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When you’re ranked the world’s 589th best golfer, it’s a fair bet that hard-nosed Aussie bookies were probably offering odds of about 589 to 1 that a 31-year-old itinerant Kiwi golfer called Nick Voke would win the Australian PGA. The Aucklander nonetheless probably had a few of those Aussie bookies sweating profusely over the closing hours of the Australian PGA as he stitched together the lowest round of the 4th day, a 5-under 66, which saw him slot home in a tie for third place. Only the eventual winner, David Puig, the LIV golfer from Spain and the young 21-year-old Chinese golfer, Wenyi Ding, did better than Voke over the 4 rounds. For his consistency and skill at the testing Royal Queensland Golf Club, Nick picked up a cheque worth around NZ$180,000, possibly the biggest pay day he’s had in his 7 years as a pro golfer. Voke is one of those army of professional golfers who are never quite good enough to nail down a playing card on any of the world’s 2 or 3 leading tours, so they spend their years travelling the world playing minor tours, trying to earn just enough to get them from tournament to tournament. Voke personifies that archetypal trier. He’s played on the Korean Tour, the China Professional Tour, was good enough to get onto the USPGA 2nd tier Tour, the Korn Ferry Tour for a couple of seasons and in recent times his staple bread and butter has been the Australian Challenger series where he had a win earlier this year. He was one of about a dozen NZ pros in the field at Royal Queensland. Voke wasn’t the only Kiwi golfer within touching distance of the lead at various times in this A$2,500,000 tournament. Ryan Fox had the lead for most of the first day. Young gun Kazuma Kobori led the field at the halfway stage, but both Fox and Kobori fell away over the closing 36 holes. The Kiwi challenge, however, didn’t dissipate with Fox and Kobori fading. Up stepped Daniel Hillier and Nick Voke. Kiwi golfers for some reason find it hard to succeed in the big Aussie tournaments even though most of them honed their amateur game across the ditch, playing numerous amateur tournaments. So it was nice see a bunch of Kiwis right there in the dog fight, down to the wire, chasing that elusive title. It does show quite clearly what a healthy state our professional game is currently in. Daniel Hiller is another who deserves a mention. It seems week after week Hillier is there on the first page of the leaderboard, and so it was again in Brisbane, finishing 14 under par for his 72 holes, just 1 shot behind Nick Voke and in a tie for 5th place with Min Woo Lee and Adam Scott - illustrious company indeed. This high finish from Hillier means he’s kicked off the new DP World Tour in a good strong manner as has, for that matter, Kazuma Kobori, who finished in 25th place, slipping out of the top 10 on the last day when he failed to secure as much as even a single birdie and had to wear 4 bogeys on his card. He, like most of the field, really struggled with their ability to get up and down because the putting surfaces were more like glass than greens and trying to stop the ball anywhere near the pin was a thankless task. Ryan Fox would attest to that too, although he had a bogey-free final round to go with 3 birdies which made up in part for a horror stretch he had on Day 2 when he strung, forgettably, 5 bogeys in a row . Foxy admitted afterwards that his game was a little rusty, hardly surprising given he hadn’t really touched a golf club for the best part of 2 months. Playing 4 rounds at Royal Queensland will have removed most, if not all, the rust from that lay-off and he is really eager to get to Melbourne for this week’s Australian Open on one of the world’s best tracks, Royal Melbourne. This strong contingent of Kiwi golfers will again lead the charge to capture this highly sought-after crown, which up until a decade or so ago was considered golf’s 5th Major. It’s still a magnet for many of the game’s best, which is why a guy called Rory McIlroy will be lining up in the strong field.

For some years now, Lydia Ko, currently 28 years of age, has been at pains to point out she doesn’t intend to be playing professional golf beyond the age of 30. That being the case, we can’t expect to be seeing Lydia hitting that little white ball for any more than another 18 months. Her last appearance this year on the USLPGA Tour was the CME Globe last week - the traditional season-ending finale on the LPGA Tour. It offers what the Head of CME Globe said at the prize giving - the biggest winner’s cheque in women’s sport - US$4million. It was won this year for the second year in a row by the 22-year-old Thai golfer, Jeeno Thitikul. That’s the equivalent of just over NZ$14million for 8 rounds of golf. Finally prize money in women’s golf, although not comparable yet to what their male counterparts can earn, at least now no longer trails embarrassingly behind what men are able to earn. Lydia Ko’s share of that huge US$11million purse at the CME Globe in Florida last week was just US$67,000. Lydia could only manage to finish in 41st place in the field of 50 starters. Only the top 50 points scorers from across the year were eligible to compete in this rich end-of-season event. At least from Lydia’s point of view she qualified for this championship final, something she wasn’t able to do last year. When Lydia looks back on her golfing year in 2025 she’ll do so with some satisfaction. She did after all post yet another win on the world’s leading women’s golf tour, the USLPGA. Lydia now has 23 wins on this Tour, including three Majors. However I suspect there will also be more than just a twinge of disappointment. She began the year very positively, with three top ten finishes in her first four starts, including a win in the World Championship back in February, but since then Lydia has posted only two top tens in her final 10 events, along with two missed cuts. In Florida it looked at the halfway stage of the CME Globe that Lydia might be on target for a very high finish. It should be said though that Thitikul, even after 36 holes, held a commanding lead over the field and went on, not surprisingly, to win it comfortably by 4 strokes. Lydia opened with a 3 under 69 and then followed that up with a 4 under 68 to be handily placed at the halfway stage inside the top 10. The weekend unfortunately was a different story, seeing her post 73 on Saturday and a 1 over par 72 on the last day. Her putter ran hot and cold. She needed just 25 putts on Day One. But over Rounds 2 and 3 Lydia, arguably the best putter on the women’s tour, needed a total of 63 putts for those 36 holes, painful stuff. Also plaguing her was the trouble she ran into on the last hole on both of the last two days, leading her to post a double bogey 6 there on Saturday and a triple bogey 7 on this par 4 on Sunday. If she had just parred those two holes, she would have finished inside the top 20. All up Lydia remains one of the world’s best female golfers. Her official ranking stands at 6th in the world. Thitikul, not surprisingly, is Number One, followed by American Nelly Korda at Two. Lydia still has unfinished business in golf, anxious to add to her tally of 3 Majors. So she’ll be back next year in what might be her final chance to add to that tally. Her game is good enough for her to be eminently capable of posting another Major to that tally. Our top male golfer, Ryan Fox, after a long layoff back home here in NZ, is back in action this week and next across the ditch, competing in two DP World Tour events to kick off this Tour’s new season. This week he lines up in the Australian PGA Championship at the Royal Queensland Club, followed by the Australian Open the following week at Royal Melbourne.

Close calls are, as we know only too well, the very essence, the very life blood, of sport. Not knowing the final outcome of a big sporting event until the very last minute or last play is what all sports fans quickly become addicted to. We Kiwi sports fans experienced a couple of those nerve-wrackers over the weekend. Just a pity neither of them involved the All Blacks. No, 33-19 is not a close call. Not even Donald Trump could pass that score off as a close shave. No, the two I have in mind from the weekend both involve Kiwis, golfers Daniel Hillier and Steve Alker. Hillier didn’t quite finish high enough at the Race to Dubai DP World Tour finale, so he missed out narrowly from securing a playing card for the 2026 USPGA Tour, the world’s most lucrative tour. Steve Alker, who threatened to run away with USPGA Senior‘s Tour championship finale after an opening round of 65, was eventually run down over the final 9 holes by winner Stewart Cink. The consolation, which comes with narrow misses these days in an era of prohibitive prize money in big events, is that you may not have won the big prize but you’re still going home with loads of cash. It will be an especially tough pill for Daniel Hillier to swallow, coming so close as he did to that highly sought after ticket-to-America. Talking to Ryan Fox at the Akarana Golf Club today, he feels Daniel could have safely secured that American ticket last week in Abu Dhabi when he had the lead going into the final day, only to let things slip a bit over the final 18. Even at the halfway stage in Dubai he was ranked 8th , so inside the top ten after his two opening rounds of 67 and 68. Clearly his third round of 72 cost him a place or two and then his final round of 70 which included a bogey 4 on 17. Who knows, if he had parred that hole it might have just about been the difference between sneaking into the top 10 or missing out on one of those spots. He missed out by 158 points, finishing the season with 2045 points to the 2203 the 10th placer, Jordan Smith, accumulated. It was nonetheless a very successful season for Daniel. All up he won a total of E1,784,000 or just over NZ$3.5 million. Rookie Kazuma Kobori also had plenty to feel proud of, comfortably qualifying inside the Tour’s top 50 players for the rich DP World Tour finale. He was proving more than competitive for the first three days, floating around just outside the top 20. However on Day 4 the birdie chain dried up. He had his first red number on the 15th followed by another on the par 3 17th , and 5 bogeys undid a lot of the sterling golf he had played over the first three days. He finished the season in 43rd place on the order of merit and so comfortably retained his playing card for the 2026 DP World Tour without the need to put himself through the nerve-wracking 6-round final qualifying tournament that many behind him must now endure. Steve Alker also finished in the money at the Seniors Tour Championship finale, taking home just over US$1 million for his second place. As well he picked up an additional US$500,000 as his share of a top 6 season bonus pool. Steve started the day with 1 shot over Stewart Cink who had made up that 1 shot deficit by the turn. Both players were at 18 under, but 3 back nine bogeys were Steve’s undoing. Meanwhile Cink was the personification of consistency during that intense back nine battle. He didn’t drop a stroke and 2 back nine birdies proved enough for him to secure that 2-shot victory.

For the third time, in almost as many weeks, Kiwi golfer Daniel Hillier would have been satisfied to see his name at the top of the leaderboard with just a handful of holes left to play on three different recent DP World Tour events. So it was again last Sunday in Abu Dhabi at the US$9 million Abu Dhabi Championship. He started the 4th round in 5th spot, just a couple of shots off the lead, but a brilliant start to his 4th round saw him birdie 4 of his first 5 holes. A further 3 back-to-back birdies on holes 9, 10 and 11 then had him 7 under for his round. At that point he was sitting on top of the leaderboard, clear of the entire field by one shot. Chasing him were the likes of Rory McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood and Tyrell Hatton, three of the stars of the successful European Ryder Cup team from a month or so back. Hillier was also well aware of the rewards that awaited him were he to win here in the desert. He mentioned before the tournament started that if he were to capture this title, it would almost certainly guarantee him a full playing card next year on the USPGA Tour, following the exact same route Ryan Fox took a couple of years back when he elevated himself from the DP World Tour to the US Tour. Unfortunately for Daniel he stumbled a little on the way home making double bogey on the 15 th and a bogey on 18. He also managed to squeeze another birdie out of his round on 16, so all up this was hardly a major meltdown. But when you have the likes of Fleetwood and McIlroy, both ranked in the world’s top 5, smelling blood, they pounce. McIlroy racked up an amazing 10 birdies during his final round, finishing with a 10 under par 62 and edged just ahead of Hillier. Meanwhile Fleetwood got himself into a play-off with fellow Englishman 30-year-old Aaron Rai, the overnight leader who shut out Fleetwood on the first hole of sudden death with a birdie to Fleetwood’s par. For Hillier, well he didn’t exactly leave the desert distraught. He earned around NZ$600,000 for his work. With rounds of 66, 68, 65 and 67 he knows his game is in great shape as he heads to Dubai for the DP World Tour finale, where an even bigger pay cheque awaits him. And if he can nail another top 3 position or higher, he may yet grab a playing card for the USA next year. Also in the field of 50 for the Dubai finale is Kazuma Kobori who played in Abu Dhabi, finishing in a tie for 41st place, which is also exactly the position he happens to occupy on the Road to Dubai rankings. That means by finishing inside the top 50 on the year-long points table, he will join the other 49 golfers in the top 50 to contest the Championship finale. In simple terms, that means a small field but big, big money - US$10 million split among the 50 players. It’s nothing short of remarkable that a young Kiwi golfer in his rookie year on the world’s second richest tour qualifies for this big final.

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.

For some of us, particularly those of a senior age, who play and follow this dear old game, it’s easy to   lament, as I do, the lack of match play at the professional level. Yes, the amateur game is steeped in match plays, but alas, as soon as you join the professional ranks, it becomes a bit of a historic relic. Yet oddly enough, often the most riveting of professional competitions are those all too rare match play events. Take 2025 for example, what has been the best and most riveting golf tournament by far this year? Well of course it was the Ryder Cup. Oddly enough, it’s that head-to-head competition that not only fires up the two players who are never more than a few metres apart for the full round, but that in-your-face rivalry quickly filters down to the nearby crowds, as we saw at Bethpage a few weeks back. Well last week we had the full spectrum, as it were, of international golf to pick and choose from. There were two 72-hole stroke play titles on offer, a 54-hole stroke play event and in South Korea, a Women’s International teams match play event comprising eight countries. Of the four events, the one I found most interesting was the LPGA event in Korea - a match play knockout event which featured Lydia Ko. The format here bore some resemblance to the Ryder Cup, but instead of two countries or teams going head-to-head, this one involved eight, split initially into two pools of four. The eight teams comprised seven countries with four players in each team and a World team headed by Lydia Ko and Canadian, Brooke Henderson. The World team, a little surprisingly, were seeded only seventh of the eight teams competing. With Ko, Henderson and Englishwoman Charley Hull in their team they proved a tough nut to crack. The World team topped their pool and, in their semi-final, met a powerful Australian side. They were tied at the end of 18 holes in the last match, so a sudden death play-off ensued.  It was won by Australia who went on to play the USA in the final which comprised two singles matches and one fourball match. The Aussie four of Minjee Lee, Grace Kim, Hannah Green, all winners on the LPGA, along with newcomer, 24-year-old Stephanie Kyriacou, a two-time winner on the European Tour, were too strong for the Americans, winning both singles matches and tying the fourball. Lydia Ko and her World team beat Japan 2-1 in the play-off for third place. Overall, this match play event was a welcome change from the regular week-in week-out 72-hole stroke play events. I just hope the men who run the USPGA Tour take notice of how refreshing an international teams’ match play event can be for a Tour dominated by 72-hole stroke play events. One tour that breaks away from the 72-hole tradition is the USPGA Seniors Tour and last week the Simmions Bank Championship in Florida was a 54-hole affair, won in spectacular and historic fashion by Steve Alker. He won by 7 shots from Aussie Richard Green. Steve’s 54-hole total of 197, 20 under par, was the lowest 54-hole score so far this year on this Tour. He picked up over half a million NZ dollars for his efforts and jumps from 4 th  place to 1 st  on the Charles Schwab Cup points list. Only the top 36 at season’s end qualify for the rich end-of-season Schwab Cup. The highlight of his final round was an eagle from the fairway on the par 5 10 th  hole. Meanwhile the men’s DP World Tour was in Korea last week for the Genesis Championship at the Woo Jeong Hills Country Club in Cheonan. It wasn’t exactly a happy hunting ground for the two Kiwis. Kazuma Kobori missed the cut, albeit by only 1 shot, and Daniel Hillier is probably going to spend this week on a psychologist’s couch in the hope of finding out why he has plummeted spectacularly down the leaderboard twice over the last two weeks. Last week in Spain he led the field going into the last round only for his game to self-implode which saw him finish up near the bottom of the field. This week he had a share of the lead after 36 holes, then the disasters of the previous week revisited him. After opening his 3 rd  round with a birdie, everything seemed on target until he got to the 5 th  where he dropped a shot, then came a double bogey on the par 3 7 th  and yet another double on the par 4 11 th  , followed by a bogey on the 17 th  to finally finish up with a 7-over 78 and so he went from 1 st  to 53 rd  in the space of 12 holes. Thankfully he rediscovered his game on Day 4, putting together a tidy 3-under 68 to work his way up from 53 rd  to 38 th  place overall. But the shrink’s couch, I suspect, rather than the practice fairway might be his first call this week.

