In the 5 seconds it took for Ryan Fox’s ball to roll the 11 feet from his putting blade to the bottom of the hole on the final green at Royal Birkdale, his life changed forever. In the space of those 5 seconds he went from golf hero to folk hero, honoured and praised globally not just for winning probably the most cherished prize in golf, the Open Championship, but also for the way he conquered that final demanding hole, a 473-yard par 4 playing as the most difficult of holes at Birkdale on that Sunday. He knew he had to make birdie on that hole to win the title and so, as they say in sport, “He went for it”. Only 3 golfers from the field of 70-odd before him were able to birdie that hole during the final round. Not even the knowledge that the fairway at some stages was only 15 yards wide could deter the ambitious Kiwi. He slammed his tee 330 yards right down the centre of the fairway, then floated a beautiful 9 iron to within 11 feet of the hole. It left the commentators and the huge crowd seated around the green speechless. Then once the magnificence of his golf had been realised by one and all, cheers erupted long and hard around this amphitheatre as Foxy marched confidently onto the green to address his putt and the rest as we know is history. Somewhat lost in the riotous celebrations that followed that successful putt was the huge list of benefits that he’s accrued. Ryan, in his typical low-key fashion, rather dismissed the $5.5million in prizemoney as a bit of an afterthought. But I guess when you’ve won the best part of $20million in winnings in less than 2 years on the US Tour, you can kind of understand his reaction. What I’m sure means as much, if not more, as the money are the exemptions he’s acquired, like a 5-year entry to all of the Majors which should help keep his ranking comfortably inside the top 50 on the World Ranking list. His win saw his ranking jump from 56 to 22. That also pretty much guarantees him a place in the FedEx Cup final which is restricted to just the top 30 golfers. The Open championship is of course also part of the DP World Tour, so his win last week would also, I think, guarantee him a place in the Race to Dubai season finale in November. His elevated status now on the USPGA Tour should free him up to return to NZ next year, if he so wishes, to play the NZ Open, scheduled again for Queenstown early in 2027. Can you imagine the crowd numbers which would flock to that event to see the current Open Champion, a Kiwi, playing in his national Open? Many other benefits will flow his way as well. Sponsors, club and ball manufacturers, clothing giants and goodness knows who else will be lining up to have their products attached to the name of this eminently sensible and likeable fellow. An indication of the tailspin his life has quickly gone into following his win was his decision to jump on a plane with his family and fly back to NZ for a couple of weeks to escape the mania that has surrounded him in the States. Meanwhile life continues apace on the PGA Tour and today produced another sensation when a 21- year-old American, Jackson Koivun, who has only been a professional for 24 days, yes 24 days, withstood a blistering weekend blitz from Scottie Scheffler to win the 3M Open by 3 shots. Scheffler played the last 2 rounds 15 under par with a 64 and 63 but still came up short by 3 shots to the young rookie who held his nerve to go 61 and 66 to match the world’s number 1, stroke for stroke, over his last 36 holes. An amazing feat. Koivun had been the world’s number 1 ranked amateur for the last 56 weeks prior to turning professional. Now we’re all left wondering how long it will be before he becomes the game’s number 1 golfer.

According to Ryan Fox’s long-time caddie, Dean Smith, “Ryan is probably the fastest golfer in the world”. After his dramatic, come-from-behind win to claim the Open Championship, Foxy can rightly be described now as one of the world’s best golfers as well. Commentators were simply left aghast at the magnificence of Ryan Fox’s win. Words like “unbelievable”, “extraordinary” and “one of the most remarkable victories in the long history of this Championship” were being showered on not one of their own, but a humble likeable bloke from the Antipodes. It was all very dramatic, but in reality, it was just another example of Ryan Fox going about his work quietly, his name well down the scoreboard through the first two rounds. Then on Day 3, Saturday, the day they call moving day in the golfing lexicon, things did change dramatically for Ryan and the rest of the field. Boy did Foxy move, reeling off 9 birdies on his way to a 62 which saw him jump from 54th place to 2nd , now a mere 2 shots behind leader Sam Burns. It was just the 8th time in Major Championship golf that a player had shot a 62, the lowest ever recorded score in a Major. That 3rd round 8-under par 62 set him up superbly to have an all-out shot at winning the Open Championship on Day 4 and that he did. Just like his father Grant, who would frequently show on the rugby field all those years ago, that when the going got tough, Grant got going. Dragging his fellow players with him appears a trait he passed down to his son Ryan. It was Ryan’s 19th win as a pro and many of them, especially notable ones, have come with a charge over the closing holes. Remember that long chip-in he pulled off in a play-off to win the Myrtle Beach Classic last year, his first win on the USPGA Tour. A month later, in yet another play-off hole for the Canadian Open, he played what he called the best shot of his career, a 3-wood which he smashed well over 200 metres onto the green, leaving him with two putts from 5 metres to claim the Canadian title. At Birkdale, midway through the back nine on the last day, he was back in about 5th place but still trailing some of the game’s big names. With 6 holes to play, he got to work. At this point he was 2 shots behind the clubhouse leader, Cameron Young, who shot the lowest round of the day, a 6-under 64. Foxy started his charge with birdies on 13 and 14, then a little hiccup saw him make bogey on 15 which meant that now he had to birdie 2 of the last 3 holes to win the title outright. In the best traditions of his father, he did just that. His birdie 3 on the 18th , a difficult par 4 measuring 420 metres, was the stuff of legends. It had a touch of Tiger Woods’ mastery. The fairway, for example, on this hole was only 15 metres wide in parts and the hole has 7 bunkers in all. Wisely Foxy took what looked like a 3-wood rather than a driver off the tee, hoping to keep it on the fairway which he did. It left him around 160 metres to the pin, dangerously placed near one of those strategically positioned bunkers guarding the green. It was playing as the hardest hole on the last day, but Foxy had no thoughts of just plonking the ball in the middle of the green, taking his 2 putts and finishing 2nd . It was for him, as our cobbers across the ditch like to say, “Sydney or the bush”. Without any fuss or delay he flushed a 9-iron straight at the flag. The massive crowd around the 18th hole saw the ball coming down on the green heading straight for the flag and held their collective breath, knowing the ball could easily roll off the green to the right. They needn’t have worried as it landed and trickled up to 11 feet (3½ metres) from the hole. The commentators, somewhat dumbfounded that anyone would dare try and get the ball that close to the hole, tried to digest what they’d just seen, but their voices betrayed them. Such bravery or was it unnecessary foolhardiness? It was probably neither, just Foxy having complete faith in his ability to execute the exact shot he wanted. It was golf as symmetrical beauty for which it would soon reward its architect. Now Foxy, the speed freak, kicked into action. He watched his playing partner, Sam Burns, putt out, then according to the Golf Channel analysts, Foxy took just 22 seconds from the time Burns picked his ball out of the hole until Foxy picked up his. In that time he weighed up the putt, with a quick look right, a quick look left, took his grip and stance and then just putted the thing and watched it roll into the hole and victory. I can think of quite a few of the world’s leading golfers who would have taken minutes, 3 or 4 at least, to weigh up all the potential factors that could be at work for such a crucial putt. Then there would be a consultation with their caddie, followed by a final review from the notebook with all the hole and green details, then a long mental adjustment until they were truly ready in mind and body before putting. There to watch his Kiwi mate win this big event was Aussie Min Woo Lee who said the speed Ryan plays is something we can all learn from. “Whenever a fast player wins, it’s the greatest thing ever.” Rather lost in the size of Ryan’s achievement was the highly admirable showing of fellow Kiwi Kazuma Kobori who had a final round of 72, 2 over par for a share of 28th place. Not bad for a kid barely out of the rookie class. I wouldn’t mind betting that young Kazuma from Rangiora might just be the next Kiwi golfer to lift the Old Jug.

Form is temporary, it is said, but class is permanent. In recent weeks our two top golfers have served to remind us of the underlying truth of that old saying. It’s been a lean few weeks for a number of our top golfers, but last week Lydia Ko and Ryan Fox showed their class when playing against the world’s best. Lydia lined up in France for the 4th Women’s Major Championship of the year, the Evian Championship, a title she won a couple of years back to give her a third Major title and then of course she followed up a couple of weeks later with a win in the Open Championship. But for the last couple of seasons, since those wins at the end of 2024, Lydia’s Major’s form has been poor. Going into the Evian last week she’d missed the cut in 3 of her last 5 Majors, without doubt the worst run she’s had in Majors in her 14 years as a professional golfer. However her form at Evian put to rest any suggestion that she was well past her best - 4 rounds under par, all 4 rounds in the 60’s and a final round of 64, 7 under par the lowest round of the final day. That was classic Lydia. In the end her 13 under total for the tournament didn’t really get her close to the title, but finishing in 7th place was a very rewarding outing for Lydia. Hopefully she can take that form with her back across the English Channel and into the final women’s Major of the year, the Open Championship at Royal Lytham and St Annes in Lancashire starting 30 July, on the course where Bob Charles won his British Open in 1963. And just to put things into perspective, that 7 th place last week was Lydia’s 18 th top 10 finish in a Major. Now this week Ryan Fox will be seeking his first top 10 finish in a Major when he lines up for the men’s final Major of 2026, the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale. It’s fair to say Ryan hasn’t enjoyed the level of success on the USPGA Tour this year that he did in 2025, highlighted by those two victories mid-year coming within the space of 5 weeks. But what he has achieved this year is consistency. From 15 starts he’s made the cut in all but two of those events. Sure, his stats have been made to look better this year because he’s been eligible to play in all 8 of the rich Signature events, some of which don’t have a cut. Nonetheless, not only has he made the cut in nearly 90% of the events he’s played in, but he’s recorded 7 top 25 placings along with a 30th place finish in last week’s Scottish Open. This was a very strong field because it now forms part of both the DP World Tour and the USPGA Tour. Effectively he was lining up against the best of Europe. Two other Kiwis, Daniel Hillier and Kazuma Kobori, will also play at Royal Birkdale. These two, however, will be looking for a change of fortunes with their games. Hillier has now missed the cut in his last couple of events and while Kobori has fared better, he too has had to grapple with form lapses in recent weeks. With three Kiwis in the field, a rare but not unprecedented situation, there will be plenty of golf fans back here glued to the four days of live coverage of the Open on Sky, even if it seems likely the Open will be competing with concluding stages of a certain “soccer” event taking place on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Zilch, nichts, nada, rien - yes it doesn’t matter which language you choose, last weekend, financially, was a decidedly unremarkable weekend for our leading five golfers. Among them - Ryan Fox, Lydia Ko, Daniel Hillier, Kazuma Kobori and Steve Allker – not one won as much as a single cent in prize money. Sure, Lydia and Ryan had weeks off, having played recent Major Championships, but both Hillier and Kobori missed the cut in the DP World Tour event in Munich and possibly most surprising of all, Steve Alker missed the cut in the Seniors’ US Open. It was pretty much an unforgettable week for the two Kiwis in Munich at the BMW International. Kazuma Kobori shot rounds of 72 and 74 to lie in 132 nd place after 36 holes, missing the cut by 6 shots. Daniel Hillier fared a little better with rounds of 69 and 74 but still missed the cut by 3 shots and was in a tie for 90th place at the halfway stage. His fate was largely sealed by his closing holes on Day 2 when he bogeyed 3 of the last 5 holes. He’s slipped further down the Race to Dubai points list, now sitting in 15th place, 5 places worse than he needs to be to gain an automatic qualifying spot for next year’s USPGA Tour. The Munich course gave up a veritable tonne of birdies. Making the most of this course was 39-year-old South African golfer Michael Hollick who recorded his first win on this Tour with a final score of 18 under par, helped by a birdie eagle finish on the last day. The cut was made at 4 under, the lowest of any tournament on the DP Tour this year. Things I imagine will be a lot harder this week when the DP Tour moves to the rugged stretches of the Scottish coast for the Scottish Open, which actually forms part of both the USPGA Tour and the DP World Tour. It is a co-sanctioned event and therefore attracts a large number of top golfers from the American Tour as well as the best from the DP World Tour. It acts effectively as a dress rehearsal for the Open the following week. There’ll be a three-strong Kiwi presence - Hillier and Kobori along with Ryan Fox. All three have also qualified for the Open Championship, the year’s final Major starting next week. Kazuma Kobori is a late edition to the field thanks to a flying visit he made at the start of last week from mainland Europe to the Lancashire coast to compete in a final qualifying event for the Open. Playing in this 36-hole West Lancashire event, Kobori finished tied for 2 nd place thanks to a second round of 65. It was a pretty tough assignment Kobori had given himself because included in this strong field were two past Masters winners, Sergio Garcia and Danny Willett. Only the top five finishers got invites to the Open, so Kobori’s showing was superb given the wet conditions which prevailed, breaking the heat drought that had seen Britian sweltering in the days prior. Apparently Kobori hadn’t given himself much chance of finishing in the top 5 but afterwards said both his driving and his putting had held up well and noted, “that when those aspects of your game are working, life’s pretty good as a golfer”. Let’s hope the so-called good life for this golfer continues for the next two weeks at least.

