in the United States, his older brother João had an idea.
Why not build another golf course next to the school?
Not a private club. Not a driving range. A place where children could learn the game free of charge.
The family named it Corujinha — Little Owl — a nod to the original course and to the lessons they hoped the game would teach.
João designed the layout himself. Over time, it grew into a quirky nine-hole, par-31 course with small, well-protected greens that reward precision over power. Through the classroom windows, children can see the tees and greens.
When Pedro returned to Brazil in 2012, he joined his brother in expanding the project.
“I wanted to dedicate myself to giving kids the same opportunities golf had given me,” he says.
Today, roughly 200 children, ages 6 to 18, move through a long-term development program that blends golf instruction with physical training, academics and sports psychology. The program runs on charitable donations, with the Costa da Lima family covering whatever costs those contributions don’t.
The goal, Costa da Lima says, isn’t merely to develop golfers. It’s to develop people.
Each hole is dedicated to a value he considers central to the game: respect, patience, honesty, discipline, resilience, sportsmanship, teamwork, responsibility and positivity.
Breaking par is celebrated. Living those values is celebrated even more. Which brings us back to the glove.
Its journey from suburban Boston to rural Brazil began with another unlikely golfer.
Milena Alves didn’t grow up around country clubs. Raised by her maternal grandparents outside São Paulo, she excelled at nearly every sport she tried — except golf, which she’d never watched and knew no one who played. On walks home from school, she’d occasionally notice a handful of small, dimpled balls lying outside the fence of a neighborhood sports club.
Their purpose was a mystery.
“They weren’t really good for bouncing, throwing or kicking,” she says. “I didn’t know what they were.”
She went on to study law, and in 2019 moved to the United States to improve her English and advance her career. Golf found her almost by accident three years later, when her then-husband’s family in New England — who liked to gather for friendly competitions, sometimes bowling, sometimes cards — suggested a round.
Alves had a knack for it. Soon she was squeezing in rounds at municipal courses whenever she could, spending spare hours on the range, and watching tournaments whenever they aired. She found herself drawn to Korda in particular.
“I love to watch her,” Alves says. “Not just her swing but how she is. She is so calm. So resilient.”
Regular instruction in the United States wasn’t in her budget, so whenever she returned home to Brazil, she made a point of seeing Guilherme Oda, a teaching professional at Ipê Golf Club outside São Paulo, who gave her complimentary lessons.
Projeto Corujinha
“I’ve met so many people through golf,” Alves says. “And so many of them have been so kind.”
Last summer, Alves attended the FM Championship outside Boston. On Saturday, she followed Korda’s group, cheering enthusiastically enough that the world’s No. 1 player began acknowledging her with smiles and glances.
After Sunday’s final round, Korda made the familiar walk from the 18th green toward scoring, stopping repeatedly to sign autographs for fans gathered behind the ropes.
Alves was waiting with two FootJoy gloves.
Korda signed both.
Alves had already decided she would donate them to junior golf programs in Brazil. She earmarked one for a youth program at the Olympic Course in Rio de Janeiro. She aimed to give the other to Corujinha, a project she knew by reputation and by following it on Instagram.
As it turned out, she was even closer to the program than she realized.
Golf circles in Brazil are small.
Her occasional swing coach, Oda, had known Costa da Lima for years. They had competed against each other as amateurs, represented Brazil as teammates and remained close friends.
Would he be willing to pass the glove along?
Of course.
When it arrived in Louveira, the children had no trouble recognizing the signature on the leather.
Like young golfers almost anywhere, they follow the professional game however they can. Costa da Lima often gathers them in the clubhouse to watch the majors. They celebrated Korda’s victory in this year’s U.S. Women’s Open as though their favorite soccer club had won a championship.
In sports, small gestures from big names often land with outsize impact. To the children at Corujinha, the glove was more than a memento. It represented a connection to a player they admired from half a world away.
To thank her, they recorded a short video.
One by one, they looked into the camera.
“Nelly, you inspire us.”
“Nelly, we are grateful.”
“Nelly, you make us dream big.”
The program posted the video on Instagram and put the glove on display in the Corujinha clubhouse.
In the Instagram montage, the last child to appear is 17-year-old Mateus Frezza.
One of Corujinha’s standout students, Mateus has lowered his handicap to 3 and climbed to third in the São Paulo junior rankings. Like Costa da Lima before him, he hopes to play college golf in the United States.
It’s impossible to know where the game might lead him.
Maybe one day, after tapping out on 18, he’ll walk along the ropes, greeting fans, signing autographs of his own.
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