When Kiwi Golfer Daniel Hillier stood on the first tee at the Delhi Golf Club on Sunday afternoon NZ time, he, in all probability, was in a very positive frame of mind. He had strung together 3 sub-par rounds at this US$4 million India Championship event and he was just 4 shots behind the tournament leader and right among the big names in this world class tournament. Quietly he must have felt confident that at last, after 6 months and 14 tournaments without a top 10 finish, he could break that drought this day. And so he did. A 3 under par 69 got him into a share of 9 th place and a cheque for NZ$147,000. Two and half hours earlier though the 27-year-old Kiwi, believe it or not, was sitting at the top of the leaderboard, having played some utterly sublime golf on this final day. He had catapulted up the leaderboard from 11th place to 1st and now had a 1-shot lead over arguably the best golfer in the world over the past few months, Englishman Tommy Fleetwood. Daniel had posted no less than 7 birdies in his first 10 holes on this last day. It was flawless golf with not a dropped shot in sight. It was probably the best 10-hole streak he had ever had in his 7-year professional career. Three holes later on the short, innocuous par 5 14th which measured only 455 metres, Hillier, from the middle of the fairway and only 200 metres from the pin, inexplicably pushed his second shot, a mid-iron, into a thick grove of trees. Even though he found his ball it was unplayable, so back down the fairway he went to play now his 4th shot which he put into the middle of the green. His mind by now was probably a mixture of despair and confusion. The result was a 3-putt green for a double bogey 7. He bogeyed the next hole as well and then another bogey on the 18th as despair took hold, seeing him drop a total of 4 shots over the last 5 holes. Sport, as we all know, can be cruel and traumatic and these twin miscreants can and often do come calling right when a sportsman or woman thinks they are at the absolute apogee of their code. How Daniel Hillier copes with this horrible adversity will tell us much about his inner self and his future prospects. I’m sure from what I’ve seen of Daniel over the years, he’ll survive this setback and get into the winners’ circle again. He has as good a technical game as anyone on the DP World Tour. Needless to say, Fleetwood, off the back of Hillier’s misfortunes, promptly grabbed the outright lead midway through that back 9 and never relinquished it to record his 8 th DP World Tour victory and elevate himself into the top 5 of the Official World Golf Rankings. And I’d be very surprised if Fleetwood, one of the genuine nice guys of world golf, didn’t have a quiet world with Daniel after the tournament concluded. Fleetwood, more than probably any other top pro, knows only too well what it’s like to see your game collapse over the final few holes of a big tournament when you have the lead. This fate has happened to Tommy numerous times during his years on the USPGA Tour before he finally broke his drought this year winning the rich FedEx Cup final a month or so ago.

It’s hard to know what Daniel Hillier’s prevailing feeling might have been after finishing in a tie for 23rd place at the Spanish Open in Madrid. Was it satisfaction at recording his best finish on the DP World Tour for 5 ½ months or acute disappointment that he frittered away, over the closing holes, a chance of a top 5 finish? I suspect it was the latter. When he turned at the halfway stage of his final round, his score stood at 10 under. He hadn’t dropped a stroke over the first 10 holes on Day 4. Two front nine birdies had him well placed inside the top 10 with every chance of a top 5 finish, something he hadn’t achieved since mid-January, when he finished 2nd in the Dubai Classic. His downfall came firstly on the two back nine par 3’s which he bogeyed and then he finished his round and the tournament with a bogey 5 on the 18th , a straightforward short par 4 measuring just 321 yards (302m). He missed the fairway off the tee, came up short of the green with his second and then eventually two-putted from the back of the green for a 5. Those three errors on the back nine saw him slip out of the top 10 down to 23rd place. Yet oddly, as I mentioned above, it represented his best finish on the DP World Tour since he tied for 9th place at the Hainan Classic in China back in the last week of April. It has been a curiously successful year to date for Daniel. One tournament, that second place at the Dubai Classic, has made his year. For his effort in the desert he won E941,000 which virtually assured him, even at that early time of the year, that he would finish in the top 70 by season’s end and hence an easy qualifier for the rich Race To Dubai coming up next month. His season earnings which stand at E1,333,000 to date or $NZ2.6 million are the most he has ever won in a single year as a professional. So there is much he has to be satisfied with and proud of from his year so far. However after that world class performance in Dubai against many of the world’s best from Rory McIlroy down, Daniel would have hoped for a lot more success than he’s had this year. His world ranking has fallen to 227, down nearly a 100 places from a year ago. He now trails Kazuma Kobori who has seen his ranking rise rapidly in recent months, now the 173rd best golfer in the world. That ranking is expected to dip slightly following his failure to make the cut at the Spanish Open. But it is a healthy sign for NZ golf that two of our brightest prospects have qualified comfortably for the Race To Dubai finale. Meanwhile in North Carolina, Steve Alker picked up another healthy pay cheque for his troubles at the SAS Championship, finishing 3rd . His 4th consecutive top 5 finish in this event, won this year by 54- year-old Alex Cejka.

A week it’s said is a long time in politics, but not so long thankfully in golf. A week ago, we watched in despair as profanities and vulgarities filled the air, all over a golf tournament for goodness sake. A week on, tranquility seems to have quickly returned to the somewhat calm and dignified ranks of golf. Half the successful European Ryder Cup team took to the fairways of three of Scotland’s best golf courses last week and a handful of America’s best were alongside them, competing for the prestigious Alfred Dunhill Championship. It was won, appropriately enough you might say, by one of Europe’s Ryder Cup heroes, Bob McIntyre, with one of his Bethpage teammates, Tyrell Hatton, finishing second. Another statement perhaps on where the current balance of power lies in transatlantic golf. I imagine a certain amount of suppressed bitterness might linger for some time within the souls of many of the European team, given how poorly they were treated by that admittedly minority of American supporters. The television coverage conveyed some but by no means the full magnitude of the vulgarity hurled at the likes of Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry. To discover the true nature of what was being said you had to go no further than YouTube which had numerous video clips from fans’ phone cameras showing a variety of vile actions - a beer mug clipping Rory McIlroy’s wife’s hat, Lowry being physically restrained by his caddie from marching into the crowd to deal with a fan hurling personal abuse at McIlroy while he was trying to tee off and so on. As is the case with television coverage worldwide these days, television producers and directors are under very clear instruction from sports bodies not to show any untoward spectator behaviour, which is why, for example, you’ll never see on your screen these days a naked or even a fully clothed streaker racing across a football or rugby field. Fortunately, there doesn’t appear that any ill-will from the Bethpage Ryder Cup square-off has soured relationships among the 24 players. They will, of course, be playing with and competing against each other from week to week in various tournaments from now on, as evidenced in Scotland last week, just days after the Bethpage furore had taken place. Just how fan behaviour will play out at the next Ryder Cup in Ireland in two years’ time is another matter. As an interesting observation, it is somewhat baffing that a golf event between two teams, whose countries together comprise at best a mere 10% of the world’s population, commands such compelling interest worldwide. Somewhat lost in the recriminations swirling around the Ryder Cup last week was yet another very heartening performance from our rookie golfer Kazuma Kobori, this time at that Alfred Dunhill Championship in Scotland won by Scotland’s own Bob McIntyre, the first Scotsman to win this important title in 20 years. Kazuma’s final round of 67 included no less than 6 birdies on the front 9. He added a further birdie on the par 5 12th and was on target for a top 20 finish, only to double bogey the 17th . The 24-year-old Kiwi catapulted himself from 87th place at the start of the last round into a tie for 40th , thanks to that final 5 under par 67. It lifted his world ranking to 173rd and he pocketed another E22,000 to hoist his earnings so far this season to E704,000 or close to NZ $1.5 million, quite remarkable for one so young. Goodness only knows what he might achieve if he can add some significant yardage to his driving. At the moment his driving average has him only as the 175th longest driver on this Tour, averaging 278 yards per hole or around 255 metres, some 20 metres behind the Tour’s average. Yet despite that clear shortage he suffers from off the tee, he ranks 3rd in greens in regulation, another startling statistic. Add to that his outstanding putting ability and you start to see why this youngster is pulling such big pay cheques most weeks.

To paraphrase the immortal words of my dear friend Peter Montgomery, has the Ryder Cup now become the Rowdie Cup? Never in the history of golf have we seen anything like the spectator shambles that unfolded at the 2025 Ryder Cup in New York. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to liken the vile behaviour of the American fans at Bethpage to the violent thuggery that has plagued international football matches in Europe for decades. But at least the players in a football match inside a large stadium are shielded from any off-field violence, whereas at a golf tournament fans can get to within a few feet of golfers when they’re playing the ball from outside the fairway. At times, listening to and watching the crowd behaviour, it was hard to know if you were at a golf tournament or a MAGA rally (Making American Golf Atrocious). Constant vile, deeply personal and offensive remarks were hollered at Europe’s leading players. On top of this, Rory McIlroy’s wife was copping it as she followed her husband around the course supporting him. On one occasion a jug was hurled at McIlroy and his wife Erica when they were walking in front of the crowd together. So extreme was the abuse directed at McIlroy and his playing partner Shane Lowry on Day Two that Lowry had to be physically restrained from marching into the crowd to settle things with someone who had profoundly upset him with comments about McIroy’s marriage. Unfortunately a few of the American players must shoulder some of the responsibility for this appalling fan behaviour. For example, on the day before the Cup began, Colin Morikawa publicly called for the home fans “to go crazy when the Cup begins, we want absolute chaos.” Well his fans delivered that and more. Sadly and predictably I guess, the plan backfired, as Europe once again won the Ryder Cup. Why an apparently level-headed person like Morikawa would become an advocate for such awful fan behaviour is beyond my comprehension. And the American hothead Bryson DeChambeau with his cringing physical and verbal incantations to incite crowd craziness every time he won a hole or sank a putt was just plain embarrassing. It overshadowed some exceptionally fine golf that he played on the back nine, coming back strongly with a string of birdies after losing five holes on the front nine. Rory McIroy made the perfectly valid point after the Cup was over that it’s perfectly fine for home fans to scream their heads off with their support for their players, but don’t indulge in abusive behaviour towards opposition players. Furthermore, as he said, “Trying to line up a shot and play it while a chorus of personal abuse is being hurled at you from close by is just not golf”. Unfortunately this adverse reaction to opposition players is now so deeply ingrained in the DNA of this event, it’s hard to see much changing at future Ryder Cups. It doesn’t take much to imagine what the American players are likely to be in for in two years’ time at the next Ryder Cup, scheduled for, of all countries, Ireland. The contest itself, if rather overshadowed by crowd behaviour, nonetheless produced nothing short of breathtaking golf on each of the three days. Europe stamped its authority on this Ryder Cup on the first morning and again in the afternoon fourball. Up by 5 ½ to 2 ½ after Day One, everyone was waiting and expecting this powerful American team to hit back hard on Day Two, but no, Europe again did the heavy lifting by winning by an even slightly bigger margin than Day One. So after Day Two Europe led 11-5, hence needing only 3 points to retain the Cup from the 12 singles matches left, reduced to 11 after Victor Hovland pulled out with a serious neck injury. Somebody then woke this giant called the American Ryder Cup team up, and they ripped into the European one, shredding their lead with alarming ferocity. Uncle Sam’s unabated hunger saw them win 6 of 11 singles and draw 4 of the remaining 5 matches. All up they lost only 1 of those 11 singles matches, a record unmatched in recent Ryder Cup history. Here’s one odd feature about the Ryder Cup... why are two days of this competition taken up with two of the dying relics of golf, foursomes and fourballs? The late great Peter Thompson, winner of British Open titles, once told me during an interview prior to a Ryder Cup that he couldn’t understand the odd fascination with four balls and foursomes, particularly the latter and offered this wry observation… “Look, the only people who play foursomes these days are veteran ladies over 9 holes on a Tuesday morning.” But ah! Who would dare tamper with any part of this global sporting phenomenon after the dramas of the last three days!