When Lydia Ko steps aside from her playing days, as she has indicated could happen within the next year or two, she will take with her a veritable basement full of memories, especially those around her three Major championship wins. She might have also tucked away memories from last week in her latest Major appearance, the Women’s PGA Championship at Hazeltine Golf Club in Minnesota, one of America’s top courses. Lydia began in the worst possible way with a 4 over 76. Her putter seemed stone cold. All up she needed 32 putts to complete that opening round, a most unlike-Ko statistic. They say in golf you can’t win a tournament on Day 1, but you can lose it with a very poor opening round. So at the end of that first round Lydia was a whopping 10 shots behind the leader. Realistically her chances of winning were virtually zero. She was 121st in the field going into Day 2. At least here her putter started working, which was just as well. With 5 less putts on Round 2 she carded a 3 under 69 which saw her squeak into the weekend, making the cut by 1 stroke. From 121st at the start of the round, Lydia was now in a tie for 55th place. Another strong showing on Day 3 with another 3 under 69 pushed her up to around 40th place. On Day 4, with the course playing at its toughest with fast bumpy greens and tight pin placement, Lydia still managed another sub-par round, finishing with a 2 under par 70. For a short while she had pulled herself up into the top 10, but a late bogey saw her slip back into a tie for 15th place overall. So it was quite a week for Lydia, but in a totally understated way she revealed her real qualities and her mettle. Never any sign of just going through the motions after that unfortunate first round as many a golfer might do. Very few golfers, male or female, could lift themselves in a Major against the world’s top 144 golfers from 121st to 15th . Lydia still has two Majors left this year to add to her three Majors and they happen to be titles she has won before - the Evian in France and the 5th and final women’s Major, the Open Championship. Meanwhile across the other side of the Atlantic, another very consistent and solid week of golf from Kazuma Kobori at the Italian Open on the DP World Tour. Four sub-par rounds saw the young Kiwi pro finish in a tie for 19th place and another handy pay cheque which lifted his earnings this year to around $NZ500,000. Not such a fortunate week for Daniel Hillier who missed the cut, albeit by 1 shot and has seen his all-important ranking slip from 11th to 13th . If he finishes the DP World Tour in the top 10 at year’s end, he gets automatic entry into the USPGA Tour for 2027. Our other top golfer, Ryan Fox, didn’t have a good week playing in the $20million Travelers Championship in Connecticut, finishing in a tie for 66th place, near the bottom of the restricted field. His worst round was a 1 over 71 and he finished with a 3 under 67, while for many in the field it was a birdie feast on this course. In the end Victor Hovland from Norway picked up his 8th PGA Tour win, beating Scottie Scheffler no less in a sudden death playoff.

It was indeed a strange sight (and sound) watching an American golfer who had led the US Open Championship from start to finish nonetheless being jeered and booed as he neared the finish line. This was the fate Wyndham Clark suffered on his way to a second US Open title at Shinnecock Hills. It seems New Yorkers hadn’t forgotten the scenes which played out on video a year ago at the US Open at Oakmont in Pennsylvania. Clark missed the cut and there and then went into an all-out rage in the locker room, smashing two lockers to pieces. Oakmont, it would be fair to say, was not amused and banned him from the course until he repaired the damaged lockers and underwent an anger management course. He obliged on both counts. Unfortunately for Clark he was paired with Scottie Scheffler on the final day this year. Scheffler of course just happens to be America’s most popular golfer and it was very obvious the bulk of the crowd wanted Scheffler to win. The fans’ negativity towards Clark seemed to have had an impact on his play. After three near perfect rounds which saw him build a 6-shot lead going into the last round, Clark stumbled all day and eventually got home with just one shot to spare. He admitted it was his putter that both let him down but also crucially saved him from what would otherwise have been another infuriating loss. Ryan Fox, on the other hand, enjoyed a very good day both on and off the course. Starting the last round positioned in the mid-fifties in a field of 72, Foxy at last produced the sort of form that has elevated him to the game’s upper echelon. His form at Shinnecock through the first three rounds wasn’t poor but at best average, given that he didn’t manage to break par in any of those first three rounds. He shot an even par 70 on Day One, struggled on Day Two with a 3 over 73 which saw him just make the cut. He was right on the cut number at 3 under par. Day Three wasn’t much better with a 4 over 74 and that saw him slip down the leaderboard towards the bottom of the field. But on Day Four Foxy got it right, shooting a 2 under par 68, one of the day’s lowest scores which initially lifted him slightly by a few places. When he finished his round he was in line for a cheque of around $US50,000. By the time the Open had concluded a few hours later, his $50,000 had tripled to $181,000 as player after player struggled on this tough Shinnecock layout. And one by one Foxy’s finishing position improved to the point where his official final placing was a tie for 23rd place. It could have been as much as another $US100,000 if he hadn’t bogeyed two of the last four holes. There can’t be too many positions or jobs where you can sit at your desk after your day’s work and watch your weekly pay climb while you don’t have to as much as lift a finger. That’s the league Ryan Fox is in now, playing for at least $US20million every week he tees it up. Meanwhile at the top of the field, the golfing gods were smiling on the American Wyndham Clark, even if not all the fans were. He did achieve the rare feat of leading a Major championship from wire to wire, as they like to say in America. The last time a golfer went all four rounds in the lead at a Major was the German Martin Kaymer in 2014. Clark essentially won the Open on Day One when he fired a 6 under 64. He had doubled his lead from 2 to 4 strokes by the end of the second round, then extended that lead to 6 shots going into the final day. It would have been something of a miscarriage of justice if Clark hadn’t prevailed. He was the best golfer at Shinnecock over the four days and he was big enough afterwards to apologise profusely for his unfortunate behaviour at last year’s Open. Holding the large trophy aloft after completing a live television interview, he called out to the large crowd around the 18th green, “I hope one day I can get you all to like me”. Well said. Matter closed.

It’s often said the hardest task confronting a newcomer to the USPGA Tour is not so much winning your first tournament but successfully defending it 12 months later. Sure, Tiger Woods made a habit of winning the same tournament year after year, Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy have done the odd back-to-back wins in a row, but there can’t be too many others. Ryan Fox came very close to joining this elite group. Standing on the 71 st hole in the Canadian Open, which he won on this same Toronto course 12 months ago, he was in second place with two holes to play. He would have to birdie the 17th and possibly eagle 18 in order to catch leader American Bud Cauley. Not surprisingly, there was no holding back from the aggressive Kiwi, it’s how he likes to play his golf. Two safe pars on these closing holes were certainly not going to get his hands on a second Canadian title. Unfortunately, like most things in sport, when you up the ante, you also increase the risk. And so it turned out for Foxy. He missed the fairway off the tee on 17, a 499-yard par 4, one of the hardest holes on this Toronto course. His drive in fact finished up in a fairway bunker, 185 yards from the hole. Using his undoubted strength, Foxy moved the ball 185 yards, leaving him 25 feet from the pin where he proceeded to 3 putt. Now the gap was 5 shots between leader Cauley and the New Zealander. But, as they say, Foxy wasn’t going to die wondering. The 18th , a 520-odd-metre or 571-yard par 5, enough to win the hole and the title, had been there for the taking for Fox this week. He made birdie there on each of the first 3 rounds. Probably in his mind was the thought of an eagle and if Cauley were to stumble on 17 and 18, who knows, he might have been able to force a play-off. He smashed out a 300-metre drive, leaving himself just under 200 metres to the hole. Twelve months ago, in his play-off with Sam Burns, he smacked a 3 wood from 210 metres to within 10 feet of the pin on this hole, enough to set up the win, but alas history was not destined to repeat itself. Instead he came up short of the green and then saw his ball slide back into the adjacent lake and his hopes of a second Canadian Open drowned in a watery grave. He made bogey here as well, so a bogey/bogey finish for a 2 under 68 and a share of 8th place. Yes, privately I suspect Foxy will have been kicking himself, but he shouldn’t. A safety-first attitude over those two final holes would almost certainly have guaranteed him second place. That’s just not the way Foxy approaches golf. For his efforts he nonetheless has now jumped inside the top 60 on the FedEx Cup standings and for finishing 8th he pocketed $US286,000 or close to $NZ500,000 and he goes off to the US Open, starting on Thursday, knowing he’s just put together 4 rounds under 70, a sure sign his game is in good shape which it will need to be if he wants a top 10 finish this week. Finally, Bud Cauley, the 36-year-old American who won the Canadian Open, recorded his first win on the US Tour after 238 starts.

Lydia Ko and Nellie Korda, the two most celebrated names in women’s golf over the past 10 years, went to the famed Riviera Golf Club in California last week with one thing in mind, each anxious to fill in the one gaping missing piece from their remarkable list of career achievements, a US Open title. At the end of the week, one went home with that sought-after title to her name, the other didn’t even it make it to the weekend. Sadly for Kiwi golf fans it was Lydia who failed to make the cut. Her two-round score of 5 over saw her miss the cut by 1 shot. Unfortunately missed cuts in Majors are becoming something of an issue for Ko, who for the first 10 years or so of her career barely missed a cut in any tournament. From her first 35 Major Championships she missed the cut only once. Since the start of 2023, however, Lydia has failed to make it to the weekend in 6 of her last 17 Major starts. If she can win a US Open she will have achieved the Women’s Grand Slam which, for some reason I’m not entirely sure of, only requires women to win 4 of their 5 Majors. I suspect the 4 the women have to win are the same 4 Major titles men have to win to earn the Grand Slam. Curiously Lydia has been in good touch basically in 2026, until she gets to a Major. From 11 starts, she’s had 4 top 10 finishes. Her only missed cuts have been the 2 Majors to date in 2026. Our three leading male golfers, I’m pleased to say, fared better on both sides of the Atlantic. Ryan Fox again lined up in one of the 8 Signature events on the USPGA Men’s Tour. Only 72 in the field, most of whom were ranked inside the top 100 on the World Rankings. Yes, there was US$20million in prizemoney at stake, but with a quality field like this there were ironically no easy dollars there for the taking. Foxy again showed why he can hack it with the best in the world, finishing in a tie for 27th against this world class field. For his troubles he picked up US$157,000 (NZ$270,000). He also moved up to 64th place on the FedEx Cup rankings. This week looms as a big week for Foxy who finds himself, for the first time in his US career, starting a tournament as the defending champion. Yes, he’s back at the venue in Toronto where he won the 2025 Canadian Open in a play-off last year against the American Sam Burns. Foxy’s winning score last year was 18 under par. So I guess that’s the sort of number he‘ll have in mind as he begins the formidable task of defending that crown. In Amsterdam last week Daniel Hillier and Kazuma Kobori both comfortably made the cut at the Dutch Open, but neither was able to kick on over the weekend. Poor old Daniel had the mortifying experience of putting two tee shots into the water on the short 115 metre par 3 4 th hole. He finally\ trudged off the green with a 4 over par 7. His round and tournament was effectively cooked there and then. He picked up 3 birdies on the back 9 to give some respectability to his round. His 73 did get him a 14 th finishing place, but he did drop out of the Race to Dubai’s top 10. He’s now 11 th . Kazuma Kobori also finished poorly with a 4 over 75 on the last day. He had 2 double bogeys along with 4 bogeys and 4 birdies, a real mixed bag and a tie for 28th .

