Telfer's Thoughts 15.12.25

As the curtain comes down on what has been a fairly memorable year for NZ Golf, another relatively new young face has popped up on our radar screen. His name is Jimmy Zheng and he finished 3rd on Sunday at the Victorian PGA Championship on the redoubtable Moonah Links course.

In extremely difficult conditions, with howling winds buffeting the course all day, the 23-year-oldKiwi rookie pro shot a 1 under par 71, the second-best round of the final day.

Indicative of the conditions was the fate of the eventual winner Marc Leishman, a 6-time winner on the USPGA Tour before he switched allegiance to LIV golf a couple of years back. Leishman is still one of Australia’s leading golfers, as he’s shown over the past two weeks at the Australian Open and the Australian PGA, but at Moonah Links on Sunday in those terrible conditions, the best he could do was a 4 over par 76 and yet that was good enough for him to win the tournament by 1 shot from fellow Australian Josh Younger, who also shot 76. A further shot back came Jimmy Zheng in a tie for 3rd place. Zheng picked up A$12,800, his best pay day to date from his short 10- tournament career.

For a while late on Sunday afternoon it looked as if Jimmy’s winning score of 3 under might just get him into a play-off, as the strong swirling winds saw the leading half dozen or so players ahead of him tumble down the leaderboard. Fortunately for Leishman and Younger, the final hole at Moonah measuring 581 metres, was down wind and that saw the long-hitting Leishman make birdie and Younger par and so secure the first two finishing spots respectively.

A further insight into how hard this course was playing on Sunday can be gauged from the scores of the top 20 finishers. Twelve of the field recorded rounds of 75 or worse.

So take note of the name Jimmy Zheng, who said afterwards that his aim is to follow in the footsteps of Kazuma Kobori, who jumped from the Australasian PGA Tour onto the DP World Tour following a series of outstanding performances on this Aussie tour.

Jimmy comes to the professional ranks with an outstanding amateur career. He won the NZ Secondary Schools Championship 7 years ago as a 16-year-old at Palmerston North Golf Club, which included a round of 60 on what was the home course of the likes of Grant Waite and Craig Perks. He was selected to represent NZ at the Youth Olympics at Buenos Aires two years later. And he represented NZ at the prestigious Asia Pacific Championships, finishing a creditable 12th among essentially the world’s best amateurs.

In May of last year he won the PGA of Australasia Qualifying School. Again another significant credit to his name.

And this year he’s been playing on the Australasian tour. He’s had 10 starts to date, with 2 top 5 finishes, 4th in the West Australian PGA and now a 3rd place finish at the Victorian PGA. All up he’s won around A$30,000.

I’m sure he’ll command plenty of attention when he tees it up next year in the NZ Open in Queenstown, starting on 26 February.

Meanwhile, faraway in every sense of the word. Lydia Ko and golfing partner Jason Day were bathing in beautiful calm Florida weather, trying to win for a second time to win the Grant Thornton International Teams title. This format sees one female and one male teaming up with 15 other teams competing in foursomes and fourball over three separate rounds.

The Down Under combo of Day and Ko won this inaugural event two years ago but this year finished at the other end of the scoreboard in a tie for 13th place with three other teams.

The American pair of Lauren Coughlin and Kim Novak took out the title this year, sharing the US$1million winner’s purse. Ko and Day didn’t do too badly for their 13th place though, each pocketing US$63,500.