Justin Thomas, a member of the American Ryder Cup team, is predicting this year’s Cup which starts on Friday will be the wildest one of them all. Most Ryder Cups these days dispense pretty quickly with many of those polite rituals we’re supposed to observe when we play and for the most part we all do. But not so at the Ryder Cup, especially when it’s played in New York. The three-day event will pack in 50,000 fans each day. If you think New York fans can get a bit rowdy at the US Tennis Open, apparently, according to Thomas, ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet’. One of the absolute no-no’s in any golf game of course is cheering when an opponent mises a putt. But at Bethpage this week I pity any poor European player who misses an important putt. He will get the biggest cheer of the day from the raucous New York fans. The British commentators will smugly castigate those ignorant American fans, conveniently forgetting European fans are not averse to a bit of that bad mouth cheering as well when the Cup is on European soil. Bethpage is a remarkable venue, sometimes known as The People’s Country Club. There are five public courses - a Red, Green, Blue, Black and Yellow course. On any given day you can see regular golfers with their traditional golfing attire, but in the group behind you might see golfers wearing jean shorts and tank tops. The Black Course is considered as hard as any US Open Championship course with a series of steep uphill holes and others like the first hole which falls away 40 feet from the tee to the green. However the guardians give you fair warning before you tee off. There’s this famous sign nailed to the fence around the first tee which states in big bold print: WARNING The Black Course is An Extremely Difficult Course Which We Recommend Only For Highly Skilled Golfers. In other words if your handicap is in double figures or near it, head back to the pro shop and hassle for a return of your green fee and get out of the place. So this is the heady setting for what’s shaping up as the golfing clash for the ages. Who will win it this year? As a rule of thumb, Ryder Cups tend to be won by the home team. The Europeans flipped that theory during a 20-year stint from 1995 to 2014 when they won 8 out of the 10 Ryder Cups. This year at home and heavily backed by that rowdy fanatical base of home fans cheering endlessly, heaven forbid, “USA USA USA”, it might just be enough to get the Americans over the line, despite the fact that a third of their 12-strong team are Ryder Cup rookies. The European team has a far more experienced look about it. In fact it looks on paper as strong as any they have ever fielded, rich with Ryder Cup veterans like Rory McIlroy, John Rahm, Justin Rose, Tommy Fleetwood, Tyrell Hatton, Robert McIntyre, Victor Hovland, Matt Fitzpatrick and Shane Lowry, as well as one of the rising stars of world golf, Ludwig Aberg. Eleven of this 12-strong team played in the last Ryder Cup. What a line-up. Let’s just get it started!

Our footballers, and take your pick here from the All Blacks to the Warriors, didn’t provide us with much comfort, if any, over the weekend. However, the Black Ferns helped right the patriotism ledger a little with a barnstorming win over their South African opponents at the Women’s Rugby World Cup. Privately I was hoping the rare sight of our top three male golfers all playing in Europe’s biggest and richest tournament outside of the British Open might restore some national pride. But alas, Ryan Fox, Daniel Hillier and Kazuma Kobori, while all performing solidly at the British PGA Championship at Wentworth and all making the cut, never really got themselves in contention to win this prestigious championship, which of course Ryan Fox managed to do two years ago. The event carried no less than US$9 million in prize money and inevitably attracted a world class field. It also provided a final hit for those players heading to New York for next week’s Ryder Cup. Most of the USA team warmed up for the Cup by playing a USPGA event in California, inevitably won by Scottie Scherffler, his 19 th victory in less than four years. The European lads meanwhile were in Wentworth sharpening their game on one of Britain’s toughest courses. The best of the Kiwis were Kazuma Kobori and Ryan Fox who both finished in a tie for 46th place. Both earned close to NZ$100,00 for their week’s work. Just behind them was Daniel Hillier who finished tied for 52nd . As mentioned, it was rare to see our three top male golfers competing in a DP World Tour event. You would have to go back to 1990’s or thereabouts and the days of Michael Campbell, Frank Nobilo and Greg Turner, all of whom regularly teed it up in the same event. All three enjoyed plenty of success in Europe with numerous wins there among them. What was particularly enjoyable watching the live television coverage of the four days of this latest event was the ability we had to watch every shot Ryan Fox played for most of his rounds. The British television producers sent out two separate live productions by satellite. One was the standard coverage across all 18 holes with emphasis on the leading 8-10 golfers. However the second production followed just two groups. Fortunately for us in New Zealand, Ryan was in one of those featured groups each day. Although he may have only finished in 46th place, Foxy played a lot of very good golf, particularly on the greens. He finished the tournament with the second-best putting record from the field of 156 starters, averaging just 24 putts per round. His driving wasn’t as accurate as it usually is. Conditions for a couple of days were very windy and this was Foxy’s first start for the best part of a month, so I think we can cut him a little slack here and suggest his next outing will see an improvement in this part of his game. Kobori the rookie was again as he usually is from week to week remarkably neat and tidy in everything he did. And speaking of stats, Kazuma Kobori, probably the youngest player in the tournament, finished the four days as the most accurate driver in that field of 156. Remarkably, his tee shots found the fairways 92% of the time - a truly amazing statistic. No-one else got near that figure. On the last day, for example, he didn’t record a single bogey, helped immeasurably by his deadly accurate driving. He has now lifted his earnings in his first full year as a professional to E681,000 - that’s just over NZ$1.3 million, not bad for a 24-year-old lad from Rangiora and he still has another half dozen or so events he can play before the season ends if he so wishes.

“Oh my goodness, you’d have thought Ireland had just won the Football World Cup”. Those were the low-key but wonderfully appropriate words of the Irish television golf commentator reacting to the extraordinary scenes of mayhem unfolding around the 18 th green at Dublin’s K Club golf club immediately after Rory McIlroy sank a 28-foot putt for an eagle. That putt got him into a play-off with the 33-year-old Swedish golfer Joakim Lagergren for the Irish Open title. Thousands of dedicated Irish golf fans quite simply went nuts as the putt of their idol dropped into the hole. No, the Irish Open isn’t a Major Championship, it’s not even the biggest tournament in Europe, but it’s an event McIlroy religiously plays every year. That alone bestows on it enormous prestige and importance evidenced further by Rory himself as the emotion poured out of him after prevailing in the 3-hole sudden death play-off. The normally fairly garrulous Irishman was lost for words as he tried to convey just how much this win means to him to the television interviewer. His love and affection for those thousands of Irish golf fans who cheered him on shot after shot is matched only by their reciprocal adoration of him. It's been an extraordinary year for Rory by any yardstick. Winning his first Masters title to complete the Grand Slam, winning the Players Championship and now the Irish Open, along with another USPGA win early in the year in California - all in one calendar year. Frank Nobilo, one of the finest golfers New Zealand has ever produced, once told me that one of the biggest regrets he had as a player was his inability to ever win the NZ Open. No matter how many tournaments big or small you may win overseas, he said, there’s something uniquely special about winning your own national title, sentiments Rory McIlroy would no doubt absolutely endorse. Two Kiwis, Daniel Hillier and Kazuma Kobori, took their place in this US$6 million event. Daniel Hillier was prominent during the first two rounds, carding a second round 6 under par 66 to hold a share of the lead at the halfway stage. The third round, often seen as moving day, didn’t happen for Daniel - two birdies and two bogeys saw him slip back to 10th place heading into the final round. Here sadly it all fell apart early for the Kiwi with 2 bogeys and a double leaving him 4 over for his round after just three holes. He steadied the ship somewhat from that point on, playing out the last 15 holes in even par but his 4 over par 76 left him in a tie for 29 th place. Nonetheless he still picked up a tidy sum for his week’s work in Dublin - E41,000, around NZ$80,000. Kazuma Kobori had a fairly tough week finishing in a tie for 62nd place but he did show some commendable fight on Day 2. A 3 under par 69 saw him sneak into the weekend as the 65 th and last qualifier to make the cut, helped in no small way by an eagle 2 on the 405 metre par 4 9th . Here he holed out with his second from 146 metres. Kazuma, after a string of high finishes in recent weeks, has now overtaken Daniel Hillier as our second highest ranked male golfer. Kazuma now ranks at 158 on the official world golf rankings with Hillier dropping back to 209th . Ryan Fox remains our highest ranked male golfer, currently sitting at 39th in the world. Foxy hasn’t played for the past few weeks, taking a well-earned break back here in NZ.

The golfing year is slowly winding down. The men’s Major’s season was for all intents and purposes the Scheffler/McIlroy road show - Scheffler grabbing two and McIlroy at last getting to try on the Augusta winner’s green jacket. The women’s game offers up five Majors every year. This year Aussie golfers Min Jee Lee and Grace Kim won two of the five, another two went to two Japanese golfers, Miyu Yamashita and Mao Saigo, with the fifth going to Maja Stark from Sweden. Still left is the DP World Race to Dubai season Championship with our two leading Kiwis on this Tour, Kazuma Kobori and Daniel Hillier, both assured of a start in this staggeringly rich tour finale. Despite the thrills and joys the Major season has provided, the best in 2025 may still be yet to come. The 2025 Ryder Cup gets underway at the Bethpage Black course in Farmingdale New York on 25th September. Both teams have named their 12 players, with no real surprises. The European team for example has named 11 of the team who won the Cup two years ago in Rome. It looks to me to be one of the strongest European teams ever, on paper anyway. And yes, there’s no shortage of rockstar celebrity power in the American ranks, headed by the world’s leading golfer, Scottie Scheffler. An indication of the depth in American golf these days is that two of the American stars from recent Ryder Cup clashes, Patrick Reed and Jordan Spieth, have both missed out on selection. Instead in comes rookie Ben Griffen who has had a stellar year to date, winning twice on the USPGA Tour and now with a world ranking of 17. The other newcomer is Cameron Young, ranked 20th in the world currently. He has also won this year on the US Tour as well as placed 4th at the US Open. Fans from the Big Apple are commonly considered the loudest, the most vocal and the most nauseatingly patriotic of sports fans anywhere. Heaven help the European team. How many times can we bear to hear that awful chant “USA USA” with its odious Trumpian political overtones? Every putt the Europeans miss, every poor shot one of them plays will send Uncle Tom’s fans into various states of unbridled joy and neurotic madness. Fans will leave all traces of fair play and quietness way behind at New York’s Grand Central station. The two starting line-ups have been named in the last week or so and on paper it looks a pretty even scrap, although a closer scrutiny of the 24 contestants suggests Team USA will start as favourites. Team USA has 10 of its 12 players ranked inside the world’s top 20 players. Europe is not too far behind with 7 in the top 20. Breaking down the top ten, again it’s the Americans that fare best - they occupy 5 of the world’s top 10 spots, Europe just 3 in Rory McIlroy, Robert McIntyre and Tommy Fleetwood. The Americans will also take heart from the fact that they have won three of the last four Ryder Cups played on US soil. Offsetting that to some extent is that all 12 European players are very experienced with all American conditions and courses. I suspect the team that putts best will win this thing but don’t ask me who that will be.

There are occasionally rare moments in sport when an individual’s achievement in one sport triggers such an effusive reaction from every corner of the sporting world that you could almost be forgiven for thinking that the world still has the wherewithal to sound as one. Tommy Fleetwood’s win in the FedEx Cup final was one such moment. You know you’ve done something special when superstars like Le Bron James and swimmer Michael Phelps, not to mention the likes of Tiger Woods and Caitlin Clark, are flicking you congratulatory messages from their phones. Tommy has been one of the world’s best and clearly one of the games most popular golfers over the past couple of years but for the life of him he couldn’t nail down a victory on the USPGA Tour. He’s won 8 times on the European Tour (now the DP World Tour). He’s finished runner-up 7 times on the USPGA Tour, second in the US Open, second at the Olympic Games. All up he has 29 top 5 finishes from his previous 161 starts. Through all this heartbreak, warm-hearted Tommy has never lost his sense of humour, always immediately available for a post-round interview after another soul- destroying near miss. His humility and humour have endeared him to golfers worldwide. At a time when there has never been as much division in golfing ranks as we have now, Tommy’s win at Atlanta in the FedEx Cup final seems to have united all the factions across the golfing world, judging by the reaction to his win. Personally all I’d like to see him do now… is get a bloody haircut! Tommy the Pommy’s win in Atlanta has somewhat overshadowed some very good news from the camps of two of our leading golfers… Kazuma Kobori and Lydia Ko. The performance of Kazuma Kobori at the British Masters was nothing short of extraordinary. He played the last 4 holes 5 under par which elevated him into a second-place finish and a cheque for E261,000 (around NZ$ 525,000). His amazing finish, believe it or not, was something of a repeat from his showing earlier in the week. On Day 2 he birdied the last four holes to make the cut and put him on the road to a half a million dollar cheque. He now stands 23rd on the Race to Dubai rankings. The DP Championship final in Dubai in November is the equivalent of the FedEx Cup where only the top 70 performers from the year are eligible to play in this super rich final in the desert. It now seems certain that both our regular Kiwis on the DP World Tour, Kobori and Daniel Hillier, will play in this event. And just to top off a fairly memorable weekend for the Kobori family, Kazuma’s sister, Momoka, who is carving out a successful career on the Ladies European Tour, finished 8th in the most recent event, The Hills Open. Meanwhile Lydia Ko rediscovered some of her best form, notably missing from her game over the past 3-4 months. Lydia posted rounds of 68 and 67 over the weekend to finish in a tie for 5th place in the Canadian Open in Ontario which was won by Canada’s most popular female golfer, Brooke Henderson, her first win on the LPGA for two and a half years.

Unfortunately for Ryan Fox, his final appearance on the 2024/2025 USPGA Tour wasn’t the finale he would have wanted. Playing in the BMW Championship in Maryland, Ryan finished in 43rd place in a field of just 49 starters. Only the top 50 players from the 2024/2025 season were eligible to play in this US$20 million event. This year has been by far the most successful year of Ryan’s career, amateur or professional. Winning twice on this the world’s leading golf tour and earning the best part of US$4 million tells you basically all you need to know about his golfing year. He entered the BMW Championship hoping to lift his FedEx Cup ranking from 34th to a position inside the top 30, which would have given him a spot in the Tour finale next week in Atlanta. However it wasn’t really until the 4th and final round before Ryan came to terms with this tough, hilly and very demanding Caves Valley course. His 4th round 69 was bettered by only 3 players on the last day. But rounds of 74, 73 and 76 from the first 3 days effectively took him out of the race for a top 30 place. But be rest assured Ryan didn’t leave Maryland empty-handed, collecting a total of US$88,000 for his 43rd finish. Along with that he received an additional US$200,000 dollars from a separate prize pool by way of bonuses for his FedEx Cup efforts. By the sound of it his golfing year is far from finished. He’s indicated he’d like to play a few events on the DP World Tour and also sounds keen to play in the Australian Open towards the end of the year. The BMW was won by Scottie Scheffler who quickly made up the 4-shot deficit he had going into the last round with a string of early birdies. Third-round leader Robert MacIntyre, playing with Scheffler, stumbled through 3 bogeys in his first 5 holes. The highlight of Scheffler’s round came on the par 3 17th , considered the toughest par 3 on the USPGA Tour. Scheffler powered his tee through the green leaving himself with a scary 27-metre downhill chip, with the hole cut precariously close to a lake. Unfazed by the proximity of hazards, Scheffler set his ball off tumbling down the green towards the pin at the bottom of the green. When it reached the flat of the green it virtually stopped, only to regather just enough roll and to then gently drop into the hole. This gave him a 2-shot lead with only the last hole to play which saw both golfers comfortably par it. Scheffler has now won 12 times over the past 2 seasons, which ranks as one of the truly great winning streaks in all of golf. This win, his 5th of the season, matches the number of wins he recorded last year. This is also the first time since 2005-2007 that a player has won 5 times, two years in a row. And yes, the golfer who last did the 5 wins back-to-back was…. Tiger Woods. Scheffler now starts as hot favourite to win next week’s FedEx Cup final and with it another US$10 million plus pay day.