After returning to the DP World Tour following his creditable showing at the USPGA Championship a few weeks back, Kiwi golfer Daniel Hillier I’m sure is more determined and confident than ever he can gain his playing card for the USPGA Tour in 2027. Last week in Austria Hillier took another step towards fulfilling that goal with a 7th placing at the Austrian Open. What was especially significant here was his move now into the top 10 on the DP World Tour‘s Order of Merit, or the Race to Dubai as it’s officially known. At season’s end the top ten place-getters on that Road to Dubai all receive playing cards for next year’s PGA Tour, the world’s leading and richest golf tour. Hillier was the personification of sub-par consistency at the Kitzbuhel Club - four rounds in the 60’s which saw him knit together two 65’s over the weekend. He recorded only 1 bogey in those closing 36 holes and finished the tournament as the leading player with the highest number of greens reached in regulation. And to add a little lustre to that impressive stat, he also emerged from the week as the longest driver in the field. He averaged 324 yards off the tee, with his longest drive measuring a staggering 363 yards. Perhaps his mate Ryan Fox has been slipping him a few tips on how to smash a golf ball. Of course now that he’s got himself into that all-important DP World Tour’s top 10, his task is to stay there for the next five months until the season ends in November. That won’t be easy. Essentially every player on that DP World Tour, somewhere between 200-300, is focused on winning one of those highly sought-after ten cards. Hillier came close to edging his way into that top 10 last year only to stumble slightly in the closing tournaments and miss out by a couple of spots. However his fellow Kiwi on the DP World Tour, Kazuma Kobori, has more pressing problems after another missed cut last week in Austria. He’s now missed the cut two weeks running, but hardly because of poor golf. In both of these last two tournaments he’s shot rounds of 69 and 71. I can’t imagine Kobori or his team are unduly worried about events of the past fortnight. Yes he slipped down the Race to Dubai standings and currently stands in 75th place on the DP World Tour, but remains comfortably inside the do or die number of 115. He must finish inside that figure to retain his playing card for next year. Not having any of those sort of worries is Steve Alker on the USPGA Seniors Tour after another successful week, this time in Morocco at the Trophy Hassan 11. Alker tied the low round of the final 18 holes in Rabat to finish in second place in this US$2.5million tournament to ensure another healthy pay cheque. It was his 4th top 10 finish of the year and he lies in 4th place on the Seniors Tour Order of Merit. The winner here for the first time on the Seniors Tour was the 52-year-old Australian Scott Hend, a regular face of many years at the NZ Open. This breakthrough win for Hend guarantees him full exemption on the Seniors Tour through until the end of 2027.

In the wake of the rigorous challenges of a Major Championship many of the world’s leading golfers give themselves a week off afterwards, some even more. The USPGA Tour, mindful of these demands, usually then schedules a tournament without quite so many of the mental and physical challenges associated with getting through four rounds of a Major. At the year’s second Major, the USPGA Championship in Philadelphia at the Aronimink course last week, no-one managed to get to 10 under for their week’s work. The winner, 38-year-old Englishman Arun Rai, won by 3 shots and finished the week at 9 under. From there the Tour moved to Texas for the CJ Cup, in honour of Byron Nelson, winner of five Major Championships. However, Nelson is probably best remembered for his remarkable achievement in 1945 when he won, believe it or not, 11, yes 11, PGA tournaments in a row, a record that not surprisingly still stands after 75 years. Not even Tiger Woods at his peak could get near that consecutive winning streak of Nelson’s. This year’s winner was former US Open champion Wyndham Clark. His winning score of 30 under par for his 72 holes contrasts rather vividly with Rai’s 9 under a week ago in the PGA Championship. Clark, mind you, had to play easily his best golf of the year to win here in Texas. His final round of 60 comprised of 9 birdies, an eagle and just 7 pars. He caught and overtook the 3rd round leader, South Korean Kim Si Woo, who had shot a 2nd round of 60 as well. As mentioned, many leading lights including Ryan Fox had the week off. All in all it was a very low- key week for NZ’s leading golfers. The US Women’s Tour had the week off and Daniel Hillier and Kazuma Kobori both missed the cut in Antwerp at the Soudal Open. It was a peculiar week indeed for Hillier. Firstly, making a rapid departure from Philadelphia where he’d played 4 rounds at the USPGA Championship. Then he got off to a remarkable start at the Soudal Open, reeling off 4 birdies from his first holes and led the field, albeit briefly. Not sure what happened next, perhaps it was a case of jet lag and the toll of having played in a Major Championship many thousands of kilometres away a few days earlier. Two double bogeys and a couple of bogeys saw him tumble quickly down the leaderboard. Day 2 was only marginally better and after 36 holes he languished in 130th place, missing the cut by 6 shots. Kobori fared slightly better with rounds of 69 and 71 to miss the cut 1 shot. The winner, South African Richard Sterne, recorded his first win on this Tour in 13 years. Away from PGA Golf, LIV Golf got some headlines when it announced last week a 10-tournament schedule for 2027. Whether it ever sees the light of day is another matter. Their financial backer, to date the Saudi Arabian quasi government entity PIF (Public Investment Fund), is ending its financial support at the end of this year. LIV Golf accepts that in order to continue along the lines it has to date, it must find in the vicinity of US$300million. A very tall order. It’s estimated the Saudis have tipped in excess of US$5billion into LIV Golf to date. Is it any wonder then that they’ve said ‘enough is enough’?

The USPGA Championship is sometimes deemed, a little unfairly, the least prestigious of the four Major Championships. Sorry, this event is a Major Championship, full stop. The 100 top-ranked golfers in the world are automatically eligible to play this event. To my knowledge I’m not aware of any golfer ever who has turned down an invitation to play in the USPGA Championship. Anyway, the last day of this year’s Championship produced drama worthy of any Major. The fact that 22 players were within 4 shots of the lead when the final round got underway at the renowned Aronimink course in Philadelphia was further proof of how significant this event is. Packed into that group of 22 were 7 past Major winners. That ominous fact didn’t bother 31-year-old Englishman Arun Rai. He produced a string of unforgettable shots over the last 10 holes to clear out from the chasing pack and win the Wanamaker Trophy with a 3-shot margin. Perhaps his most spectacular shot was a 65-foot rolling twisting putt on the par 3 17th. . To shoot 65 on the last day of this event on a course that no golfer, including Rai, got to double figures under par further highlights how tough this course played over the 4 days. Incidentally Rai becomes the first Englishman for 108 years to win this Major Championship title. Our two leading male golfers, Ryan Fox and Daniel Hillier, fronted up and both to their credit made the cut. Hillier got into the field because of his world ranking of 92. His experience of playing golf in America amounted to very little. For him to make the cut and finish in a tie for 26th not only earned him the best part of NZ$200,000 but he proved to himself that he can compete with the world’s best on the USPGA Tour. His 26th placing will also earn him important points on the DP World Tour’s Road To Dubal season finale. So a very productive week all round for Daniel. Foxy finished in a creditable 37th place, completing the 4 rounds with a total of just 1 over par. Final word here to Rory McIlroy who got off to the worst possible start with a 4-over 74 including 6 bogeys, 5 of those bogeys coming in the last 6 holes. But no-one bounces back better than Rory. From finishing the 1st round in 119th place, he got to within 1 shot of the lead during the final round, but couldn’t finish the job, settling for 7th place overall. Meanwhile Lydia Ko finished in a tie for 8th place behind winner Lottie Woud, also from England, in the Kroger Queen City Championship in Ohio. After three rounds in the 60’s Lydia could do no better than an even par 71 on Day 4 to finish 7 shots adrift of the winner. It was Woud’s 2nd title on the USLGA Tour.

It’s probably the oldest cliché in golf. “You drive for show, but you putt for dough”. Those famous words were uttered 70 odd years ago by the man many believe to be the greatest putter of all time, South African Bobby Locke, four-time winner of the Open Championship. Gary Player summed him up neatly when he said once, “I’ve never seen anyone putt better than Bobby Locke.” Locke must have known something about this mysterious golfing art because he won four British Opens (The Open Championship) in 8 years between 1949 and 1957. Part of his legend apparently centres around the fact that he never lost a 72-hole tournament in his homeland for 20 years, thanks to his putting. Probably not far behind Locke in the all-time putting stakes was Sir Bob Charles. Both these players were regularly out-driven by many of their peers, but more than narrowed the gap on the big hitters when they got to the green. That maxim is absolutely still as true today as it was 70 years ago. No better example of this at work surfaced in Barcelona over the weekend when our own Kazuma Kobori, playing in the Catalunya Championship, came storming home and grabbed a share of 6th place thanks to his putter. Kazuma shot 67 on the last day, needing only 24 putts to complete his 5 under par final round. Now if a golfer only needs 24 putts to complete his 18 holes, it means in all probability he’s chalked up no less than 12 1-putt greens along with 2 putts on the remaining 6 holes. Kobori is by no means a big hitter. At this tournament he was only the 42 nd longest hitter off the tee on the last day, averaging 287 yards per drive, nearly 10 yards longer than his season average. But what he does is hit a lot of fairways, in fact he now tops the driving accuracy stats on this tour so far this season. He hits on average 78% of fairways off the tee, more than anyone else and remember, he’s playing his second shots sometimes 25-30 yards behind his playing partners. His 6th placing in Barcelona was his first top 10 finish of the year and has lifted him from 91st to 63rd on the all-important Race to Dubai season-ending Championship. Once again he was the personification of consistency, all four rounds under par and finishing off the final rounds with birdies on the last three holes. This has become a feature of Kazuma’s golf. When he finishes high, it’s often due to a late flurry of birdies on the last day. However the truly remarkable story at this tournament was the showing of the winner, little-known 22-year-old South African, Yurav Premlall, who won the tournament by 14 shots, the second-highest winning margin on either the DP World Tour or the USPGA Tour. The record margin is 15 strokes, Tiger Woods’ victory margin at the US Open some 25 years ago. It’s hard to believe this is just Premlall’s 9th start on the DP World Tour. From those 9 starts he’s missed the cut in 4 of them. Then he comes out and does this, rounds of 70, 64, 63 and 63 and for good measure he chipped in on the last hole to get within 1`shot of Tiger’s record margin. All up the South African had 33 birdies in his 72 holes. On American soil our two highest ranked golfers, Ryan Fox and Lydia Ko, had weeks to largely forget. Foxy finished 67th in a field of 72. He fared much better over the last two rounds than he did the opening two. Lydia was up there with the leaders after an opening 67 but couldn’t break 70 again for the week and finished in a tie for 18th place. Now all eyes in the golfing world this week will be on the men’s second Major of the year, the USPGA starting on Friday morning at the Aronimink Golf Club in Philadelphia, and good news for us back in NZ. We’ll have two starters in the field, Ryan Fox lining up in his 28th start in a Major and Daniel Hillier playing in his 6th Major. He’s in the field because he now ranks inside the top 100 so gets an invite to this Major.

