TELFER’S TAKE 19.10.26

It’s one of the ironies of modern-day sport… Perform brilliantly and you will be well rewarded and usually handsomely remunerated. Example: Ryan Fox. Perform steadily, however, from week to week and your form may well go unnoticed for the most part. Example: Daniel Hillier.

Clearly Fox is now a household name in New Zealand. Daniel Hillier probably not.

Yet Hillier’s form in 2026 shows very clearly that steadiness can also pay a handsome dividend even if your exploits don’t attract wide media coverage.

Hillier, a 28-year-old Kiwi, secured the second biggest pay cheque of his career with his runner-up position in last week’s rich India Championship in New Delhi. Daniel took home in excess of $750,000 for his week’s work in the sweltering temperatures of the Indian capital.

More importantly, the low-key Kiwi golfer has now firmly cemented his position inside the top 10 players on the DP World Tour who are presently not exempted on the US Tour. What that means is, if Hillier can hold his place inside that top 10 list for the final three events of the 2026 DP World Tour season, he will receive his playing card as a playing member of next year’s USPGA Tour, which incidentally offers around a total of quarter of a billion dollars in prize money. That playing card is the goal and dream of just about every professional golfer on the planet.

Ironically Hillier has done very nicely over the past two or three years being confined to just the DP World Tour. From his last 50 tournaments on this Tour, he has amassed over $6 million, so I can’t imagine the recently married NZ Open Champion is struggling to put food on the table for his wife and himself these days. But the big plus and attraction of playing on the US Tour is the level of competition. You are pitted each week against the top 50 or 100 golfers in the world. The money is eye-popping but so is the quality of the fields you meet every week.

If you want to find out how good you are as a golfer, you have to get yourself on the US Tour where you’ll soon find out where you really stand in world rankings. Hillier’s form this year in particular suggests he should be able to hold his own in America in his first year there.

So far this year on the DP World Tour he’s had three second places and 7 top 10 finishes. His form in New Delhi was another useful pointer to his all-round capabilities. The field here included a number of world class players like Rory McIlroy, Ryan Fox, Tommy Fleetwood, Shane Lowry, Patrick Reed, Aaron Rai and Justin Rose. Of those seven players, only Tommy Fleetwood hasn’t won a Major in recent years. Yet Hillier out played them all. Foxy missed the cut, McIlroy and Rose finished in a tie for 40th , Patrick Reed 23 rd and Fleetwood, the nearest to Hillier, tied for 5th .

So, if he does get on the US Tour next year, Hillier will arrive there with a lot of confidence based on his showings in Europe over the past couple of years.

And how great will it be to have two Kiwi golfers walking the fairways of America every week!