An unfortunate Americanism, favoured for some years now especially by American television commentators when summarising a competitor’s career, is to list numerically their losses alongside the number of events they’ve played in. It is unflattering and can portray a player in a pretty brutal light. “Well, that’s another failure for Joe Bloggs, he’s now O and 10”, the big O indicating how this poor fellow is still without a win. As fate should have it, Tommy Fleetwood, the eminently likeable and talented English golfer, has now played 43 tournaments on the USPGA Tour but hasn’t posted a win. So sure as hell, every week when any shots of Fleetwood appear on the screen, out comes the big O comparison. It was fair dripping out of the commentators’ mouths this week after Fleetwood, who looked on the verge of breaking his drought when he led the field with just a couple of holes to go at the St Jude Classic in Memphis, hit a couple of loose shots near the end of his round. That saw him finish tied with JJ Spaun, who ultimately went on to win the sudden death play-off and poor old Tommy is now universally known around the golfing world as Mr O/43. This is terribly unfair on Fleetwood, who for a number of years now has ranked in and around the world’s top 10 golfers (he’s currently ranked 13). Despite his heartbreaking loss to JJ Spaun, Fleetwood happily agreed to a television interview on the 18th green, just minutes after his loss, which must have been hurting him big-time at that moment. He did it, as he always does, with humour and dignity, content to answer what it’s like to have been so close so many times but still going home without the bacon. Ironically, Ryan Fox playing in this same tournament finished in a tie for 50th place, yet pleased, I suspect, to know he’s still picked up enough FedEx Cup points to get him into the field for this week’s second round. The field for this event has only 50 starters. Ryan’s main focus this week, I imagine, is to get that ranking from 36th up to 30th place. To achieve this he’ll probably have to finish 10th or better. If he can get inside the top 30 he will then progress to the FedEx Cup final the following week in Atlanta. This small field of 30 will split something in the order of $US20 million.

It’s finally all over, this marathon Major Championship season - 9 events in all. These days the season comprises five for women and the traditional four still for men. The final Major was the women’s Open Championship, played down in Wales at the Royal Porthcawl course. New Zealand, unusually, had three golfers in the field - Lydia Ko as per usual, but along with her were newcomers Amelia Garvey and Momoka Kobori, sister of Kazuma Kobori who is now established on the men’s DP World Tour. These two gained entry through qualifying tournaments in Europe where they’re based. Neither managed to make the cut. Garvey missed the cut by a single shot and Kobori was a further 4 shots back. Given their inexperience at this level of the game, both acquitted themselves well, especially Garvey who was regularly hitting her drive out over 260 yards, some 50 yards further than Lydia Ko’s average drives, in what were admittingly very difficult playing conditions. However, length, as we know in golf, isn’t everything, because Amelia averaged only around 6 fairways hit from her two rounds. This, in her first year on the world’s Number Two Tour for women, has seen Amelia string together 4 top 10 finishes prior to the Open Championship, clearly suggesting she has a bright future in the women’s game. For Lydia, again unfortunately, it was another disappointing showing overall in a Major Championship in 2025. Lydia entered the Open as defending champion but a 1 over par 73 on Day One left her 6 shots off the lead. Things didn’t improve on Day Two with another 1 over par 73 which saw her make the cut with only 2 shots to spare. However, during her back 9 on Day Two the British commentators, in their curious and ill-informed wisdom, decided to write her off completely, lamenting how the defending champion wouldn’t be around for the weekend because she was a stroke off making the cut for most of her second round. What these characters didn’t take into account was the increasingly strong winds blowing across the course which saw scoring become inevitably more difficult and so the cut went from even par to minus 2, enabling Lydia to ease into the 3rd round with that 2-shot cushion. Her best showing came on Day Three with a 2 under par 70 that saw her move up to just inside the top 20 and with a chance of at least a top 10 finish, but instead she saved her worst for last with a 3 over 75 that left her in a tie for 36th place. It wasn’t all bad news for Lydia. This Major carried $US9.5 million in prize money. So even finishing well off the pace in a tie for 36th , Lydia picked up $US57,000 for her troubles. Ryan Fox was back in action across the Atlantic on the USPGA Tour. A promising opening round of 68 had him inside the top 20 (just) and in good shape to make the cut at this 3M Championship event. His second round started well enough with an early birdie, but 4 bogeys on the back nine left him well outside the cut. It was odd to see Ryan’s driving stats well down the list. His average driving distance of 307 yards had him only ranked 53rd in distance off the tee. Hopefully it was just a case of his game being a bit rusty after a 2-week break, followed by a trek back to America. This week he will want and need his game to be razor sharp for the first round of the FedEx Cup play-offs. Some potentially mega-big pay days await Foxy if he can find his best form. This week he needs to finish in the top 50 to progress to the second round and then the top 30 the following week to make the finals.

In the topsy-turvy world of real estate, the three buzz words “location location location” dominate and define the business. Oddly enough, they also convey a certain significance in the professional world of golf. Players change location every week, from one city to the next and often one continent to the next, but just occasionally during the annual lull, following the completion of the Major golf season, it’s time for “vacation vacation vacation” for most of the game’s leading practitioners. This is what’s been happening over the past week and our leading golfers are no doubt relishing the downtime. Ryan Fox, after an energy-sapping but rewarding past couple of months, passed up playing the latest event on the USPGA Tour, as did most of the world’s top 100 players. Foxy, unlike how he found himself this time last year when he was battling to keep his playing card for 2025, is guaranteed full exemption for the next two years following his two wins in America this year. He is also now ranked highly enough to have safely qualified for the FedEx Cup play-offs which will start in a couple of weeks’ time. Such is his assured playing status in America for the next couple of years, Ryan’s decided he’s going to travel back to Europe to play in a few of the more highly ranked DP World Tour events because he still has a soft spot for European courses and certain tournaments. He’s also enjoyed a lot of success in Europe prior to his shift to America and given his current good form, more good results could well come his way over the next couple of months. Daniel Hillier and Kazuma Kobori, the two Kiwis who play the DP World Tour, also have had a week off with no DP World Tour event scheduled after the conclusion of the USPGA. This tour resumes in Scotland this week with the Nexo Championship at the Trump International Links in Aberdeenshire. Donald Trump is currently in Scotland, so he may make what I suspect will be a contentious appearance at this event. Meanwhile Lydia Ko, also a little surprisingly, had last week off rather than playing in the Scottish Open, used by all the game’s leading players as a dress rehearsal for the Open Championship which follows the Scottish Open. This year the Open is at Royal Porthcawl in Wales and Lydia of course is the defending champion. No reason was forthcoming from the Ko camp as to why she missed the Scottish Open. 2025 has been something of a rollercoaster ride for Lydia. She recorded a win in her 3rd start at the World Championship back in February. However, she has only played 11 tournaments so far this year. She hasn’t recorded a top ten finish since March and has missed the cut in her last two tournaments, which means her last four-round tournament was back in mid-June. On the surface it doesn’t look like an ideal build-up for the most important tournament of the year in Women’s golf, the Open Championship. However, Lydia has always done things her way. She has changed caddies and coaches more than most other women golfers, but she has also, let us not forget, forged a record almost second to none in the modern game. We can only hope she is not carrying an injury into this, her most important event of the year. Despite the ups and downs of her year to date, one thing is for sure, if she brings her A game to Porthcawl, coupled with her fiercely competitive mental game, she will be right in the mix come Monday morning’s final round, I have no doubt about that.

Watching Scottie Scheffler stroll to a comfortable victory on the final day of the Open Championship came really as no surprise. The tall, languid American held a 3-shot lead after 54 holes, but nonetheless there was some chatter that Rory McIlroy, after an exquisite third round 5 under par 66, might nip in and grab the Claret Jug ahead of Scheffler, egged on by a massive home crowd. Alas, the Irishman couldn’t repeat his third-round heroics, playing out a fairly patchy 2 under 69 to finish 7 shots adrift of Scheffler in a tie for 7th place. It can be argued, and the world rankings underline this as well, that Rory McIlroy is the world’s Number 2 golfer behind Scheffler. The difference between the two is consistency. Scheffler pitches up every week and reels off sub par rounds, regardless of the courses, links or parklands, the length and speed of the greens or the height and depth of the rough. Rory, when he’s on fire can match Scheffler, but the Irishman’s problem is he can’t seem to do it for four rounds often enough. When Scheffler’s game is off, which is very rarely, he’ll still patch together a 73 or 74. Rory, on the other hand, when he’s having problems with his driver in particular will clock up 77’s or 78’s. Meanwhile, others, including some of Scheffler’s peers, are starting to talk about him in the same breath as Tiger Woods. Shane Lowry, who played with Scheffler, said he honestly thought he was going to birdie every hole. “It was incredible to watch. If his feet stayed stable and his swing looked like Adam Scott’s we’d be talking about him in the same words as Tiger Woods”. Xander Schauffele, last year’s Open winner, echoing Lowry’s comments, said, “I didn’t think the golfing world would see someone as dominant as Tiger come through so soon. You can’t even say Scottie is on some sort of run, he’s been killing it for over two years now. When you see his name up on the leaderboard it sucks for us.” Yes, valid comparisons up to a point. When these thoughts and others were put to Scheffler, he said bluntly, “Comparing me to Tiger is just silly stuff. He’s won 15 Majors, I’ve won 4”. So guys, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Remember also Tiger has won 82 tournaments worldwide, Scheffler 20 to date. Of most interest to me is how many more Majors Scheffler might win. He’s just 29, so probably has at least another 10 years of top golf ahead of him if he so wishes. Curiously, if he were to win just 1 Major per year for the next decade, that would take his tally to 15, Tiger’s magic number. The chances of Tiger ever adding to that tally look slim. The two Kiwis in the Open field failed narrowly to advance beyond the first two rounds. Both Ryan Fox and Daniel Hillier missed the cut by 1 shot. It must have been an especially painful moment for Daniel. With 3 holes left in his second round, he was looking pretty. His score was at even par and at that point the cut looked as if it would probably be at one over (plus 1). Unfortunately for Daniel, he then proceeded to bogey two of his last 3 holes to finish at 2 over. Meanwhile the cut came down to minus 1 so he and Foxy, who had two reasonably efficient rounds, both missed out by the narrowest of margins… 1 shot. The final word this week to Jordan Spieth on Scottie Scheffler: “He doesn’t care to be a super star. He’s not transcending the game like Tiger did. He just wants to get away from the game and separate himself from it. He feels it is too much. He differs in that respect more than any other superstar that you’ve seen in the modern era. I don’t think there’s

For as long as professional golf has been around, the game’s honeypot has always been the American Tours - the USPGA and Seniors Tours for men and the USLPGA for women. Change comes slowly to this notoriously conservative sport, whether it’s rule changes, dress wear or tournament routines. The one exception, however, has been prize money, which has catapulted skywards in recent years and not just in the USA. We had the unusual sight last week of the world’s leading men’s and women’s weekly tournaments in Europe, not America, offering a combined total of $17 million in prize money, $9 million for the men, $8 million for the women. Now it’s far from a revolution that is shaking world golf, more just an unusual coincidence. The world’s leading female players gathered on the shores of Lake Geneva to contest their 4th Major of the year, the Amundi Evian Championship, which carried US$8 million dollars in prize money. Meanwhile the USPGA Tour had moved to the town of North Berwick, east of Edinburgh, for the Scottish Open. Here the prize pool was US$9 million. The Scottish Open in recent years has acquired co-sanctioning status, meaning it’s part of both the USPGA Tour and the DP World Tour. It’s always played the week prior to the Open Championship and gives players from around the world a chance to accustom themselves and their game to those distinctively different courses that host the Open every year. They’re usually staged on flat, treeless links courses, fully exposed to the ravages of European weather systems. Unfortunately, Kiwi golfers competing in both events saw very little of the combined $17 million purse. Ryan Fox made a very good start in the Scottish Open, firing a 4 under 66 on Day 1, to lie in a tie for 9th place. That proved to be his only sub par round as he went 70, 74, 72 for the next three to finish in a tie for 65th place. Daniel Hillier fared worse, failing to make the cut. Over on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lydia Ko was not faring much better, shooting two rounds over par - 74 and 71 - which left her at 5 over for the 36 holes and 3 shots off the cut mark. To date it’s been an awful Major Championship season for Lydia and given her great form at the end of last year and the start of this year, it’s mystifying why her form has been so poor. From the 4 Majors this year, Lydia’s results have been T52nd, T20, T12 and a missed cut. Of those 14 rounds of golf in her 4 Majors she hasn’t broken 70 once. However, Ko is resilient and we’ve seen her bounce back spectacularly before from previous ruts she’s found herself in. Let’s hope she can do it again in the year’s final Major, the Women’s Open Championship starting on July 31. While Lydia was leaving Lake Geneva early, an astounding finale was playing out at the end of the Evian Championship. The eventual winner was 22-year-old Australian Grace Kim who eagled the 72 nd hole to get into a play-off with Thailand’s Jeeno Thitikul. Thitikul looked certain to win the event on the first extra hole after Kim was forced to take a penalty drop from just off the 18th green. In a scene uncannily similar to what we saw from Ryan Fox at Myrtle Beach last month, Kim chipped on from some 70 feet off the to the left of the green for a birdie. Thitikul, from a handy position, made her birdie putt for a 4 as well. So back to the tee they went for another crack at this par 5 finishing hole. Once more another eye-popping shot from Kim – from well over 200 yards out, she dumped her fairway wood 2nd to within inches of the hole. Thitikul could do no better than make birdie, leaving Kim with a tap in for eagle to claim her first Major title. But what a finish! She played the last 3 holes of this Championship eagle, birdie, eagle. Not even the much-vaunted State of Origin matches produce excitement of this calibre. Bonza mate!