“It was nuts”. The reaction of Scottie Scheffler to the putting performance of Cam Young’s 4th round of the Cadillac Championship in Florida over the weekend. ”I don’t think he missed anything”, added Scheffler and he wasn’t exaggerating as he talked about Young’s performance on the greens. Over the course of the round, he was 7 strokes better than anyone else in the field on the putting greens. Was it any wonder Young won the championship by 6 strokes - his second win of the year? Earlier he had beaten the world’s best players in the Players Championship. Right now Young, believe it or not, is the hottest property in world golf in 2026. Both Scheffler and McIlroy remain Numbers 1 and 2 respectively on the official World Rankings and both have won a tournament this year, but Young has won twice. Add these victories to his performance at the Ryder Cup last year where he was easily the best performed American and Cam is indeed your man. No, he’s not a household name just yet but that epithet he may well have secured by year’s end. His driving off the tee is nothing short of remarkable. With that long signature pause at the top of his swing he just dials up the middle of the fairway, hole after hole. Apart from 2 wins, he’s had 5 top 10 finishes so far this year and must now start as favourite for the year’s second Major, the USPGA Championship, which starts next week. Putting him ahead of Scheffler and McIlroy in the betting stakes might not make much sense to many who follow this game, but in golf, of all sports, stats don’t lie. Also in the field was Ryan Fox who’s becoming the personification of steadiness and consistency. In this event he finished 30th . Okay that won’t win him a Halberg Award this year, but up against 70 of the world’s best golfers, it was again a sterling effort from Foxy on the course they have called for decades the “Blue Monster”, 7700 yards of demanding golf which tests every aspect of your game. It’s also a course Foxy hasn’t played that often. He put together 4 rounds of par or better – 72, 71, 72, 68 and a cheque for around $NZ200,000. His finishing score was 5 under par, again a pointer to his consistency over the 4 days, but there was one hole, the 18th , which proved his nemesis - he bogeyed it every round. If he’d just parred it each day, he would have finished inside the top 10. Mind you, as tough par 4’s go, they don’t come much tougher than this one. It ranks as the 6 the hardest par 4 across all the courses played on the USPGA Tour in one calendar year. Meanwhile far away in Southern Turkey, Daniel Hillier and Kazuma Kobori were in action again on the latest DP World Tour event. However, Hillier was seriously off his normally high-quality game and failed to make the cut by a wide margin. But the young Kobori fared infinitely better. After a second round of 68, Kazuma found himself in second place where he doggedly defied his experience at this level and stayed around the top of leaderboard, or within a shot of it, really until the back nine on Day 4. This was a tough course, evidenced by only one player the eventual winner - Mikael Lindberg from Sweden, the only player in the field to get to 10 under, winning by 2 shots. Kazuma just couldn’t get his usually highly reliable putter to fire on this last day. He only had 1 birdie and that came on the first hole. Eventually he finished in a tie for 13th place and a handy cheque for E34,000. Elsewhere, Steve Alker came up short in the second Seniors Major of the year, finishing in a tie for 11th , 9 shots behind Stewart Cink who picked up his 4th win this year from 7 starts. Yep, as Steve Alker has clearly shown, there’s still a lot of money to be won playing golf for a living in the USA even after the age of 50.

It was shaping up as a big week for our big names. Unfortunately the early sizzle quickly turned to fizzle and with Ryan Fox having a week off, what followed was a low for the likes of Lydia Ko, Daniel Hillier and Kazuma Kobori. The biggest disappointment was the showing of Lydia. She lined up in Houston at the Chevron Championship for the first women’s Major of the year. Her form in 2026 meant she entered as one of the favourites. From her 6 starts on the LPGA Tour this year, Lydia had notched 3 top 5 finishes and a tie for 11th in her last start prior to the Chevron. She began the Championship with a solid, if not spectacular, opening par round of 72, although it did leave her whole 7 shots behind Nellie Korda, the eventual winner. Her second round began promisingly enough with 3 birdies along with 2 bogeys on the front nine. That, however, was the end of the good stuff, as golfers like to say, as she battled her way fruitlessly through the back nine where she ran up 4 bogeys, no birdies and just 4 pars. Most unlike Lydia Ko golf, it must be said. On the last hole, a par 4, Lydia was on for 2 and had about a 15-foot putt for birdie. It was a putt she knew she had to sink in order to make the cut. Alas the putt didn’t drop and she tapped in for a second round of 75, missing the cut by 1 shot. It was just the 6th time in 69 Major Championship starts that Lydia had missed the cut. Life unfortunately wasn’t much better for Daniel Hillier in the China Open, his first start on the DP World Tour since he won the NZ Open in Queenstown back in March. The long break didn’t appear to have done his game much harm as he opened with a rock-solid 68, 4 under par and comfortably inside the top 10 going into Day 2. His fate at this point unfortunately was to bear a remarkable similarity to that experienced by Lydia Ko across the other side of the Atlantic. On Day 2 he was going along nicely. At the turn he was 1 over par but two birdies on 9 and 10 got him back in touch with the leaders. Two more pars had him comfortably inside the cut when suddenly the wheels came off his round. A double bogey 6 on 14 followed by 2 bogeys on 16 and 18 saw him sign his card for 73 and a missed cut, like Lydia, by 1 shot. Daniel would have been unhappy at not playing the weekend after a long break but there was enough good stuff in those first 31 holes to suggest his best is not far off. All of which meant Kazuma Kobori was the only Kiwi out of Ko, Hillier and himself to make a cut last week. Kazuma, having just his second start after a month-long lay-off like his compatriot Daniel Hillier, began very solidly with a 2 under par 69 and followed it up with another sub-par round on Day 2 to make the cut comfortably enough. Another even par round on the third day left him in good shape for a top 20 finish but it wasn’t to be. He too lost his consistency on Day 4. His blues began on the second hole, a par 3, which saw make double bogey. He recovered well enough with 3 birdies mixed in with 2 bogeys, then disaster befell the young Kiwi when he got into all sorts of trouble on 18, having to settle for a costly and painful triple bogey 8 which inevitably saw him tumble down the leaderboard to finish in a tie for 58 h place, dropping 13 places on just 1 hole. It emphasised very clearly and painfully for young Kazuma how ruthless professional golf can be at this level.

Ryan Fox looks to have finally recovered from the travails of kidney stones which have hampered his USPGA Tour campaign for 2026. For over a month he’s been sidelined by these painful little acidic stones. They severely hindered his Masters preparation which led to him playing Augusta below his best form. It didn’t come as any great surprise to see him miss the cut, albeit narrowly. His tie for 16th place at the Heritage Classic however was a positive sign that he has his mojo back. The Heritage is known as a Signature event on the US Tour. There are only 8 of them, spread across the entire year. The fields are limited to the top 70 golfers from the previous year and offer US$20 million per tournament. Furthermore, most of those 70 players belong inside the world’s top 50. Yes, the money is good, very good, but so is the competition. Once you’re in these high-end Signature fields, the dollars mount up very quickly. Foxy, for example, earned around NZ$500,000 for his tie for 16th place at the Heritage. The addition of these lucrative events to the annual USPGA Tour schedule didn’t come about by accident nor PGA bosses feeling uncommonly generous towards their players. No, it was due entirely to the appearance of LIV Golf and the hundreds of millions of Saudi petro dollars pumped into this new breakaway Tour. Many big names like Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Bryce DeChambeau, Cam Smith and Jon Rahm switched. One could hardly criticise these players for doing so, given the size of the LIV offers - in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars just as signing-on fees, then playing for much larger purses than were then offered by the USPGA Tour. The USPGA Tour then unearthed their own bountiful reply, diving into their own reserves and arm- twisting the big sponsors to increase their sponsorship dollars. The arrival of these 20-million-dollar Signature events has clearly gone down well with top PGA Tour players, but not necessarily with many of the couple of hundred lower-ranked players who comprise the bulk of the players on this Tour. “Hey”, they’re saying, “What about us, what sort of remuneration are we getting for our loyalty?” That issue is yet to be resolved. Foxy, meanwhile, will be very pleased with this latest overall result. He certainly started like a man in a hurry. Picking up 5 birdies in his first 9 holes, 4 of them coming on consecutive holes. Sadly he couldn’t match that form on Day 2, having to settle for a 1-over 72 and losing touch with the leaders. Day 3 delivered better stuff - a 5-under 67 and a chance still of a top 20 finish. That would have happened if he had just finished on Sunday with a par on the 18th but he made bogey instead and had to slip back to a tie for 16th . With the Majors season well underway and the next one in just a few weeks’ time, the PGA Championship, Foxy’s return to form, albeit a little hurried, augurs well for the year’s second Major.

It might be something of an exaggeration to say Rory McIlroy is suddenly feasting on the rewards, records and remuneration (a mere US$4.5 million) that come from winning The Masters. However, 15 consecutive years of failure to win at Augusta hasn’t all been in vain. It was obvious last year and again this year that McIlroy has acquired a vast reservoir of what to do and what not to do around this devilishly testing course. No-one in the field of his generation has as much innate knowledge of this unique course. Yes, it’s an age-old sporting cliché that you can learn much from your failures. Rory’s two final rounds were the clearest example I can think of where a golfer has leaned on his past experiences to finally climb to the top. After leading the field by 6 shots at the halfway stage Rory, 22 holes later, had given back all those 6 shots to the field, then when he missed a 3-foot putt on his way to a double bogey, his hopes now for a second straight green jacket looked to have died on the glassy greens of Augusta this day. Another bogey 2 holes later seemed to confirm that Rory was in the throes of letting slip another Masters. Past adversity told him, unfortunate though these two lapses were, 14 under would probably win this thing. That meant no more bogeys and 5 birdies had to be found over those final 12 holes. His mind this time was clear and his thought process logical. The results were immediate - birdies on the next two holes meant he was back on the horse. He was looking more like the Rory of Thursday and Friday. Then came the pivotal moment on the par 3 12th . He pulled a pitching wedge out of his bag and sent his ball sailing high and serenely over Rae’s Creek and landed it 6 or 7 feet from the hole. Fate and momentum combined sweetly as he poured the putt into the hole. From that moment on you sensed nobody now would stop the Irishman. He stood on the 18th tee soon after with a 2-shot lead, grabbed his 3-wood and, as he sensed the title was surely his now, lashed out at his ball, opening wide the club face which sent the ball arcing right into the thick stand of trees halfway up the 18th fairway. Fate had dealt him one final fortunate twist. He had a shot, even though another crop of tall trees obscured his view of the green. It didn’t matter. He ripped a short iron over the trees and into a greenside bunker. That was just fine. He duly popped the ball onto the green, took his two putts and became only the 4th player to win back- to-back Masters titles. The other three? Jack Nicklaus of course, Tiger Woods of course and the incomparable Sir Nic Faldo. While Rory was making more history, Scottie Scheffler reminded us all why he is still the Number One ranked golfer. He trailed McIlroy by 13 shots after 36 holes, but finished the tournament just 1 shot adrift of the winner. Scheffler became the first player in the 91-year history of The Masters to play the final 2 rounds without a bogey. He rightly, I guess, remains Number One and Rory stays at Number Two. The former, the world’s best golfer, the latter the most loved. Golf is very fortunate to have these two superstars leading the way. Sadly, the lingering side effects of kidney stone extractions conspired against Ryan Fox who went into this important golfing week with only two competitive rounds to his name in the month prior. To his credit, Ryan’s staunch determined mannerisms nearly got him into the weekend. He missed a 3-foot putt on the 34th hole and so missed the cut by 1 shot.

