Telfer's Thoughts 3.11.25

As the golfing year winds down, our leading Kiwi golfers have, for the most part, become flightless. Ryan Fox, after a successful and congested year of golf and travel, is kicking back and taking in a bit of fishing on his boat, somewhere in the Hauraki Gulf. He’ll be back to work, however, when he crosses the Tasman later this month to play the Australian Open, once considered the game’s “5 th “ major, an event dominated for years by the likes of Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player.

Our DP World Tour boys, Daniel Hillier and Kazuma Kobori, are having a break before the two final events of that Tour, both of which, particularly the Race to Dubai final, carry huge purses. Even Steve Alker is having a week at home and why shouldn’t he after yet another win on the US Seniors Tour last week.

That leaves just Lydia Ko who has cut back her playing schedule anyway this year but popped up in Malaysia last week on the US LPGA Tour, at the Maybank Championship. She finished a highly creditable 9 th , just two shots behind the winner, Miyu Yamashita from Japan, who headed off Korea’s Hye-Jin Choi and Aussie Hannah Green to prevail in a 3-way sudden death play-off. If it hadn’t been for two double bogeys Lydia endured on the back nines, during second and third rounds, she may well have won this tournament outright. It is very rare for Lydia to double bogey a par 3 and then double bogey a par 4 the next day on the same nine. Maybe that had something to do with the fact that this tournament was just her 3 rd start in 3 months on this Tour.

Her 9 th place was just her 5 th top ten finish of the year, a relatively low number of top finishes by her standards.

I should point out Lydia did play last week in the International Crown Teams event in South Korea. It must have been a slightly odd experience for her playing in an International Teams event in her country of birth but not representing either South Korea or New Zealand. New Zealand didn’t have four golfers of sufficiently high world ranking to warrant an invitation to this event. Lydia instead was part of a 4-strong World Team which also included Canadian Brooke Henderson. These two highly

ranked world golfers were good enough and wily enough to drag the World Team into the semifinals and only missed out grabbing a spot in the final when Australia prevailed against them in a narrow race semi which went to a sudden death play-off.

So, all in all it’s been a pretty useful fortnight of golf for Lydia. Sure, we may not have seen much of her over the past three months but she showed in Korea last week and Malaysia this week that she’s not far from her top form as she eyes up the LPGA Tour’s rich season finale, the CME Group Tour Championship with US$11 million dollars prizemoney and US$4 million of that going to the winner.

Great to see women’s golf at last attracting the sort of financial muscle men’s tournaments have been enjoying ever since the arrival of Tiger Woods. Sure, the prizemoney in women’s golf still lags embarrassingly behind the men’s game but with the sort of money this season championship final is offering the game’s top women, it’s showing the gap between the boys and the girls is narrowing.