Kazuma Kobori, the 22-year-old rookie pro from New Zealand, enjoyed his best week on the DP World Tour when he fired a final round of 63 and shot up the leaderboard by 14 places to finish alone in 3rd place at the BMW Championship in Munich this week. That final round of 63 included 9 birdies and an eagle. The Kiwi pro now sits in 44 th place on the DP World Tour rankings. At year’s end only the top 70 golfers from this Tour are eligible to play in the rich Race to Dubai end-of-season championship. Kobori now has an excellent chance of being in that top 70. Sure, there is a lot of golf to be played between now and November, but the consistency of Kobori‘s overall game suggests he’s a good bet to be in that top 70. So far on tour Kobori hasn’t ranked anywhere near the top 100 in distance off the tee, but in Germany he made some big strides here, averaging 299 yards (around 275 metres) which ranked him 56th longest driver in Munich. He remains however the second most accurate driver on the DP World Tour. He lived up to that ranking in Germany, hitting 85% of fairways, while the field’s average was in the low 40’s. He has also fattened his wallet considerably in Germany lifting his season earnings to E373,000 or just over NZ$700,000. Daniel Hillier, the other Kiwi in the field, didn’t fare quite as well as Kobori - he missed the cut. Our top golfing duo, Ryan Fox and Lydia Ko, both had the week off. Foxy travelled to Britain for the first of two tournaments, the Scottish Open this week which forms part of the USPGA Tour, followed by the Open Championship at Port Rush in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile on the LIV Golf circuit, Kiwi pro Ben Campbell picked up a cool US$225,000 for finishing in a tie for 21st place in the latest LIV Golf tournament in Dallas, which was won by Patrick Reed who picked up US$4 million - just staggering numbers. However, feelings between LIV Golfers and USPGA players still run deep if an outburst from former Major Championship winner Lucas Glover is anything to go by. In a golf podcast aired in the USA last week, Glover said he is firmly opposed to any LIV Golfers being allowed to rejoin the USPGA circuit as has been suggested in some quarters as a means to resolve the standoff between the two tours. Glover couldn’t have been more emphatic in his opposition, saying he doesn’t want those players back. “Personally,” he says, “I don’t want to play with them... or see them back here taking part of my pie”. I suspect he is far from alone with those feelings in the ranks of USPGA players. Clearly animosity still exists between the two tours as various spokespeople from the two bodies continue to try and thrash out a compromise deal that would see the two tours unite in some fashion. It looks a bit like the stand-off between Israel and Hamas. Interestingly enough, Donald Trump has got involved with this golf dispute but appears to be having about as much success there as he is trying to bring about peace in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas.

His name may not run off the tongue as easily as Lydia Ko or Ryan Fox, but it may not be long before the pronunciation of Kazuma Kobori’s name becomes second nature to golf followers everywhere. Kazuma Kobori is quickly but quietly becoming the silent achiever of NZ golf. No, he hasn’t set the golfing world alight or even the NZ golf scene for that matter. He is after all still a rookie, still in his first year as a professional golfer. But again last week in the Italian Open where he finished in a tie for 16th place, he has shown a game typified by consistency and accuracy off the tee and a rare touch on the green. Statistics, especially in a game like golf, don’t lie. After 17 tournaments so far this season on the DP World Tour, Kobori sits as the second most accurate driver of the golf ball off the tee and the 31st best putter on tour. Remember these stats embrace well over 200 golfers who play on the DP World Tour, the world’s second strongest tour behind the USPGA Tour. Remember Kobori is just 23 years of age and has only been a pro since November last year. His consistency on this demanding tour, which so far this year has encompassed tournaments on four different continents, has seen him accumulate E223,000 or approximately NZ$425,000 in prize money. That suggests he’s probably done enough this year to have secured his playing card for next year on the DP World Tour. His immediate goal now is probably to finish inside the top 70 money winners this year in order to qualify for the super-rich DP World Tour play-offs in November. At the moment Kobori sits at number 73 on these rankings. We are exactly halfway through the season with still 16 tournaments left before those November finals, so Kobori, given his new-found consistency, would appear to have an excellent chance of being in those finals. To date, from his 17 starts on this year’s tour, he has recorded 7 top 25 finishes. He has only one top ten to his credit, a 4th place at the Singapore Open. Underlining this rookie’s consistency has been the fact that he has only missed 5 cuts, and remember he is playing on courses every week he’s never played before. Add to that a schedule of having to travel far and wide to countries he’s unlikely to have traversed before. This is a far cry from the sheltered, carefully managed career he had as a leading amateur where everything was paid for. Very few NZ golfers, with the exception of Lydia Ko, have posted numbers as impressive as this young man in their first year as a pro, which underlies just how profoundly difficult life is for most amateurs when they first turn pro. So don’t worry if you stumble a bit over getting his name absolutely right. It won’t be long, I suspect, before you’ll know it off by heart. NZ’s other DP World Tour golfer, Daniel Hillier, didn’t fare quite as well, finishing in a tie for 41st place. However Daniel remains 10th on the End of Season Play-offs ranking list. Steve Alker meanwhile had to make do with a 7 th place in the US Seniors Open, 8 shots behind the winner, Padric Harrington. It was the Irishman’s second Senior Major championship title. And finally a word for NZ’s latest pro, Fiona Xu, trying to make it on the USLPGA Tour. Playing in the Dow Championship, a doubles event, Fiona and her American partner, Mariel Galdianao, finished in a tie for 33rd place. It’s been a tough first up year for Fiona. She’s only made the cut twice from her 9 starts, so her prize money in this latest outing of US$6700 was no doubt very welcome.

Our big three - Ryan Fox, Lydia Ko and Steve Alker - were all in the thick of it on their respective tours over the past seven days. None made it into the winner’s circle, but all should be well pleased with the quality of their golf. Steve Alker got closest to the big prize, finishing runner-up in the Kaulig Championship, which also doubles as a Major Championship, at the famous Firestone Country Club. It would have been Steve’s second Champions Major title if he had prevailed. As it was, he took the eventual winner, Miguel Angel Jimenez, to the second hole of sudden death before losing out to a 15-foot putt from the Spaniard, the undoubted star of the Champions Tour in 2025. His win today was his fourth of the year so far. Alker will get the chance to turn the tables on the in-form Spaniard later this week when the next Champions Major gets underway – the US Senior Open. Meanwhile in the latest Women’s Major, the 2025 USPGA Championship, it was the Australian, Minjee Lee, who handled the tough conditions best at the Fields Ranch course in San Francisco. Lee picked up her third Major title to sit equal with Lydia Ko, both having three Major titles to their credit. The tough windy conditions in San Fransico certainly took its toll on the field. Only Minjee Lee and two others managed to break par for the 4 rounds. The Australian held a 4-shot lead going into the last round, but she too struggled in the high winds. All up Lee registered 5 bogeys in her final round, yet her 2 over par 74 was good enough to see her finish 3 shots clear of the field. She clearly was the deserved winner. Lydia Ko chances of winning here largely disappeared on the first day. After 18 holes she was in 58th place after a 3 over par 75, and in danger of missing the cut. To her credit Lydia probably played as well as anyone over the last 3 days, playing the last 54 holes in just 2 over par which saw her climb to a very respectable 12 th place by the end of the 4 th round. She may not have played her best golf in this Major but I think it’s fair to say any course that sees Lydia Ko clock up 16 bogeys, as she did here over the 4 rounds, must rank as arguably the hardest course in all of women’s golf. The world’s best male golfers also had a tough week at the Travelers Championship in Connecticut, the latest Signature event on the USPGA Tour. Only the top 70 golfers on the FedEx Cup list were eligible to play here and that included Ryan Fox. I can only imagine how exhausted, mentally and physically, Foxy must be feeling now. He’s played in 5 of the last 6 weeks. His schedule has included two Majors, the Canadian Open and two Signature events. He made the cut in all 5, won 2 of those tournaments and has set himself up for the next 2-3 years on the American PGA Tour. On top of that, he’s won somewhere in the vicinity of NZ$6-7 million. In this latest event he finished in a tie for 17 th , winning US$252,000 or close to half a million Kiwi. I suspect and hope, for his sake, he takes this week off and gives his body a rest before his next big challenge, the Open Championship, across the other side of the Atlantic coming up in July. He’s in such great form I’m sure, privately anyway, he rightly thinks he can realistically contest for Major titles. His run of form and results over the last 6 weeks, I would suggest, is unsurpassed in the annals of NZ golf. Sir Bob Charles, whose golf was marked by an undeniable beacon of consistency and whose ability to compete week after week was renowned, didn’t compete against the fields which have the depth there is now in the USPGA Tour.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. A journeyman pro winning America’s national Open - a Major Championship on America’s hardest course - but this is exactly what happened. Thirty-five-year-old JJ Spaun, a native from California, emerging out of the rain, the mud and the gloom to roll in a 65- foot putt on the 18 th hole to win the year’s 3 rd Major championship. Perhaps it’s a little unkind to label Spaun as an absolute journeyman. He did record a solitary win on this Tour a few years back and this year took Rory McIlroy to a play-off in the Players Championship before losing out to the Irishman. However he was sufficiently disillusioned with his game last year to seriously consider giving the game away. That thought is unlikely to return to him any time soon I imagine. Another oddity here - after his win he attributed the win in large part to the weather. Heavy rain midway through the day made much of the course unplayable and prompted a two-hour weather delay. That, said Spaun, gave him time to regather his thoughts. When the rain came he had largely played himself out of the tournament after bogeying 5 of the first 6 holes. When he got back out on the course, however, he rediscovered his putting touch which saw him record the only bogey-free round on Day 1. His opening round of 66 gave him the first day lead and he put that down to his putting and his accurate driving. Over the back nine the putts from 10, 20 and 30 feet started to drop. Meanwhile his opponents on the first page of the leaderboard were coming to grief one by one as Oakmont started to take its toll. At one stage no less than 5 players were tied at the top at 1 under par. In the end it came down to that final green. If Spaun could get down in 2 from 65 feet the title was his. A three putt here meant he would be tied with Scot Bob McIntyre. It was a long awkward downhill putt. Getting the speed right was the key to getting his ball close to the hole and when he needed his putter to come to the fore again, it did so. And in she rolled and with it the title - US Open champion. It was a US$4million putt. Another who oddly enough benefitted from the weather carnage was Ryan Fox. He began the day in a tie for 39th place. He got the better of the weather on this final day and made the most of it shooting a 1 under par 69, his only sub par round of the tournament. Then he sat back and watched the awful weather roll in and the scores start to climb and his position get better and better. At the end of it all his 72-hole score of 7 over was enough to see him in a tie for 19th place, one of his best ever showings in a Major. Also it lifted his world ranking by 2 spots to 30 and his FedEx cup ranking improved by 1 position to 24. Financially another great week for Foxy, picking up $US267,000, the best part of half a million in NZ money. His 1 under par 69 was bettered by only 2 players in the field on that 4 th day, John Rahm and Rory McIlroy who both shot 67’s.

In 2025 Rory McIlroy has done it, so has Scottie Scheffler and Seb Straka, the only golfers to win twice this calendar year on the USPGA Tour. Ah… but hold on, we can now add a third name to that list - a bloke called Ryan Fox, who showed his win in the Myrtle Beach Championship a month ago was no fluke. Helped, in no small way, by what Foxy himself called “the best shot I’ve ever played”, he won the Canadian Open in a two-way play-off with Sam Burns, an American. But gee, it was one helluva struggle. Burns and Fox needed four extra holes before they could be separated, thanks finally to a birdie four on the par 5 18 th at the Osprey North course in Toronto. By my reckoning Foxy has become the first New Zealander to win two tournaments on American soil in a single PGA year. Bob Charles won a USPGA title in 1963 and then added the British 0pen title later in that year. Winning two titles within the space of a month makes him, alongside Rory and Scottie, just about the hottest golfing property on the planet at the moment. If there is one incontrovertible fact about golfing life it’s that victories, no matter the strength of the field, don’t come easy. Fox and Burns battled it out for 22 holes each today and in the course of the four holes play-off it was clear the pressure was needling away at both of them. Both had chances which they couldn’t cash in on and both had anxious moments which threatened to end their hopes of victory, but each was able to drag themselves back into the dogfight and finally it was a beautiful high climbing Fox 3 wood from 250 yards which landed and stopped just a few feet from the hole that eventually snapped the deadlock and handed this enormously prestigious title to the Kiwi. The Canadian Open, with a history dating back over 100 years, may not be a Major but it carries enormous prestige and always attracts one of the strongest fields outside of the four Majors. This year’s field was headed by Rory McIlroy no less. Winning it brings a long list of benefits. Just like his win last month saw him into the year’s second Major, the USPGA, so this win gets Foxy into this week’s US Open at Oakmont. He picks up US$1.7million or around three and half million NZ dollars in prizemoney for his Canadian win. His world ranking has shot up to 32 and his FedEx ranking now has him inside the top 30, virtually assuring him a place in golf’s richest tournament, the FedEx finals, later in the year. Invitations to compete in rich end-of-season events will flood in. Sponsors’ doors will open wide. Back here he should, if I can be unashamedly partisan, win the Halberg Sportsman of the Year and probably the Supreme Halberg title as well. This is not just a memorable day for NZ Golf but NZ sport as well. So, for sure we now have a fox on the run and he’s running as fast as his legs can take him to his next big goal - to capture a Major Championship title. He has shown very clearly he now has the game, the mind and the nous to win at the highest level of this sport.