The golf calendar’s most awaited week has arrived. The Masters. As Ryan Fox, no longer a Masters rookie, observed a few days ago, “It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve played Augusta, every time you enter through the gates and take the drive up Magnolia Lane to the clubhouse, it’s a goose bump experience”. Ryan, unfortunately, could hardly have been more ill-prepared, after being laid low a month ago with kidney stones. Since then he’s only played two rounds of competitive golf. He is now thankfully an experienced world-class golfer and won’t be making excuses for this severely limited game time he’s had since the beginning of March. He’ll be relying on his bulldog spirit and fierce determination to get him through what will be a tough week for him. Just making the cut will be an achievement in itself. Due to the limited size of the field, usually around 90 to 95, the cut is made at 50. In other words, only the top 50 progress to play the final two rounds and that will be Foxy’s first aim. Again, in another piece of bad luck for Foxy, the 10-shot rule was removed a decade or so back. Under this rule, all players who were within 10 shots of the lead, regardless of their position, qualified for the last two rounds. So who is likely to win? Scottie Scheffler, the world’s Number One despite an indifferent year to date by his standards, or Rory McIlroy, the defending champion with 44 wins worldwide to his name? An elite American golf betting handicapper, Brady Kannon, who’s called eight Major winners since 2013 and whose most recent success came just a couple of weeks ago when he correctly predicted Matt Fitzpatrick paying 15-1 to win the Valspar Championship, is only revealing his choices to those who sign up to his betting website. However among popular betting sites, favouritism is fairly evenly shared between Scheffler, McIlroy and two LIV golfers, John Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau. DeChambeau has acquired the knack, over the last couple of years, of peaking in the Majors. So he’s my bet. I’ll be surprised if he’s not in the hunt when it comes to the back nine on the last day. Augusta’s back nine is very gettable. There are 2 par 5’s reachable in 2 and 2 magnificent par 3’s which can be birdied as well. If you can get on a tear at the start of the last nine you can shoot up to near the top of the leaderboard very quickly. It’s part of the enduring and addictive charm of The Masters. Missing from the field this year are Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson who have won 8 Green jackets between them. If you’re picking a non-American winner that might be a savvy bet. There are 46 foreign golfers in the field this year out of a field of 94. Meanwhile in Las Vegas, Lydio Ko missed out on yet another top 10 finish by 1 stroke when she tied for 11th place at the Aramco Championship, but overall she continued her good consistent form in 2026. It was however a bit of a rough ride for Lydia who opened with rounds of 75 and 76, seeing her just make the cut and in a tie for 59th place after 2 rounds. Then the next day Lydia, as she is prone to do, went out and shot a 68 to record the lowest round of the day and jump 44 places up the leaderboard.

Shooting a score of 60 in any tournament, be it as an amateur or a top professional, is a moment of unalloyed joy which very few golfers experience at any time in their career. Yet both New Zealand’s top two golfers, Ryan Fox and Lydia Ko, have joined this elite club this year. Ryan Fox, playing in a charity event prior to starting his 2026 overseas playing schedule, wheeled out a 10-under par 60 on the Akarana Golf course in Auckland, setting a new course record that will now require a piece of golfing history to lower. Then Lydia turned up last week, showing us all that anything Foxy can do, she can match. Playing in the Ford Championship in Arizona, Lydia blasted a 12-under par opening round of 60 - 12 birdies and 6 pars. Off the top of my head, I can’t recall another round of golf at this level in either the men’s or women’s game which contained 12 birdies. Amazing. Now while Lydia wasn’t able to get close to that 60 in any of her final three rounds, H-J Kim, second to Lydia after her first round, then went out and carded yet another 61 in her third round. Again I can’t remember any golfer in a PGA Tour event at this level with 2 61’s on their card in the same tournament. With absolutely no disrespect to either Lydia or H-J, this was by no means the toughest course these women will encounter this year. A further indication of how easy this course was playing can be seen by the fact that not one player who finished in the top ten shot over par. Every round of those top ten was under par. I think if I were living in Arizona I’d be beating a path as quickly as possible to that club to get a membership. H-J Kim, not surprisingly, went on to win the tournament, finishing with a four-round score of 260, 28 under par. Lydia, with final rounds of 71, 69 and 68, finished 4 th , picking up a cheque of around NZ$170,000. Interestingly, Lydia with that 60 recorded her lowest-ever round in professional golf and it tied as the second lowest in the history of the LPGA Tour. Her career earnings now top US$21 million, leaving her just US$1 million shy of Annika Sorenstam’s record for the most money won by a woman in professional golf. Unfortunately the news from our elite men over the weekend was nowhere near as bright. Ryan Fox, in his first outing back since being sidelined with kidney stones, failed to make the cut at the Texas Open and now has just one more tournament left before The Masters starts at Augusta on 9 April. And Kazuma Kabori, the very personification of consistency on the DP World Tour from week to week, was again initially showing this strength of his game in the Indian Open with rounds of 71, 71, and 70, all under par through 54 holes, then one disaster after another befell the young Kiwi on Day 4. His troubles started on the 2nd hole with a bogey, followed by a double on the very next hole, then a double catastrophe on 8 and 9 - a double bogey followed by a triple bogey 7 on the 9th for an outward 9 of 44, 8 over the card. Kazuma managed to stem the bleeding on the back nine, playing the first even holes in even par, only to stumble badly on the two closing holes - a double bogey 6 on 17 followed by another double bogey on the par 5 18th . So out it in 44 and home in 40 for a 12- over par 84 which left him in a tie for 50th place. Did he sustain some sort of injury early in his round which caused this unusual slump? Nothing has emerged at the time of writing to suggest anything was wrong with him physically. However his driving, such a strength of his game, was well off on Day 4. He hit only 50% of fairways well, below his usual 70–80%. As a result he only hit 27% of greens in regulation. Clearly something was not right. Did he just have a mental meltdown after things started to go wrong? We may get a clearer picture later this week. If he doesn’t start this week, we can assume he is probably carrying some sort of injury.

Steve Alker hasn’t been very visible on the Seniors’ Tour in the United States this year for a very good reason. He’s been Down Under visiting his home country preparing for and playing in the NZ Open in Queenstown. No sooner was he back in the States than he quickly got back to his winning ways, picking up his 11th win on this Tour and probably his most spectacular. At the halfway stage Alker was 9 shots off the lead but over the weekend he shot 62 then 65 to force a playoff with Padraig Harrington. Steve won on the first hole of sudden death with a 14-foot birdie putt. As remarkable as his comeback was, the fact is that this was Alker’s 100th event as a Senior and astonishingly he has never missed a cut, yes 100 starts for 100 cuts. That takes my breath away. The Middle East has in recent years become an increasingly important arm of international golf. Its significance is especially relevant to the DP World Tour. A number of high-profile, big-moneyed events take place in the United Arab Emirates across late January and into February. Good fortune indeed was on their side this year as their four DP World events finished just 10 days before US and Israeli fighter jets took to the skies over the Middle East and carpet-bombed military, political and nuclear weapons’ factories in Iran. The DP World Tour had just begun its African Swing when the bombs started to fall in the Middle East. The UAE unfortunately has become a regular target for Iranian missiles due to what Iran perceives as a nation with close economic ties to the United States. Since then, all regular activities from international sporting events to air travel have been thrown into chaos. Formula One Grand Prix for example has been cancelled or at least postponed until such time as the fighting ceases. Meanwhile, life continues on, albeit rather prosaically in the golfing world. Ryan Fox is still recovering from the removal of kidney stones and hopes to play at least one tournament in the USA before the Masters begins at Augusta on 9 April. Two Koboris were in action over the past week. Kazuma in China and his older sister Momoka at the Australian PGA Championship in Queensland, won by Aussie Hannah Green, now a winner in her last 3 starts. It was also a very good week for our two leading players on the Ladies European Tour. Amelia Garvey finished in a tie for 5 th place which earned her A$20,000 and further back in a tie for 36th place was Momoka Kobori whose golf had been a model of consistency for the first 3 rounds, only for her to stumble badly on the front nine on the last day. Four bogeys and a double on this nine saw her turn in 43 and forgo any chance of a really big pay day. To Momoka’s credit she fared 10 shots better on the back nine to finish with a 76 - out in 43, home in 33. After three very good weeks in Australia, where all the tournaments were part of the European Tour, Momoka now sits in 22nd place on the Order of Merit. To retain her playing card for next year she must finish the year inside the top 70. Amelia Garvey is in an even stronger position now, sitting in 10th spot on that all-important Order of Merit. Momoka’s brother Kazuma suffered a similar sort of fate to Momoka while playing in the Hainan Classic in China. After three good consistent rounds, Kazuma lost touch with the leaders on the final day with 3 bogeys marring his card, seeing him finish in a tie for 34th place.

Eerie echoes of the unpleasantries which marred the closing holes of last year’s Ryder Cup in New York surfaced again, albeit not so menacingly, over the dramatic final holes of the Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass in Florida this past weekend. Cameron Young and Matt Fitzpatrick, opponents in that Ryder Cup of 2025, were duelling for the Players title. While there was only friendliness between the two players, boos and jeers were nonetheless aimed fairly and squarely at the Englishman, especially after Young grabbed a share of Fitzpatrick’s lead with a birdie on the famous par 3 17th hole. Then came that unfortunate chorus, “USA USA USA”, as the masses made their way up the 18 th fairway. During a moment of silence, while waiting for Young to hit his ball off the tee, some perhaps religiously misguided soul screeched “God Bless America”. Maybe he thought things weren’t going so well for Team USA in the Middle East. In the end the lone cry seemed more comic than tragic. Young appeared delightfully indifferent to the verbal sideshow as he unleashed a 375-yard drive(343 metres) up the 72nd hole, reputed to be the longest drive on this hole since the Shot Link telemetry was introduced at Sawgrass in 2003. It was also close to 20 metres longer than Rory McIlroy’s drive earlier in the day. It set up an easy par 4 for Young, while Fitzpatrick, after missing the fairway off the tee, could do no better than a bogey 5, leaving the quietly-spoken, likeable American the winner by 1 shot and US$4.5million richer. Sadly Ryan Fox took no part in this high-profile event due to a kidney stone which laid him low the day before the tournament started. He was admitted to a local hospital where he had the stone lasered, for the most part a largely pain-free procedure, but it will be a week or so before he’s back to full fitness. He did message me to say he’s very hopeful he will be able to play in the year’s first Major which gets underway on 9 April at Augusta. Also missing from any action over the past week were Daniel Hillier and Kazuma Kobori with the DP World Tour having a week’s break while its schedule shifts from Africa to Asia. Both Kiwis should be in the line up in Hainan, China for the Hainan Classic starting 19 March. However the Kobori name was not entirely out of the golfing frame last week with Kazuma’s sister, Momoka Kobori, recording one of her best finishes on the Ladies European Tour which stopped Down Under to embrace the Australian Women’s Open at the Kooyonga course in Melbourne. Like her younger brother, Momoka was a model of consistency, recording rounds of 73, 72, 71, and 68 to finish in a tie for 7th place and a cheque close on $NZ30,000. This high finish has seen her move above the other NZer on this tour, Amelia Garvey. Kobori now sits in 17th place on the Order of Merit, a couple of spots ahead of Garvey who also played in the Aussie Open finishing in a tie for 34th . Both players will head for Hope Island in Queensland for the Australian PGA Championship. It’s the last of three tournaments in Australia which form part of an increasingly global look about this women’s Tour which, despite its title, reaches into most quarters of the golfing world, rather like the men’s DP World Tour.