Three years and three months ago Scottie Scheffler was just another little-known American golfer trying his hardest to rack up a win on the USPGA Tour. Well early in 2023 he made that all important breakthrough with his first win. Now three years and three months later he’s added another 15 wins to that opening win in February 2023. Oddly enough it took Tiger Woods exactly the same length of time, three years and three months, to record his first 16 wins. Comparisons with Tiger Woods are an odious exercise. Nonetheless over the past 50 years really only Tiger Woods has notched up as many wins as quickly as Scottie Scheffler. The key to his success? Well, fellow Texan Jordan Spieth might have summed it up best when he said during Scheffler’s latest success, “his club control is elite, maybe the best that’s ever been”. In the end Scheffler won the Memorial Tournament by 4 shots to record his 3 rd win of the year. It was also a very satisfactory week for Ryan Fox. Playing in his first Signature Event, he finished in a tie for 20 th place. Only the top 70 players on tour were eligible for this event or, put another way, Foxy was teeing it up with most of the world’s top 50 players and to stay in the picture for the full 4 rounds and finish in a tie for 20 th place is no mean feat. He beat a lot of players higher than him on the world rankings. It also lifted him from 66 th to 60 th place on the FedEx Cup standings. It should also be noted that for finishing 20 th in this US$20 million tournament he earned US$250,000. If he keeps this form up there will likely be quite a few more big pay days ahead, for the rest of this year at least. Not such good news from two of our usual top performers, Lydia Ko and Daniel Hillier. Lydia, after the superb form she’s shown the golfing world over the last 7-8 months, wasn’t able to produce it in the year’s second Women’s Major – the US Open, the richest tournament in women’s golf. A share of 26 th place was the best Lydia could muster. Four rounds in the 70’s, only 1 of them under par (the second round 71) meant she never featured on the leader board. Two of her traditional strengths - accuracy off the tee and her deadly putting - were strangely missing at the Erin Hills golf course in Harford, Wisconsin. Breaking her game down by the numbers makes for difficult reading. Her problems began on the tee where she was only able to find 36 fairways out of 56. Such poor numbers usually mean difficulty hitting greens in regulation. Lydia only managed to find 42 greens in regulation which meant she missed a whopping 30 greens over the 4 rounds. Struggling to find greens impacted on her putting as well. It’s hard to get the ball close to the pin if you’re playing out of the rough on 30 holes. Lydia was averaging 29 putts per round, another figure higher than what we have come to expect from Lydia, considered the best putter in the women’s game. The title went to 25-year-old Maja Stark from Sweden, a relative outsider ranked outside the world’s top 30 but now a household name in world golf and a prizewinner’s cheque of US$2.4 million to go with the title. Back in Europe, Kiwi Daniel Hillier was very much in with a chance to grab his second win on the DP World Tour. The Kiwi opened with rounds of 66 and 67 to be just a couple shots off the lead at the halfway stage. Alas he wasn’t able to sustain that early round form and shot rounds of 70 and 73 over the weekend, eventually slipping to a tie for 37 th place at the Austrian Open in Salzburg, finishing 15 shots behind the winner, Germany’s Nicolai von Dellingshausen.

It’s been an unusual and probably an uncomfortable last fortnight for the US Senior Tour. This is the one for over 50’s, the one where Steve Alker has prospered greatly. In what appears an unusual move the USPGA scheduled two of the Senior Majors this year back-to- back. Now comes the uncomfortable bit - both tournaments were won by the same golfer, Angel Cabrera, arguably South America’s finest ever golfer. In 2007 he won the US Open and two years later he won the 2009 Masters. Unfortunately there is a lot more to Cabrera than his golfing abilities. He’s also a convicted criminal who in recent years was sentenced to 48 months in prison for his crimes. He was released on parole after serving 28 months in jail for assaulting and threatening two of his ex-girlfriends. Now at the age of 55 he’s been granted membership of the Senior PGA Tour. To win back-to-back Majors, albeit on the Seniors Tour, suggests this fellow has lost little of the skills that brought him two Majors earlier this century. I suspect there’s some measure of disquiet behind closed doors on the Seniors Tour. Some might argue his behaviour towards his ex-girlfriends should have disqualified him from ever playing on any tour. However he has served his time in prison and been released back into civilian life and entitled, by law in most countries one imagines, to resume his normal life. Cabrera himself has opened up about his violent past. He hasn’t tried to walk away or hide from any of the unpleasant behaviours he displayed five years ago. He admits his life was out of control, his problems fuelled and amplified by alcohol. He said life ‘inside’ was terrible - one jail in Argentina is known as the prison from hell. He has publicly apologised to his two ex-girlfriends, begging them to forgive him. No word yet from the girlfriends. Meanwhile back to the golf, Steve Alker with two largely poor rounds by his standards had played himself out of this Senior PGA title after 36 holes, but he did show on the last day what he is still capable of when he fired a 6 under par 66, sparking memories of his last day 63 back in 2022 which carried him to his first Senior Major’s title in this event. In the end Steve finished in a tie for 14th place. No tournament golf this past week for Ryan Fox and Lydia Ko but I’m sure both were hard at work in preparation for their respective big tournaments coming up this week. Lydia is teeing it up in the Women’s US Open, the second Major for 2025 for women and Foxy is readying himself for his big week, his first appearance in a Signature event where the money is huge (US$20 million), a no cut field of just 70 with extra FedEx Cup points and a big pile of world ranking points because of the calibre of the field. Meanwhile across the ditch in Belgium a very mixed week for the two Kiwis plying their trade on this tour. Daniel Hillier missed the cut at the Soudal Open in Antwerp, but yet another cut was made by our rookie pro Kazuma Kobori, becoming the personification of consistency. He’s now made the cut in his last five tournaments and has only missed two this year in 13 starts. His tie for 25th place in Antwerp lifts his earnings this year to E192,000 which equates to something just over NZ$200,000. It’s worth noting as well that Kobori has probably never played any of the courses prior to his appearance at them this year which normally is a significant disadvantage for a player.

Fairly or unfairly there are many in the golfing world who feel the USPGA Championship is very much the ‘poor cousin’ of the four Majors. It doesn’t, they say, have the history, tradition or the majestic tapestry that drapes the other three. And yes there is an element of truth to those claims but just don’t mention them to Scottie Scheffler. This most mild-mannered and unemotional of golfers broke into a maelstrom of unbridled joy after he tapped in on the 72nd hole to grab his 3rd Major Championship. Never before had we witnessed such scenes from Scheffler, grabbing his cap and tossing it into the ground with an almost violent, or should I say passionate, motion. As he hugged his wife and 1 year old baby deeply, one commentator thought he saw tears from the world’s Number One golfer. Remember this is a guy who had already won two Majors, so this wasn’t exactly a brand new experience, especially as he began the day with a three-shot lead. You would have had a hard job finding a bookie anywhere who would have given you odds on Scheffler not winning this thing. His final winning margin of 5 strokes over his nearest rivals rather reinforced his pre-round favouritism. However he was very quick to point out in his post-match media chat that it was an emotionally draining round of golf and it required mustering all of his technical and mental skills to overcome a very poor and indifferent front nine. At the halfway stage his 3-shot lead had disappeared and he now found himself in a share of the lead at 9 under alongside John Rahm, whose putter was running red hot, so much so that one television expert commentator said Rahm is now the favourite to win. That mini implosion of Scheffler’s game clearly prompted a re-think and some swing changes, particularly around his grip. Whatever he did, it worked. No longer was he tugging his drives to the left and missing fairways. Three birdies on 10, 14 and 15 saw off Rahm, who crashed and burned over his last 3 holes, with two double bogeys and a bogey. From a share of the lead after nine, the Spaniard finished in a tie for 8th place and a whopping 7 shots adrift of a triumphant Scheffler. This was for sure a Major championship that produced as tense and electrifying a back nine as any major championship finale in recent times. With his win Scheffler became only the 3rd player, alongside Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, to have won their first three Majors by a margin of 3 strokes or more. The day wasn’t such a happy one for Ryan Fox who slipped 9 places down the leaderboard from 17th overnight to a tie for 28th place. Nonetheless he can be well leased with his effort. To complete 4 rounds of Major Championship golf under par as Foxy did is something he should be well pleased with. Conditions were particularly tough on this last day at Quail Hollow. A strong wind blew throughout the afternoon and the greens were so slick that trying to hold the ball on the green was nearly impossible at times. Foxy’s 1 over par 73 was only 1 shot worse than Scheffler’s 72, to give context to Foxy’s effort. His world ranking should improve slightly as has his FedEx Cup standing. All in all it caps off the most successful two weeks in Ryan’s career. He must be totally exhausted, mentally and physically. He’ll have a much-deserved break this coming week, then another first and another biggie, into his first foray at a Signature event, the Memorial Tournament. In short, a small field of just 70 starters and US$20 million in prize money. Meanwhile in Alabama, Argentinian golfer Angel Cabrera, who served 30 months in prison for domestic violence before being released on parole in 2023, won his second Champion’s Tour title Major when he took out the Regions Tradition in Birmingham. Steve Alker came up 3 shots short and had to settle for 4th place. However, he retains the Number Two spot in the Charles Schwab Cup race and clearly has his game in good shape ahead of the Champions Tour’s first Major, the Senior

With his spectacular come-from-behind win at the Myrtle Beach Championship, Ryan Fox has joined that most elite and exclusive of Kiwi golfing clubs, those golfers from this country who have won on the USPGA Tour. The club comprised just 7 members prior to today. They now have an 8th member, Ryan Fox. It’s hard to know what will live longest in our memories - his overall victory or that stunning 17-metre chip in from off the green on the first hole of a 3-man sudden death play-off. That one bold aggressive shot has changed Ryan Fox’s career. The rewards that will now tumble towards him are manifold, chief of which begins with his inclusion in the year’s next Major, this week’s USPGA Championship in Charlotte, North Carolina, just a few hours’ drive from Myrtle Beach. He also picks up around NZ$1.2million in prize money for his Myrtle Beach win. His world ranking and FedEx Cup standings receive healthy boosts. He is now ranked inside the FedEx Cup Top 70. If he can stay there till season’s end, he’ll be eligible to play in the FedEx Cup play-offs where he could make millions if he plays well enough. We’ll also see him compete at the Open Championship this year. On top of all of this his win today gives full exemption for 2 full years on the USPGA Tour. Other doors will open to him as well. That old saying “The rich get richer” certainly has application on the US Golf scene. Ryan will now be able to play in rich events, open only to the best players on the Tour. Essentially it means playing for a lot more money but with much smaller fields. It was a classic Ryan Fox showing at Myrtle Beach. His win today, interestingly, followed a pattern evident in most of his wins on the DP World Tour, where he works his way almost anonymously through the first three rounds of a tournament, mixing solid and at times some superb golf, undone to some extent with a spread of bogeys. During his third round of 68, Foxy had no less than 6 bogeys - yes 6 bogeys in one round - but in true Foxy fashion he also nailed 9 birdies. Just remarkable stuff. With all that behind him he took to the final round a couple of shots off the lead, playing patient accurate golf through the first 9 holes, just a single birdie to show for his efforts, but significantly, no bogeys. So from this solid confident base he upped the tempo, continuing to find fairways which let him attack pins. His putter then started to kick in and the birdies began to flow, four of them on the back nine. For me the crucial hole was the 17th , a par three measuring 165 metres. Foxy was now in a 4-way tie for the lead at -14. Here he hit one of his best shots of the day, firing the ball straight at an awkwardly placed pin position, delighted then (as we all were back here as well) to the see the ball come to rest 6-8 feet under the hole. Calm and relaxed he stepped up and drained the putt, then went on to safely par the tough par 4 finishing hole. Two of the golfers behind him, McKenzie Hughes, a Canadian, and American Harry Higgs also got it to 15 under after 72 holes. Then on the first hole of sudden death the “fox” from down under crashed the North American party with that stunning chip from just off the green, which, as Foxy admitted afterwards, never looked like missing and he was walking the shot in from 8-10 feet from the hole, knowing he had read the line perfectly and then hit it accordingly. Many golfers of high esteem have to wait years before grabbing a win on this high-quality demanding Tour. To nab your first victory inside your first 2 years on tour is also remarkable. Sure the Tour’s top 70 players were playing elsewhere in the latest Signature event, but let that not deflect from the size of Ryan Fox’s achievement. So he joins Sir Bob Charles, John Lister, Grant Waite, Frank Nobilo, Michael Campbell, Danny Lee, Craig Perks and Phillip Tataurangi who have won on the USPGA Tour. Of those 8 only Sir Bob managed to win more than once on that Tour. Who would bet now that Ryan Fox won’t join him as a double winner on that Tour? Meanwhile in other parts of the golfing world, Lydia Ko finished 10th on the latest LPGA Tour in what looks like a rehearsal for the upcoming second Women’s Major of the year and Kazuma Kobori continued his excellent run of making cuts, this latest one, the Turkish Airlines Open. Although only finishing in a tie for 52nd place it nonetheless was enough to push him inside the all-important top 70 on this Tour and if, like Ryan Fox, Kobori can stay inside 70, he will be eligible to play in the equally rich end of season DP World Tour finale in Dubai. The rookie Kiwi has now made 9 cuts from his 12 starts on this Tour this year, a very good record considering he has probably not played any of the courses where he’s been making the cut

For the fifth time this year, in 9 starts on the USPGA Tour, Ryan Fox opened with a round in the 60’s. His 5 under par 66 at the Byron Nelson in Texas was his best start from any of those 9 this year. So could this be the week Foxy finally converts a great start into a top 5 finish if not higher? That opening round of 66 saw him grab a share of 5th place on Day One. But what followed was an all too familiar pattern in 2025 as once again he failed to stay with the leaders on Day Two. Three mid- round bogeys and a 4th on the 16th saw him slip rapidly down the leaderboard. Fortunately he pulled a much-needed birdie on 18 that got him back to where he started the day on 5 under - exactly the cut mark. Day Three brought more of the same - 4 mid-round bogeys before a blistering finish which saw him birdie 4 of the last 5 holes for a round of 70, 1 under par. Unfortunately it still left him near the bottom of the field. By now any chance of a high finish had all but disappeared. Again his final round was littered with another 4 bogeys, partially offset by 3 birdies for a 1 over par 72 - the only round of the 4 over par. So , for sure, when you look at his rounds – 66, 71, 70, 72 - it’s hard to be too critical of his scoring, but the fact of the matter is, this was not a strong field by USPGA Tour standards as evidenced to a large degree by Scottie Scheffler’s winning margin of 8 shots. This tournament represented an ideal opportunity for Foxy to make some significant progress up the FedEx Cup points table. I’m sure he personally will be disappointed that he didn’t make a better showing. However the week did represent another cut made, the 6th from his last 7 starts, which suggests he’s not far off the kind of form we have seen from him in recent years. All up he made 18 birdies over his 4 rounds in Texas. Unfortunately he also chalked up 13 bogeys. Now as fate should have it, if he had played the week without a bogey, those 18 birdies he had would have left him with 5th placing overall, exactly where he was at the end of his first round and a cheque for around NZ$500,000. All of that just goes to show how deep and ruthless this Tour is. Have a couple of bogeys and your round goes into free fall as you tumble down the leaderboard. We can’t leave Texas without a word about Scottie Scheffler’s week. His 8 shot winning margin is the highest winning margin since Rory McIlroy’s 8 shot win in the 2011 US Open. His 36 hole score of 123 is the second lowest in USPGA Tour history and his 4 round score of 253 equals the lowest winning score in US history. Is it any wonder he is the Number One ranked golfer in the world? And how fitting that his first win in 2025 should be in his hometown, on the very course where he made his professional debut as a 17-year-old, 11 years ago, with his sister on the bag as his caddie.