Daniel Hillier’s much-coveted win in the New Zealand Open at Millbrook not only restored faith in the standard of NZ golf, but also thankfully brought an end to the long and continuous domination Australian golfers have had on our National Open. However, a week later, normal Australian transmission, as it were, has resumed with Australians not just edging out the Kiwis, but a strong contingent of Japanese golfers as well at the Japan-Australasian Tour Championship. Aussies filled six of the top ten places and two of them, Travis Smyth and Jack Thompson, then went on to battle it out over a 6-hole sudden death play-off. Eventually Smyth snapped the deadlock to claim first prize in this $1million tournament. The best of the Kiwis was the ever-consistent Kazuma Kobori who finished in a tie for 6th at 12 under par for the week, 3 shots behind the eventual winner. Unlike last week, Kobori was the only Kiwi to finish in the top 10. Nic Voke was the best of the rest of the Kiwi line-up, tying for 11th place. Then came a relatively new name on the Kiwi golfing scene, 25-year-old Aucklander Cameron Harlock, who rocketed home with 6 birdies and 7 1-putt greens on the back nine on Sunday to grab a share of 15th place. Harlock has been on a golfing scholarship in America and has now turned pro. And if his putter continues to run as hot as it did at Middlemore, we’ll be hearing and seeing a lot more of this guy in years to come. Kerry Mountcastle, 3rd at Millbrook last week and handy to the lead at Auckland through the first 3 rounds, lost his touch on the last day, carding 5 bogeys on his way to an even par round of 71. Those bogeys saw him slip to a share of 35th place alongside fellow Kiwi Michael Hendry. Meanwhile Ryan Fox enjoyed another useful pay day on the USPGA Tour, pocketing US$157,000 for his share of 26th place at the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill in Florida. Ryan had a share of 6th place after an opening round of 68, 3 under par. The following day he shot his first over par round in 3 tournaments on the PGA Tour this year. His consistent golf this year can clearly be measured by shooting 10 rounds in a row under par. Unfortunately, a 3-over par round on Day 3 saw him slip back into the middle of the field. An improved final round saw him climb up into a tie for 24th place. Those 2-over par rounds have seen him drop 5 places on the FedEx Cup rankings. He now sits at 34th place, still well inside that all important top 70. The tournament at Arnie’s place produced a riveting finish. Daniel Berger had led the tournament for the first 60 plus holes, only to see Akshay Bhatia reel off 4 birdies on the back nine to force a sudden play-off, won by Bhatia on the first extra hole.

If you were surprised at the unabashed joy streaming out of the face and body of Daniel Hillier after he sank his last putt on the 72nd hole at Millbrook to win the NZ Open, well here’s why. For the last couple of years, golf writers and commentators have been perplexed as to why this top Kiwi golfer hasn’t added a second win to his sole DP World victory in 2023, the highly significant British Masters. It is one of the most sought-after titles in Europe after the Open Championship. The NZ Open no longer forms part of the DP World Tour, so Hillier’s win in Queenstown won’t see him shoot up the world rankings or even improve his place on the DP World Tour rankings. But he was overjoyed with this win for all sorts of reasons as he let his emotions out on that 18th green. Much of the talk before the Open started was around whether a Kiwi could at last win this title and end this depressing Australian stranglehold on our national Open. Hillier was acutely aware of this domination which added to his determination to become the first Kiwi since 2017 to be crowned the winner. The stats unfortunately speak for themselves and show why Hillier and others from here were desperate to snap this Aussie run. Basically, Aussies have colonised this event for the past quarter of a century. An Aussie golfer has been declared the winner of the NZ Open 13 times since 2001. During that same period we recorded only one NZ victory and that was Michael Hendry in 2017. In 2012, for heaven’s sake, even Aussie amateur Jake Higginbottom was good enough to take out the title, besting the best we could put into the field that year. Yet oddly enough, during the late ‘90s and the first two years of this century, it was a Kiwi who triumphed every year from 1996 until 2002. Winners include Michael Campbell, Greg Turner and David Smail. It was a victory richly deserved by Hillier whose game from tee to green was the best of any player in the field. Long and accurate off the tee, comfortably over 300 yards with his driver. Precise, accurate iron play set up many birdie opportunities and then there was his very hot putter which possibly turned out to be the most lethal club in his bag. All up Daniel needed just 119 putts to complete the 4 rounds, that’s an average of less than 30 putts per round. In total he had 30 1-putt greens and on Day 1, he 1-putted every green on the front 9. These are quite phenomenal statistics. I sense a second win on that DP World is not far away. Hillier wasn’t the only Kiwi to stand out at Millbrook. For starters 12 NZ golfers qualified for the final two days, one of the highest numbers of Kiwis to make the cut for many years, if my memory serves me correctly. Kerry Mountcastle, for example, was near to the top, if not alone at the top of the leaderboard at various times over the last two days. He hung tough on Day 4 in very windy conditions, helped also by a very good display of putting which saw him come home in a tie for 3 rd place and a cheque close to $100,000, possibly the biggest pay day in his professional career. All told 5 NZers finished in the top 20. After Hillier and Mountcastle came Michael Hendry tied for 10th , Sam Jones 14th and Kazuma Kobori in 19th place. So with 12 Kiwis making the cut, 5 finishing inside the top 20 and Daniel Hillier winning the title, this has been by far the most successful NZ Open for many many years. It should augur well for a lot more success offshore for our top golfers in the years to come.

Across opposite sides of the world last weekend, Ryan Fox and Lydia Ko showed emphatically why they are our two most successful and celebrated golfers. Competing against most of the world’s best, each produced golf of the highest quality. It would not have come as a great surprise if either had kicked on for a victory. Each was in the hunt for a title but neither could go low enough on the last day to notch up a win. However both finished comfortably inside the top 10 of their respective tournaments. Together their combined scores totalled 32 under par. Each player posted 4 rounds in the 60’s. Now here’s where it gets interesting. Fox and Ko could well team up and compete for a gold medal in a new Mixed Team event that’s been added to the golf schedule at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Sure, 2028 is a long way off and Lydia has spoken about retiring from the game by the time she reaches 30 and that’s in April this year. However her form in 2026 on the LPGA Tour suggests to me she may be having second thoughts about an imminent retirement. That strong competitive element, such a hallmark of her career, looks to be alive and well, very well in fact, in 2026. Last week in Thailand she finished 4th in the Thailand Honda LPGA, reeling off rounds of 67, 64, 69, 68, hardly the sort of golf you’d be turning in if you’re retiring in two months. Meanwhile Foxy joined the swinging 60’s party with rounds of 67, 69, 69 and 67 at the Genesis Invitational at the Riviera Golf Club in Los Angeles, which just so happens to be the club that will host the golf competition at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Foxy finished in a tie for 7th place, winning US$602,000. He jumped 35 places on the FedEx Cup table after this LA performance and now ranks 24th . Only the top 50 on the USPGA Tour at season’s end qualify for the rich FedEx Cup series. But it was anything but a laid-back week for many of New Zealand’s up and coming crop of young pros. Most of them were at the iconic Paraparaumu links playing in the NZPGA Championship which was dominated by golfers from Australia. Oddly enough it was a visitor from the USA, 30-year-old Truslow Austen, who took out the major prize and took home the handsome trophy that goes to the winner. All eyes now switch from Paraparaumu to Queenstown for the 2026 NZ Open which starts on Thursday, 26 February. Once again John Hart and his team have attracted a very strong field for this NZ Open which carries a purse of NZ$2million dollars in prizemoney. The Kiwi challenge will be headed by Daniel Hillier and Kazuma Kobori, our two leading DP World Tour professionals. Also in the field are two USPGA Tour winners, Kevin Na, a 5-time winner on the USPGA Tour, who appears to have severed his ties with LIV Golf and hopes to regain his playing rights on the US Tour. Also from the USA comes Kyle Stanley, twice a winner on the US Tour. Another Kiwi with strong credentials of late is Ben Campbell, the New Zealander enjoying a very profitable period on the LIV Golf Tour. All up there’s no doubt about this year’s Open - it’s one of the most competitive NZ Opens we’ve seen for many years. A tournament which Aussie pros by and large have tended to dominate in recent years, but this year it could be a very different story. Let’s hope there are Kiwis on the front page of the leaderboard coming down the stretch at Millbrook on Sunday afternoon.

When you’re one of the world’s best golfers with two Majors to your name, going 848 days without a win of any kind would, you’d expect, prompt a raft of pessimistic thoughts to rattle around in your head. Not so said Collin Morikawa after breaking that two-and-a-half-year drought with victory in the Pebble Beach Pro-Am on the Monterey Peninsula in California. He was always sure he would win again and was good enough to believe he could, even against the best. The Pebble Beach Pro-Am is one of the high-flying events on the US Tour. Being a Pro-Am it brings together Hollywood celebrities, sporting stars, business tycoons and the game’s best golfers. Eighteen of the world’s top 20 were at Pebble Beach this year, along with the likes of Ryan Fox. Morikawa’s win was built around a 10 under par 62 on the third day, a round which included 11 birdies. Even that eye-popping display still left him two shots off the lead going into the last round. He was able to continue his good form into the last day and as the leaderboard bunched up with four players at one stage tied for the lead midway through the last round, it was Morikawa who prevailed with his sound game from tee to green and saw him edge out his closest rivals by 1 shot when he birdied the par 5 18th . For all the plaudits that deservedly went Morikawa’s way there was almost as much admiration, bordering almost on disbelief, at the performance of Scottie Scheffler who almost completed one of the greatest comebacks of all time. After the first round, Scheffler, the world’s undisputed leading golfer, was right near the tail of the field after an opening round of 72 which left him 10 shots behind the leader and in 62nd place. At one stage during the second round he slipped to 11 shots off the lead. Rather like Morikawa’s ‘never give up’ attitude, Scheffler’s mind mirrored similar thoughts. A 6 under 66 on Day 2, then a 5 under 67 narrowed the deficit to 8 shots which in Scheffler’s own words meant he just went out there on the last day and ‘free-wheeled it’ and with spectacular success, reeling off 6 birdies and 3 eagles, yes 3 eagles in the one round. It was nothing short of spectacular. He also clocked up 3 bogeys, but when he walked off the 18 th green and signed for a 9 under 63 he had a share of the lead. Unfortunately for Scheffler, Morikawa’s strong finish saw him pip his fellow American on the last hole. Almost as spectacular was Rory McIlroy’s final round - an 8 under 64 - 8 birdies, 10 pars, no blemishes. Scheffler and McIlroy are officially the world’s top two golfers and although neither managed to win at Pebble Beach this day, they showed why they are nonetheless the world’s two best. Ryan Fox, it should be added, certainly didn’t disgrace himself in such exulted company. After an even par 72 on Day 1, which left him tied with Scheffler in 62nd place, Foxy then hung tough for the final three rounds with some very classy golf. An 8 under 64 on Day 2 and 69 on each of the last two days saw him finish in a tie for 24th place with a cheque for around NZ$225,000. All up Foxy recorded 22 birdies across the four days. I’m assuming he will tee it up down the road in San Diego this week for the next US$20 million Signature tournament where every competitor is assured a big pay day because there’s no cut. Every golfer plays four rounds.

Some 6 or 7 years ago Patrick Reed, after one of his wins on the USPGA Tour, casually dopped into a post-round interview that he was now “One of the world’s top 5 golfers”. The problem was that the Official World Golf rankings said otherwise and had him ranked just inside the top 20. Call it ignorance or arrogance but it’s just the way Reed has always operated. Love him or leave him Patrick Reed has a unique way of making his mark on international golf. After winning the 2018 Masters Reed’s form seemed to desert him, not helped by his on-course behaviour which saw a number of cheating allegations levelled his way. Brooks Koepka incidentally nicknamed him Sand Castles after Reed was accused some years back of sweeping sand away from behind his ball in a bunker. For all the bad press Reed has attracted, American golfing fans have always loved him, especially for his Ryder Cup heroics. Who can forget his epic singles win against Rory McIlroy a decade or so ago which earned the surly American the title of Captain America? Well ‘Capt A’ seems to have rediscovered his best form and it’s come coincidentally shortly after cutting his ties with LIV Golf. From his last 3 starts on the DP World Tour he’s recorded 2 wins and a second placing, the latter coming after he lost a sudden death playoff. This remarkable run of form has ironically seen Reed propel himself back just inside the top 20 on the World Rankings. LIV Golf, as the saying goes, probably isn’t amused. Mind you, LIV Golf has been getting a bit more publicity than usual with the victory of 23-year-old Australian Elvis Smyllie in Saudi Arabia. He was also a member of the winning team in the same event. All up this young Aussie pocketed US$4.75 million for his 72 holes. Not a bad week’s work for a young bloke who had never won a golf tournament outside Australia. The good news for LIV is that the next stop on their world circuit is Adelaide which has always attracted by far the biggest crowds of any LIV tournament. At the Saudi event Ben Campbell finished 30th and fellow Kiwi Danny Lee in a tie for 41st . Daniel Hillier I suspect wasn’t quite as upbeat as Patrick Reed was with himself or his golf after his final round at the Qatar Masters. The Kiwi started the last day just 3 shots behind Reed. After a solid enough start with pars on his first 2 holes, his tee shot on the 190-metre par 3 3rd missed the green, a poor second was followed by a 3-putt green for a double bogey, two holes later on the 5th he made bogey and all chances of victory had effectively disappeared. Out in 39, 3 over par, he improved slightly on the back nine where he had 3 birdies but also 3 bogeys and when he walked off the 18th he had slipped from 4th place to a tie for 20th . However he still maintains his 5th place on the Road to Dubai. Better news however from Kazuma Kobori whose golf at Qatar was the personification of consistency. He began the week with a 5 under par 67 then followed it with three rounds of 70 to finish the tournament in a tie for 9th place. This will have done young Kaz the world of good. Coming off a highly successful first year on this Tour in 2025, he’d missed the cut in his first 2 tournaments this year. After this top 10 finish his confidence I’m sure will be back. He also picked up E44,000 or close to NZ$100,000 and jumped 54 places on the Road to Dubai where he now sits in 86th place. Ryan Fox meanwhile completed his first tournament of the year on the USPGA Tour. Competing in the Phoenix Open in Arizona in front of crowds of hundreds of thousands at this riotous event, Ryan turned in a classic Foxy 4-rounder, a giddy amalgam of birdies and bogeys. Fortunately the birdies out-ranked the bogeys by 8 and saw him finish in a tie for 24th , earning US$82,000. The tournament was won by this fast-rising American sensation Chris Gottterup who beat off Hideki Matsuyama on the first hole of sudden death. It was Gotterup’s second win of the season.

All eyes were on one player at the Farmers Insurance in San Diego, the latest event on the USPGA Tour. In the end Brooks Koepka didn’t even come close to winning in this his comeback appearance on the US Tour after leaving LIV Golf just before Christmas. His form was way short of the commanding figure he cut when winning his five Majors before leaving for the big dollars of LIV Golf. However the 35-year-old American showed glimpses of his former self when he put together a much-needed 4 under par 68 on Day 2 which enabled him to just make the cut and play the weekend. He said afterwards he’s never been comfortable on the San Diego poa annua greens. Inevitably, given his past record, public expectations are high that he can recapture the sort of form that had him the Number One ranked golfer in the world. His recent form on the LIV Tour has been patchy at best. However, now that he’s back in the cut and thrust of weekly golf on the PGA Tour, his game will improve, I have no doubt about that. Koepka thrives on regular competition. That’s one of the chief reasons he made the switch back to the PGA. Playing one largely insignificant tournament a month in a different part of the world just didn’t fire his competitive juices. Having the likes of Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy lurking around when he plays now will surely see his stocks rise. Hundreds gathered around his final green at San Diego, watching him putt out for a tie of 56th place. But typical Koepka, when asked when he will play next, he said, “Arizona this coming week. I just love the chaos”. Meanwhile Justin Rose continued his good form from 2025 and proved to be a runaway winner in this latest PGA Tour event in San Diego. It was virtually a done deal after Rose’s opening round of 62, 10 under par. He never really relinquished that big lead over the next three days. His 6-shot lead midway through the tournament was the largest 2 nd round lead by any golfer since 2008. Not bad for a 45-year-old. With his win in San Diego by 7 shots he moves up to 4th on the world rankings. He was the first golfer for 71 years to go wire to wire, for this his 13th tour victory on the US Tour. Kiwis in various parts of the world came to the fore over the past weekend. Daniel Hillier once again came close to entering the winner’s circle on the DP World Tour, this time at the Bahrain Championship. A final round of 66, 6 under par, left him just 1 shot short of making a play-off with three other golfers including Patrick Reed, winner last week in Dubai. The Kiwi did however have the satisfaction of shooting the lowest round of the day. His driving over the four rounds ranked second, as well he was third in Greens in Regulation, second most accurate off the tee and inside the top 10 in putting. He’s now had 3 top 5 finishes in his last four events and as one of the English television commentators observed, “this man is a walking bank”. This latest performance has lifted his earnings on this tour to E520,000. That’s in excess of NZ$1 million dollars and it’s only the first week of February. His ranking on the Race to Dubai also got a little bump, moving up to 5th place. Lydia Ko looked likely to be among the big dollars as well in her first appearance in 2026 on the LPGA Tour in Florida. But it wasn’t to be. Playing on her home course in the Tournament of Champions which was reduced to a 54-hole tournament because bad weather washed out Saturday’s play, Lydia was up there near the top of the leaderboard through the first two rounds. Unfortunately a horror back nine on Day 3 took her out of contention. Three bogeys and a double bogey saw her card 40 on the back nine and left her 7 shots adrift of the eventual winner Nelly Korda. Lydia shot 74 on the last day. However her 4th place in this her first up appearance for 2026 is nonetheless a very encouraging start to the year. In April, Lydia turns 30 and for some years now she’s indicated she doesn’t envisage herself playing competitive golf beyond 30, so this may well be her last year on tour. Closer to home it was a great week for the young Kiwi pro Jimmy Zheng who finished 2nd at the Webex Players Series event in Australia, picking up a cheque in the vicinity of $30,000. Not bad for a 21-year-old who only turned pro last May after winning the Australian PGA Tour Qualifying School event. Jimmy shot a final round 65 to finish only 1 shot behind the winner, Haydn Barron.

Controversy has been the constant companion of the man who won last week’s rich Dubai Desert Classic. Thirty-five-year-old Patrick Reed beat off a world class field including Rory McIlroy, Tyrell Hatton, Tommy Fleetwood, Ryan Fox, Dustin Johnson and Padraig Harrington. It was Reed’s first win on the DP world Tour since 2020. He also won nine times on the USPGA Tour before joining the LIV Golf circuit in 2023. One of those nine victories was the 2018 US Masters. But throughout his professional career Reed has been dogged by a serious of cheating allegations. At the 2019 Hero World Challenge Reed copped a 2-stroke penalty for clearing sand behind his ball with two practice swings in a waste bunker. Reed claimed it was an accident. At the 2003 Dubai Classic controversy again arose from a shot Reed hit which became stuck in a tree. He identified the ball as his even though television replays suggested it might have been a different ball. He dismissed the controversy as a ‘non-issue’. Reed was clearly angered at these allegations, particularly the criticisms he was copping from the Golf Channel and its expert commentator Brandel Chamblee, so he filed a $750million lawsuit against Chamblee and the Golf Channel for what he claimed was damage to his reputation. The case was thrown out by the judge who then required Reed to pay the legal fees of both Chamblee and the Golf Channel. Fortunately for Reed his time at LIV Golf appears to have been free of any such controversies. Certainly the only focus on him at this recent Dubai Classic was on the quality of his golf. Here there was much to admire over the days in the desert, particularly his two mid-rounds - a 66 on Day 2 and 67 on Day 3 - which were the foundation stones he laid for his victory on Day 4. Going into the last round he held a 4-shot lead which he never surrendered. On a difficult windy day with the greens running at turbo speed he held his game together to shoot an even par round. The merit of that score can be seen in the context of what his nearest rivals were doing. Only two players out of the top 10 finishers managed to break 70, yet Reed’s even par score of 72 was till enough for him to win by 4 strokes. Reed, like a lot of the top ranked names who defected to LIV Golf, has become increasingly incensed at the refusal of the board behind the Official World Golf Rankings to grant ranking points to LIV Golf tournaments. The effect of this has seen a number of big LIV Golf names no longer eligible to play in any of the Majors because they don’t rank inside the world‘s top 50. So, annoyed by this snub, they have taken legal action but to no avail. One way round this ranking points road block for LIV Golfers is to play in DP World Tour events which do attract ranking points. This route, practised regularly by Reed, has worked very neatly in his favour. He’s now ranked inside the world’s top 50 which sees him qualified to play in the four Majors this year as long as he stays inside the top 50. Most of the big names playing in Dubai had weeks they’d rather forget I’d suggest. In a field of just 100 starters Rory McIlroy finished tied for 33rd , Tommy Fleetwood a shot back was in 41st place, followed by Ryan Fox tied for 45th. Daniel Hillier did slightly better than those three big names finishing in a tie for 26th place which has seen him slip just the one place to 6th on the all-important Race to Dubai leaderboard. Hillier must finish season’s end inside the top 10 which will grant him exemption into next year’s USPGA Tour. Kazuma Kobori missed the cut by 1 shot but he was in pretty good company. Two former Major Champions, Dustin Johnston and Padraig Harrington, also came up short after two rounds and both had the weekend off.