It has been a very unfortunate week for Lydia Ko. She woke up early one morning last week with a tingling sensation running down her right arm. The timing of this injury couldn’t have been worse, coming as it did on the eve of the year’s first Major Championship for women, the Chevron Championship. Clearly she felt the medical attention she received was effective enough to allow her to compete in this important event. Lydia being Lydia didn’t publicly reveal much about her injury. However it’s hard to believe her poor showing at the Chevron was not directly linked to the problems with her arm. Lydia only just made the cut, played nowhere near her best golf across the 4 rounds to finish in a tie for 52nd place.  This was the worst of her 5 performances this year, where she has posted 3 top 6 finishes, including a win. While Lydia was struggling near the tail of the field, dramatic events were unfolding around the final hole for Ariya Jutanugarn, the Thai golfer and a 2-time Major championship winner, who had a 1- stroke lead. Unfortunately her second shot on this par 5 ran through the very fast green coming to rest some 25 feet from the hole. Her ball was sitting in some light rough, but camera shots showed it was nevertheless a reasonable lie. All Ariya needed to do was to put the ball onto the green, take two putts and the year’s first Major was hers. Alas, disaster befell the Thai as her club face chunked the grass behind the ball and her chip travelled no more than 6 inches, remaining in the light rough. Trying to recover her nerve from such a setback, Jutanugarn then overcompensated with her next chip which saw the ball run 15 feet past the hole. Inevitably, in her badly shaken state, she missed the par putt and had to settle for a bogey 6 which meant, incredibly, 5 golfers including Ariya finished in a tie after 72 holes, all with their scores at 7 under par after 4 rounds. So all 5 went back to the 18th hole, for a sudden death play-off, probably the very last hole on the planet Jutanugarn would have wanted to play again, given what had happened to her minutes earlier. To Ariya’s credit she managed, along with 3 others in the play-off, to par the hole, but edging them all out with a birdie 4 was Mao Sargo, who was the Tour’s Rookie of the Year in 2024.  Her win today was her first on the LPGA Tour. She becomes the 5th Japanese player to win a Major title and the 4th in the last 5 years. The normal chaotic scenes that rain down on the winner on the 18th green were somewhat muted, as all and sundry shared to some small extent the heartbreak Ariya Jutanugarn was feeling and reeling from. Another golfer, also feeling somewhat depressed with how things went on the last day, was Kiwi Daniel Hillier. Going into the latest event on the DP World Tour, Daniel was just 1 shot off the lead and must have believed his second DP World Tour was in the offing, especially after the way he had played through the first three days, posting rounds of 67, 70 and 68. However, starting his last round with a double bogey 6 on the first hole rather took him out the race for the title. He wasn’t able to re-capture his form from the first 3 rounds, having to settle for a 1 over par 73 and a share of 9th place.  But he did move up the all-important Race to Dubai points table from 7th to 5th. Meanwhile Kazuma Kobori, our 23-year-old rookie, once again made the cut on this Tour, but he too couldn’t produce any of his dynamic skills on the last day and, like Hillier, posted a 1 over 73 to finish in a tie for 45th place. And another tough week for Ryan Fox who, along with his playing partner South African Garrick Higgo, missed the cut at the Zurich Team Classic where birdies were flying off golf clubs like a flock of hungry geese. The cut in this event in Zurich was 14 under par. Yes, you had to shoot 14 under par just to make the cut. Higgo and Fox were inside the cut after the first round of 4 ball best ball, but the following day on the alternate shot they could do no better than a 2 over par 74 and missed the cut by 8 shots .

To the immense pleasure of his many fans, Justin Thomas finally won again on the USPGA Tour, taking out the Signature RBC Heritage at Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. As this was a Signature event it carried US$20 million in prize money, making it probably the biggest pay cheque in Thomas’s career. It was also his 16 th career win, but his first since 2022. Over his first 191 tournaments on this Tour, Thomas won 15 times... that’s a very high win strike record. Yet inexplicably he has remained winless from his last 58 tournaments. That has everyone scratching their heads. How could one of the world‘s leading golfers and a Major Championship winner go so cold for so long? For sure there have been good signs from Thomas so far this year, so to see him finally get over the line and win was not entirely unexpected. There is, however, another important element to this win. Early in his 3rd round, Thomas’s ball landed in a bunker. While picking up loose impediments from around his ball, which he is entitled to do, his ball moved. So tiny was the movement that not even the television camera was able to capture it. However Thomas saw it, and he was the only one. Not even his caddy could have seen what happened inadvertently because he wasn’t in the bunker. To his eternal credit, Thomas had no hesitation calling for a rules official to whom he explained what had taken place. Essentially what Thomas did then was call a penalty on himself. He was penalised 1 stroke for moving the ball after it had come to a halt. No-one on the planet would have ever picked up what had taken place if Thomas had chosen to remain silent. But he didn’t. That is one of the delightfully peculiar aspects of this game. It is very easy to cheat in golf. You will find most golfers playing at any level will have the opportunity to discreetly move their ball out from under a bush or the like. It’s wrong and you should incur a penalty but if no-one else sees you give your ball a little kick, then who’s to know. Very occasionally allegations of cheating by a prominent player surface and some even in the face of irrefutable video evidence remain defiant of any wrongdoing. Fortunately, such incidents are few and far between. In the end Thomas’s honesty paid off because he won the tournament albeit by way of a sudden death play-off. When interviewed after his round, Thomas said his decision to call in a rules official was a no-brainer. He intimated that the idea of winning a tournament off the back of cheating was totally unacceptable to him. Furthermore, with his win Thomas has now moved up to 6th place on the Official World Golf rankings. Ryan Fox did not qualify for the Heritage but a second official PGA Tour event took place in San Domingo in the Dominican Republic. For the 5th time in 8 starts this year Foxy made the cut, but failed to fire over the final two rounds again, finishing in a tie for 59th place. It’s back to the American mainland this week for Ryan where he will team up again with Garrick Higgo for the Zurich Classic Teams Event in New Orleans. Incidentally Higgo won the event in the Dominican Republic, which no doubt will enhance his confidence as well as Foxy’s as they prepare for this event. Last weekend two of our other leading golfers, Daniel Hillier and Kazuma Kobori, were competing in the China Open as part of the DP World Tour. Once again Kobori, the Kiwi rookie, turned in a sterling performance with 4 consistent rounds, finishing in a tie for 20 th place and another very productive payday. This lifts his winning on this Tour to just on E150,000 or close to NZ$300,000 in his maiden year on tour with still another 6 months to go. He's already one of big success stories in NZ golf for 2025. Daniel Hillier, after a good start, wasn’t able to maintain his early momentum and finished in the middle of the field.

It was a coronation long in the waiting but remarkably short in its consummation. Just a simple 3-foot (1-metre) putt from Rory McIlroy on the 72nd green at Augusta saw the Northern Irishman join one of golf’s most exclusive clubs, winners of all 4 Major titles or as it’s popularly called, the Grand Slam of Golf. Just six players in the history of golf have won the Grand Slam - Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Gary Player and now Rory McIlroy. Note, not even Arnold Palmer earned membership, which quite rightly entitles you to be called one of the greatest golfers of all time. Who really could object to McIlroy’s inclusion? That he’s had to endure 11 frustrating years to secure the 4th and final leg of the Slam is nothing short of incomprehensible, given the immense talent of the man. Yet he will probably lie in bed and in the privacy of his own mind ask himself over and over, “How did I win this thing? I missed so many fairways on that last day, I missed short, ever-so-short putts. I double bogeyed the first hole and the par 5 13th but I still won”. He won because of the maturity that he now has at 35 years of age and his ability to remain calm when his clubs and or his swing let him down. Then, in the spirit and character of those names mentioned above, he pulls off shots of breathtaking majesty, clawing back the lead when his tenure at the top looked likely to vanish. Over the four days he played an astonishing array of shots that forever will hold pride of place in the Masters Hall of Fame, none more so than his second from just over 200 yards on the par 5 15 th . He had to hook it violently around a bunch of protruding branches, clear the water in front of the green and let it roll up to within 3 or 4 feet of the flag, all of which he did. Yes, once again he missed a short 4- or 5-footer for eagle, but his birdie gave him the lead again by just 1 stroke. Even though his putter let him down again on the 18th green, once more from an embarrassingly short distance, he remained outwardly stoic. Back to the 18th he and Justin Rose went, this time his second shot from 200 yards left us all gob-smacked as it gracefully landed behind the flagstick and quietly trickled down to within a few feet of the hole. Justin Rose couldn’t birdie his long putt. Rory this time mercifully found the hole and at last he had acquired the most garish, but the most sought-after, jacket in golf. The genteel ‘patrons’ of Augusta discarded their required peaceful behavior and went gangbusters, turning the surrounds of the 18th green into something resembling a Beatles concert. Yes, there were images of demure, well-dressed denizens in their 60s and 70’s who probably last gyrated like this at a Beatles concert back in the 1960’s. Their boy, their hero, at last getting his rich desserts. A boisterous, passionate all-American audience cheering madly as if he were one of their own. Rory, collapsing to his knees in some sort of yoga pose, just burst into tears, threatening to flood the green with this outpouring of joy and relief. As one of the green suits said in the Log Cabin a few minutes later, McIlroy has given us all one of the most enthralling and memorable days in the 90-year history of the Masters. He was absolutely right.

For hordes of golf fans, this week, the second week of April, is the golfing highlight of the year. It’s special because it’s Masters week, The US Masters. Many golf fans, especially in America, will tell you the Masters is the major Major. No doubt part of its enduring appeal is the familiarity of the course. We all know those iconic holes, like they are holes from our own local club - Ray’s Creek the par 3 12th , the two gettable par 5’s on the back nine, that mesmerizing par 3 16th. that throws up probably more holes in one than any other hole from any other Major course. We know these holes so well, we can even tell you now, for example, where the pins will be located for Sunday’s final round. Then on top of the course, there’s its arresting physical appearance, carefully and beautifully groomed for the best part of 12months in preparation for the world’s best. Sadly, our best, Ryan Fox, has missed out on a spot in this year’s Masters. His last chance came last week at the Texas Open, an event he had to win in order to get into this year’s Masters field. Alas, Ryan had one of his worst opening two rounds of all his starts on the US Tour over the last two years. With rounds of 76 and 73, he finished near the bottom of the field at the halfway stage. Quite simply, Fox conceded the strong fierce winds which blew throughout his two rounds got the better of him. So, without Foxy in the field there will be no NZ flag flying above the clubhouse at Augusta this year. The man going into this year’s field who is very much in the spotlight is Rory McIlroy, the in form golfer of 2025. The nuggety little Irishman is probably in his best form since he last won a Major over 10 years ago. With wins in the Players Championship and the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, he’s claimed the two biggest titles of the year so far. However, his challenge is the beguiling layout of Augusta and the only Major title he hasn’t won. More often than not he struggles on the tight demanding fairways at Augusta. There is a certain parallel between the fates at Augusta of McIlroy and Greg Norman, who also failed to win here. Both men are two of the most attacking players of their respective generations, but both have discovered that at Augusta all-out attack doesn’t win you a green jacket. Knowing when to leave your driver in your bag is a key strategy for this course. Right now, every aspect of McIlroy’s game is as good as any of his rivals. His driving is the best of anyone in the field. His short game is also hard to better. He has notably improved his putting this year on his way to those two big wins. But can he combine all these features for four days this week at Augusta? Ironically, in some ways the Masters is the easiest to win of the four Majors because it has by far the smallest field, usually around 90 competitors, 50-odd fewer than the other three. The numbers might be smaller but the quality of the field is of the highest ranking. Adding to the interest here is the coming together, for the first time this year, of the best players of the competing or should I say warring Tours, the USPGA and LIV Golf. So, McIlroy and friends from the US Tour will need to be mindful not just of each other but a handful of the best from LIV Golf - Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, John Rahm among others. So it’s Scheffler, McIlroy, Schauffele, Morikawa and the likes up against those renegades from LIV Golf. Bring it on!