Hello again and welcome to the New Golfing Year which is well and truly up and running with the game’s two main tours kicking off last week - the DP World Tour in the Dubai desert and the USPGA Tour in Hawaii. The Christmas break is usually the quietest week of the year on the course, but this year there was a huge story that broke off the course. Brooks Koepka startled the golfing world two days before Christmas by announcing he was quitting LIV Golf. He promptly applied to be reinstated into the USPGA who, disregarding their own rules and regulatory stand down periods, immediately welcomed Koepka back like a long-lost son. No penalties, maybe a fine, but the burly American is now set to rejoin the Tour within the next couple of weeks. Big victory for the US Tour and potentially a savage blow to the world of LIV Golf. Much more is still to be played out here. Will other superstars of the LIV stable, viz Bryson DeChambeau, John Rahm, Cam Smith and others follow suit, chucking in the LIV towel and returning to the PGA Tour? As things stand it appears those three are going to stay put. Nonetheless these are nervous times for LIV Golf who simply can’t afford to bleed any more big names. If they do, the whole LIV tent could quickly fold. Our two top golfers, Ryan Fox and Daniel Hillier, were in action in Dubai where Daniel Hillier came within a stroke of picking up his second DP World Tour win. Midway through the back 9 on the last day the Kiwi was 1 of 5 players who shared the lead which included Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry. Sadly for the two Irishmen, both strayed their tee shoots on 18 so neither was able to make par. Daniel Hillier fared better with a regulation par but that still left him one shot behind the leader Nacho Elvira, a 38-year-old Spaniard who broke the 5-way deadlock with a birdie on 17. That meant all he had to do was par the last hole which he did for a one-shot victory. However there was much to admire once again about the golf of Daniel Hillier. His 2nd place was his 4th top 6 finish from his last 5 starts which includes a 2nd , two 5ths and a 6th . For his troubles last week in Dubai he earned E258,000 - that’s just a shade over NZ$500,000. His next start is the Hero Dubai Classic which is just a 30-minute drive away. This is the tournament which saw him finish second to McIlroy last year. Another useful pay packet could be on the way for Daniel in this coming week. Also in that field will be Ryan Fox who, like Hillier, had his first competitive outing for the new year. Foxy, if nothing else, was a model of consistency. He opened the tournament with two 72’s and finished it with two 71’s for a share of 27th place. He might have missed out on the big bucks that went Hillier’s way, but at least he had the satisfaction of returning the best putting figures for the last round of the entire field - just 25 putts for his final 18. I’m sure he’ll want to see his play from tee to green this week a little more accurate though. On the USPGA Tour opener in Honolulu 25-year-old Chris Gotterup won for the third time in his short career. The 25-year-old American was ranked 195th in the world 12 months ago. Now, after this latest win and thanks to a red hot putter on the last day, he’s now the 17th ranked player in world golf.

So the curtain has come down on another golfing year. The game’s best players have put their clubs in the garage for a couple of weeks which means it’s time to dish out a few awards. Who’s really called the shots in 2025? The most prestigious award is the PGA Player Of The Year. In reality there were only two contenders for this title, Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy. Normally any player good enough to best his rivals for two Majors in the same year, as Scottie Scheffler did in 2025, would be hands down the Player of the Year. But wait. What about the calendar credentials this year which belong to Rory McIlroy. His winning of The Masters in April at Augusta was quite clearly the single most memorable victory by any golfer in 2025. His win made Rory just the sixth player in history to win all four Majors and the first to do it since Tiger Woods some 20-odd years earlier. McIlroy, the game’s most popular player, had been trying in vain for a decade to win The Masters and join golf’s most exclusive club. When he sank the winning putt on the 18th green on the last day, Rory’s palpable relief was echoed by golf fans in every corner of the globe. McIlroy wasn’t done in 2025 with just that elusive Major. A few months later his other big dream and hope for 2025 was the Ryder Cup, played this year on American soil. The Europeans got the job done, thanks in no small way to the efforts of McIlroy, whose play was as sublime as it was inspirational. The win came at no small cost. In a staggering about face, McIlroy, the darling of the American galleries at Augusta, was now the villain of Bethpage, as thousands of angry New Yorkers booed, jeered and insulted the European players. Singled out for especially vindictive abuse was McIlroy. Even his wife had a drinking cup thrown at her. This was an especially dark chapter in the long history of the Ryder Cup, crowd hooliganism at big sporting events no longer, it appears, just the shameful hallmark of European football. Anyway for all of McIlroy’s triumphs it was, fittingly enough, Scottie Scheffler who took out the Player of the Year award. On tournaments won, no-one touched Scheffler. He had six wins in 2025, including two Majors. End of story. He has now won the Jack Nicklaus Player of the Year trophy four years in a row. The only other player to achieve this four straight run was, yes, Tiger Woods, who won this title every year from 1999-2003. With every win and every Major Scheffler wins these days, comparisons with Woods inevitably creep into the golfing narrative. So it’s probably worth recalling that Scheffler has so far racked up 19 US Tour wins, Tiger has 82 next to his name and 15 Majors. Back here, NZ Golf has had a very good year thanks to Ryan Fox on the USPGA Tour where he won twice in 2025 at the Myrtle Beach Classic in May, then the much sought-after Canadian Open a month later. It’s a very special club reserved for golfers winning twice or more in the one year on the US Tour, which is why Foxy’s world ranking soared during this period from around 100 to inside the top 40 and that’s about where he sits at year’s end. He's had a much-deserved long break from the rigours of life on tour. Mind you, he hasn’t exactly locked his clubs away as we saw a week or so back, winning his own ambrose event - Fox on the Run - at Royal Auckland and a week earlier playing in a charity event at this writer’s club, Akarana. He shot a course record of 60, just 11 under par. 2026, bring it on, I hear Foxy saying. Also Daniel Hillier and Kazuma Kobori had really successful seasons on the DP World Tour. As well, Lydia Ko had another really solid year on the US Ladies Tour, picking up another win but she wasn’t able to nail that 4th Major title she’s looking for. Anyway that’s my lot for 2025. It just remains for me to wish you a very happy Christmas and all the best for 2026. And make sure you enjoy your new golfing year. Remember nothing beats hitting that little white ball towards the hole!

As the curtain comes down on what has been a fairly memorable year for NZ Golf, another relatively new young face has popped up on our radar screen. His name is Jimmy Zheng and he finished 3rd on Sunday at the Victorian PGA Championship on the redoubtable Moonah Links course. In extremely difficult conditions, with howling winds buffeting the course all day, the 23-year-oldKiwi rookie pro shot a 1 under par 71, the second-best round of the final day. Indicative of the conditions was the fate of the eventual winner Marc Leishman, a 6-time winner on the USPGA Tour before he switched allegiance to LIV golf a couple of years back. Leishman is still one of Australia’s leading golfers, as he’s shown over the past two weeks at the Australian Open and the Australian PGA, but at Moonah Links on Sunday in those terrible conditions, the best he could do was a 4 over par 76 and yet that was good enough for him to win the tournament by 1 shot from fellow Australian Josh Younger, who also shot 76. A further shot back came Jimmy Zheng in a tie for 3rd place. Zheng picked up A$12,800, his best pay day to date from his short 10- tournament career. For a while late on Sunday afternoon it looked as if Jimmy’s winning score of 3 under might just get him into a play-off, as the strong swirling winds saw the leading half dozen or so players ahead of him tumble down the leaderboard. Fortunately for Leishman and Younger, the final hole at Moonah measuring 581 metres, was down wind and that saw the long-hitting Leishman make birdie and Younger par and so secure the first two finishing spots respectively. A further insight into how hard this course was playing on Sunday can be gauged from the scores of the top 20 finishers. Twelve of the field recorded rounds of 75 or worse. So take note of the name Jimmy Zheng, who said afterwards that his aim is to follow in the footsteps of Kazuma Kobori, who jumped from the Australasian PGA Tour onto the DP World Tour following a series of outstanding performances on this Aussie tour. Jimmy comes to the professional ranks with an outstanding amateur career. He won the NZ Secondary Schools Championship 7 years ago as a 16-year-old at Palmerston North Golf Club, which included a round of 60 on what was the home course of the likes of Grant Waite and Craig Perks. He was selected to represent NZ at the Youth Olympics at Buenos Aires two years later. And he represented NZ at the prestigious Asia Pacific Championships, finishing a creditable 12th among essentially the world’s best amateurs. In May of last year he won the PGA of Australasia Qualifying School. Again another significant credit to his name. And this year he’s been playing on the Australasian tour. He’s had 10 starts to date, with 2 top 5 finishes, 4th in the West Australian PGA and now a 3rd place finish at the Victorian PGA. All up he’s won around A$30,000. I’m sure he’ll command plenty of attention when he tees it up next year in the NZ Open in Queenstown, starting on 26 February. Meanwhile, faraway in every sense of the word. Lydia Ko and golfing partner Jason Day were bathing in beautiful calm Florida weather, trying to win for a second time to win the Grant Thornton International Teams title. This format sees one female and one male teaming up with 15 other teams competing in foursomes and fourball over three separate rounds. The Down Under combo of Day and Ko won this inaugural event two years ago but this year finished at the other end of the scoreboard in a tie for 13th place with three other teams. The American pair of Lauren Coughlin and Kim Novak took out the title this year, sharing the US$1million winner’s purse. Ko and Day didn’t do too badly for their 13th place though, each pocketing US$63,500.

First it was a little-known Spaniard golfer, David Puig, who a week ago upstaged Australia’s best to win the Australian PGA and this week the party-pooper, another rather anonymous figure from Europe, 26-year- old Dane Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen, snatched the Australian Open title from under the nose of local hero Cam Smith when he drained a long birdie putt on the 72nd green at Royal Melbourne to win the title by 1 stroke from Smith. The Dane’s main claim to fame is the three wins he’s had on the Challenge Tour, the Number Two Tour of Europe which secured him a place on the DP World Tour. If nothing else, the wins by these two young European golfers serves to remind us that the strength of the DP World Tour isn’t quite as weak as some have suggested. Yes it’s true all of Europe’s top players are happily ensconsed on the USPGA Tour and most well reimbursed for their time playing in the States. However there is also now an underlying strength to that DP World Tour. Both Ryan Fox and Daniel Hillier will testify to that. Fox and Hillier are both winners on the DP Tour. Fox went from Europe to the States last year off the back of a couple of very successful seasons in Europe and promptly won not once but twice on the US Tour in 2025. Hillier missed his US Tour playing card a couple of weeks back by the narrowest of margins. The USPGA is clearly sufficiently impressed now with the standard of play on the DP Tour, which is why they give out full playing cards to the top ten players at season’s end. Hillier might have missed his US card for 2026, but judging by the way he’s played in recent weeks in the Middle East and now in these two Australian events, which form part of the DP World Order of Merit, he looks likely to get one of those cards this year. His 6 th place finish at Royal Melbourne has lifted him to 3rd place on the Race to Dubai Order of Merit. Again, like last week in Brisbane, Daniel had his chances on Sunday to become the first New Zealander to win the prestigious Aussie Open title. To date the best performance by a Kiwi belongs to John Lister who finished in a tie for 2nd place at the 1977 Australian Open. Standing on the 72nd tee, Hillier was just two shots adrift of joint leaders, Neergaard-Petersen and Smith. The Kiwi didn’t hold back on the 435-metre par 4 final hole at Royal Melbourne. Unfortunately his second drifted right, missed the green and ended up in a greenside bunker. Three putts on that final green saw him drop two places into a tie for 6th place. The long-hitting Kiwi has now had four top ten finishes in his last six starts. It'll be a surprise if he doesn’t find himself in the winners’ circle sometime over the next 12 months. Clearly, as his results show, he has lifted his game to another level in recent months and is now one of the leading figures on the DP World Tour. Hillier was also the best of the Kiwis at Royal Melbourne. Ryan Fox had a good week with four rounds at par or better to finish in a tie for 14 th place. If it hadn’t been for bogeys on 16 and 18 he would have nailed a top 10 finish. As it was, he finished at 7 under for the 72 holes along with Rory McIlroy. The Northern Irishman showed he’s just as popular down under as he is in Europe and the United States. Over 110,000 people flocked to Royal Melbourne over the four days, most I’m sure attracted by the prospect of seeing the world’s most popular and dynamic golfer in action. He might not have won the tournament but after a disappointing opening round with a 1 over par 72 he nonetheless played the last three rounds at 8 under with more than just the odd flash of brilliance. And the good news is he’s coming back for next year’s Open, also to be held on golf’s most celebrated peninsula. The venue will be Kingston Heath, another world-class golf course.

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.