A near miss for Ryan Fox and another highly productive week for Lydia Ko. Our two top golfers showed their class, world class, against the world’s best in both men’s and women’s golf, respectively, over the past seven days. For Ryan Fox it was a near thing as he edged his way ever closer to his maiden win on the USPGA Tour, but alas in the end it wasn’t to be. Starting the last day in the final group at the Texas Children’s Houston Open, which in itself was a first for Ryan, his conceding 5 shots to overnight leader Min Woo Lee meant it was always going to be a tough task to overhaul the dashing Australian who continued with his hot form throughout that last round. The world’s two top players, Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy, both mounted strong challenges as they tried to run down Lee, who, like Fox, was looking for his first win on the American Tour. But the Aussie was having none of it, repelling the world’s best with a solid patient round. He was certainly in no hurry. One hole, the 8th , saw Lee and his caddie spend what seemed like an eternity pondering their options after his tee shot strayed into some bushes. All told, this final trio took 31 minutes to play this hole alone. Lee would probably argue the wait was worth it, because in the end he scrambled a par and kept his 2-shot lead. His steadiness in the end also paid off as he had to repel Scheffler who fired a final round 62, McIlroy snapping at his heels as well with a 66, not to mention Gary Woodland who got into the action big time, also with an 8 under 62 which saw him finish in second place. However, the Aussie had to bring his best out on this 8th hole after his approach from 140 meters shot through the green and finished close to 20 meters from the pin. If he didn’t get up and down he was in a three-way tie with Scheffler and Woodland. The plucky Aussie was up for it, putting from off the green rather than chipping. The ball stopped just centimeters from the hole. The tap in gave the 26-year-old his maiden PGA Tour win. Moments after his win he took a call from his sister Minjee, one of the superstars of women’s golf. Also on hand were Min Woo’s parents from Australia, making for a very emotional time after that long, tough grind out on this municipal course. Meanwhile, Ryan Fox was left to ponder what might have been. He hung tough for the front nine -2 birdies and a solitary bogey left him still in the hunt but needing to replicate what he did the day before when he shot 31 on the back nine. That possibility sadly went out the window rather quickly after he bogeyed both 10 and 11, and another bogey on 16 took him right out of the picture. He did birdie the 18th for a 1 over 71 and in a tie for 15th place for which he earned US$121,000, close to NZ$200,000, but Foxy is probably regretting that it wasn’t more than that. He now has one final chance of getting into next month’s Masters if he can win this week at the Texas Open, in San Antonio, a three-hour drive from Houston. Across the other side of the USA in Arizona, Lydia Ko came home in a tie for 6th place at the Ford Championship. It may not have been vintage Ko, but four rounds in the 60’s and finishing just 4 shots behind the winner suggests strongly, with the Women’s first Major of the year just a month away and two wins already to her name this year, Lydia might be looking forward to that tournament.

It was bit of a pity that in a week when the sports media in this country was endlessly infatuated with the ongoing struggles of Liam Lawson as he tried to improve his very poor showings in his first two Formula One outings, another talented young sportsman from this country, golfer Kazuma Kobori, achieved a major milestone on the DP World Tour but was largely ignored by the media here. Playing in the Singapore Classic, Kobori ripped apart the course with 9 birdies in his final round which saw him surge from near the back of the field into 9 th place overall, his first top ten finish in this the game’s second biggest Tour. A pity really that it received such scant attention back here. However in NZ golfing circles, this achievement in his first year on the DP World Tour will have brought much joy and was widely praised. His only blemish unfortunately for him came on his last hole where he made bogey. Statistically there was indeed much to admire in Kobori’s final round. His 25 putts were the lowest total of anyone in the field. His 8 under par 64 was also the lowest score posted by anyone in the field and just for good measure he was Number One on that last day in scrambling. Kobori’s real strength is his accuracy off the tee. After 9 tournaments this season, he stands as the 3rd most accurate driver on this Tour. Ironically in Singapore he was ranked only the 19th most accurate off the tee. He certainly isn’t a big hitter, averaging around only 265 meters or 288 yards with his driver, leaving him 150th in driving distance. However it’s abundantly clear from these stats that his ability to find the fairway off the tee is more than compensating for his shorter hitting power. As every golfer knows, it’s always easier to hit the green from the fairway than the rough. Also it should not be forgotten that his 9th place finish earned him E43,000, boosting his season earnings now to E123,000. These are figures you wouldn’t expect from a rookie in his first year on a Tour as big as this one. A few more performances like this will, I’m sure, make the media back here sit up and take notice of this exciting young Kiwi golfing talent. Also competing in Singapore was Daniel Hillier, the more highly ranked of the two Kiwis competing on the DP World Tour. Hillier finished 4 shots behind Kobori in a tie for 37 th place. Meanwhile in Florida, Ryan Fox, competing in the Valspar Championship on the USPGA Tour, had another mixed week. He started well with a 3 under par 68 which had him in 8 th place after Round 1. Things didn’t go anywhere near as well on Day 2. After a double bogey and 2 bogeys, Foxy thankfully snatched a late birdie which saw him make the cut by 1 stroke. Another 3 over 74 in Round Three saw him wallowing near the tail of the field. A return to somewhere near his best with a final 2 under 69 saw him finish in a tie for 42 nd place. Ryan’s form of late has seen him start well but unable to keep that form going for 4 rounds. That, no doubt, will be something Foxy and his team will be prioritising. This week the itinerant DP World Tour touches down in New Delhi for the Indian Open. Also the USLPGA returns this week after a 3-week break, following the Asian swing during February and early March. Hopefully Lydia Ko will be back in action and keen to continue her outstanding early season form.

What would sport be like without its idiosyncrasies? Those peculiar rules, regulations and crazy out-of-date traditions which nonetheless endure, providing that addictive kick which keeps fans coming back for more. For example, there were the top and bottom teams in Super Rugby battling it out last Saturday night. Yet the top dog, the Chiefs, had to come from behind to eventually beat the bottom-placed Blues, getting there, in the end, thanks to a missed conversion attempt from the Blues in the dying minute of the match. Golf also throws up more than its fair share of oddballs. Take last week’s Players Championship. This event is rightly dubbed golf’s 5th Major, but in actual fact the ‘5th’ reference should be dropped. Here ’s an event that has all the game’s top 100 players competing, boasting therefore a stronger field than most, if not all, the 4 Majors. The Masters, for example, doesn’t even have a field of 100 players and many of those are past winners, players often 20, if not 30, years past their prime. But hey! This is The Masters and all golf fans rightly love it for what it is. Then there’s the money factor. What would sport be without money, as we hypocritically decry the evil intrusion of the obscene amounts top sports people are paid these days? However the reality is, more often than not, the higher the purse, the greater the prestige attached to a sporting event. The 2005 Players Championship, for example, carried US$25 million in prizemoney - that’s around NZ$40 million. Very good coin, as they say, if you can get it. It’s now the largest prizemoney purse in golf. Sure that should not automatically make it a Major, but when you add to that the depth and quality of the event, played every year on one of America’s iconic courses, that’s evidence enough for me to have this event installed as a Major Championship, full stop. Anyway to the golf... and the so-called 5th Major. The Players Championship won in the end after 5 days of golf. Rory McIlroy picked up his 28th win on the USPGA Tour, but only after a sudden death play-off with journeyman pro, JJ Spaun, ranked 180th on the FedEx Cup list last year. Rory should have wrapped this title up easily inside 4 days, but after surging to a 3-shot lead on the last day with 5 holes left, a storm hit Ponte Vedra and play was suspended for 4 hours. When play resumed, Rory’s game went cold and Spaun grabbed a couple of late birdies to sneak into a play-off, held over until Monday because of bad light. By way of a change, this play-off was decided on stroke aggregate over 3 holes. Unfortunately for JJ, his title hopes sank in the waters behind the famous 17th green. He whistled an 8 iron straight through a strong headwind and clean over the entire green and into the water. That effectively killed the play-off, Rory winning it easily with a par on 18 and a cheque for US $4.5 million. He also became part of an elite group of double winners of this event, joining Jack Nicklaus, Fred Couples and Tiger Woods, who’ve won here twice. Rory now has two significant wins before the end of March, something he’s never done before in his 18-year professional career. He is also arguably the world’s best golfer right now. Officially he still ranks behind Scottie Scheffer, who hasn’t posted a win in 2025. Clearly these will be the two headline acts for next month’s Masters at Augusta. This is the only Major title Rory hasn’t won. The demands of Augusta have been difficult for McIlroy to come to terms with, but he did say after this latest win that he feels his game is a lot more complete in every area than it’s ever been before. He’s also the most popular golfer on the planet and millions worldwide will be hoping he can break his Augusta duck next month. Finally, two of our leading male golfers filled their pockets with some seriously big cheques over the weekend. Ryan Fox finished in a tie for 20th place and a payout of over NZ$400,000 to seriously kick start his USPGA year after a couple of missed cuts. However the really big cash went the way of Ben Campbel. Playing in the latest LIV Golf stop in Singapore, Ben raced up the leaderboard during the third and final round last Sunday, posting a 5 under 67 to finish 3rd and take home a cheque worth NZ$2.6 million dollars. Clearly Campbell’s decision to throw his lot In with LIV Golf is paying some quick and handsome dividends. Keep up the good work Ben… you deserve it.

Kiwi golfers weren’t exactly visible on the world’s leading regular golf tours over the past week, although Steve Alker did what Steve Alker does best, as in winning on the US Champions Tour. It was Steve’s 9th win on the Champions Tour, but his first since January of last year. Playing in Tuscon, Arizona, Alker needed a 12-foot putt on the first hole of sudden death to defeat local club pro JasonCaron in the Colorgard Classic. Of the regular Kiwis, Ryan Fox wasn’t ranked high enough to get into the Arnold Palmer Invitational in Florida. Daniel Hillier was having a week off from the DP World Tour, after having played the NZ Open in Queenstown. Lydia Ko, likewise, was having the week off after her LPGA win in Singapore the week before. That really left it to two of our newbies, Kazuma Kobori Iin South Africa and Fiona Xu in China on the LPGA Tour to carry the Kiwi flag. Unfortunately, both of them missed the cut which meant they too had the weekend off, which was no doubt welcomed by Kobori as he’s played an awful lot of golf in recent weeks without a break. However back here at home, the NZPGA Championship was held at the Bridge Pa course on the outskirts of Hastings and here Kiwi colours did indeed fly high. Taking home this title and a cheque for around $35,000 dollars was Tyler Hodge, a 30-year-old New Zealander trying his hand for the second time at a professional career. A self-described journeyman, Hodge turned pro in 2017, but after four tough years with little to show for his efforts, he quit the pro ranks. A couple of years later, in 2023, he gave it a second shot and those tough times have paid off, learning the hard way, what no coach can teach you, how to grind it out on the mean, unforgiving fairways of tournament golf. An interesting mixture of prominent names from our pro ranks showed up at Bridge Pa. Tim Wilkinson, trying to get his playing card back for the USPGA Tour, turned up and put together four good rounds, the last three all under 70 to claim 4th place. Josh Geary and Nick Voke, recent winners on the Australian Tour were there too. Adding to the local success at Bridge Pa was the sight of another Kiwi, Kerry Mountcastle, finishing second to Tyler Hodge, making for a 1, 2 Kiwi quinella. Meanwhile in Hong Kong at the latest stop on the LIV golf circuit, Danny Lee came home in 20th spot and Ben Campbell finished in a tie for 35 th place with Brooks Koepka. All eyes this coming week will be on the Players Championship in Ponte Vedra, Florida, where virtually all of the world’s top 100 will play in an event now recognised, albeit unofficially, as the men’s 5 th Major.

New Zealand Open week is traditionally the acme of the golfing year in this country. Expectation a New Zealander would triumph this year was running much higher than normal, given the depth and calibre, as well as the current hot form of many of our leading golfers, two of whom, Josh Geary and Nick Voke, were winners of the two previous tournaments on the Australasian Tour. Also in Queenstown was the in-form Daniel Hiller, fresh off a runner-up finish in the Middle East. Steve Alker, arguably the best senior golfer in the world over the past 2-3 years, pitched up as well. Danny Lee, surprise surprise, made his first appearance at the NZ Open for over a decade. So the chances of a Kiwi winner for the first time in 8 years seemed ever so bright. Alas it wasn’t to be. Our best and brightest, most of whom it should be said did display some excellent golf, in each case didn’t play quite well enough. One or two low rounds out of 4 didn’t cut it here, where the winning score was 23 under par for the 72 holes. Relatively little-known Australian golfers have made a habit for some years now of coming over here and scooping up our biggest annual golf prize. And so it was again this year. This time it was Ryan Peake, a 31-year-old West Australian ex-prison mate who spent 5 years in jail for assault while a member of the bikie gang, the Rebels. Peake hadn’t played in NZ before because of his jailed history which had prevented him, until a week or two back, from getting visa clearance to travel to NZ. His lack of familiarity with the fairways of the two courses at the Millbrook resort clearly counted for little in the end. He played 36 holes on the day before the tournament started, then ripped out four sub-par rounds in the 60’s to win by one stroke. It was an especially nerve-wracking final hole for Peake, who had left his tee shot on this par 3 finishing hole way right off the green and in some light rough. His normally reliable short game momentarily deserted him and he was left with a three-metre putt he had to make to avoid a 4-way play-off. His nerve held and the sheer joy mixed, one imagines, with a myriad number of emotional memories, good and bad, came charging out of the West Australian. As he said afterwards, “The story is what it is, I’m here just to play golf” and he’ll be playing an awful lot more in years to come, one imagines, and in some pretty exalted company. For starters he’ll play in this year’s Open Championship which comes with winning the NZ Open. He now sits third on the Australasian Order of Merit and his chances of finishing in the top 3 as the season winds down are fairly high which, if he does, will see him gain full exemption to the DP World Tour for next year. Unfortunately, none of the much-vaunted Kiwis in the field could finish in the top 10. Best effort came from Daniel Hillier who finished in a tie for 12th spot at 17-under, 6 shots behind Peake. At exactly the same time as Peake was peaking in Queenstown, Lydia Ko on the lush fairways of the Sentosa Golf Club in Singapore was clocking up her 23rd victory on the USLPGA Tour. Even with 22 wins under her belt prior to this one, her win here appeared very special, judging by her comments in the victory ceremony. It was her first victory in 11 attempts to win this tournament here in Singapore. For all her successes worldwide, very few of them have come in Asia. Her win here in Singapore was also the 10th country where she has recorded a professional victory - remarkable record really. She won by 4 strokes in the end. A string of three birdies on the front nine gave her a sizeable leadover the rest of the field from that point - the result was really never in much doubt. One of the highlights of her round was a 61-foot birdie putt on the par 3 15 th . It was a two-tiered downhill putt with a double break on the lower tier. Lydia started the long walk to the hole after she had putted. Halfway to the hole she stopped in astonishment as the ball snaked its way into the hole. Her face was one of amazement, then she just burst into laughter. The eccentricities of golf. Meanwhile in Durban, Kazuma Kobori again defied his status as a rookie on the world’s second biggest golf tour the DP World Tour. At the Durban Country Golf Club, he finished in a tie for 25th place in the South African Open, with a final round 5-under par 67, lifting his season earnings to E79,000, over NZ$130,000 and it’s only the first week of March. Not so cheery about his latest performance is Ryan Fox who had the misfortune to miss the cut by one stroke in Florida on the latest stop of the USPGA Tour. That’s two missed cuts in a row for Ryan. That’s also, I guess, part of the eccentricities of golf.