Tournament Results 27/11/2023: Min Woo Lee was at his entertaining best when winning the Australian PGA Championship at Royal Queensland.
The charismatic 25-year-old from Perth put on a show for the fans with brilliant and audacious shot making over the first three rounds.
Lee began the final round with a three-shot lead but it was wiped out in just two holes after Japan’s Rikuya Hoshino made a hot start.
But birdies by Lee at three of his next four holes restored his lead before an audacious chip-in eagle from 50m at the ninth hole stretched the margin to four at the turn.
From there, Lee coasted to his first Australian PGA title, carding a final round 68 to finish at 20-under par, three ahead of Hoshino.
Marc Leishman was a shot behind in third with Curtis Luck a stroke further back in fourth.
FINAL SCORES
- 1 Min Woo Lee -20
- 2 Rikuya Hoshino -17
- 3 Marc Leishman -16
- 4 Curtis Luck -15
- 5 Joaquin Niemann -13
- 6 Adam Scott -12
- T7 Todd Sinnott -11
- T7 Rafa Cabrera Bello -11
- T7 Frank Kennedy -11
- T7 Joel Moscatel -11
- T7 Cam Davis -11
- T7 Lucas Herbert -11
The summer of Australian golf surges into life this week when the Australian PGA Championship kicks off in Brisbane.
The tournament will be played at Royal Queensland Golf Club and with a $2.3 million purse up for grabs, it’s the richest event on the PGA Tour of Australasia.
Co-sanctioned with the DP World Tour, the Australian PGA has attracted a field stacked with top local and international golfers vying to have their name engraved on the legendary Joe Kirkwood Cup.
The Australian PGA Championship will be played at Royal Queensland Golf Club, starting Thursday November 23 and finishing November 26.
THE DEFENDING CHAMP
When you’re a mulleted, moustachioed Queenslander who also happens to be one of the finest golfers in the world, there is no greater home ground advantage in golf than playing in front of an adoring home crowd at Royal Queensland.
Cam Smith saluted at last year’s Australian PGA as the reigning Open champion, beating Perth’s Jason Scrivener and Japan’s Ryo Hisatsune by three shots, and the atmosphere felt, at times, more like a victory lap than a proper golf tournament.
While the fans will likely be just as raucous and Cam will again be the main man, he’ll need to bring his A-game if he’s to defend his title and claim a fourth Australian PGA.
He’ll face a much deeper field this year but his A-game doesn’t appear to be far off.: Cam’s year thus far has seen him crowned the individual runner-up on the LIV Tour, while he’s also notched two top 10s in the majors.
And a couple of weeks ago at his most recent start, Cam had the Hong Kong Open in his grasp until the final hole.
He finished runner-up to New Zealand’s Ben Campbell but wasn’t helped by some ridiculous rule-bending and time-wasting antics from final round playing partner, Thailand’s Phachara Khongwatmai.
Cam seems a fairly uncomplicated bloke though and if he’s on-song, back-to-back Aussie PGAs seems to be a logical outcome.
He successfully defended his title in 2018-19 and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see him do it again.
THE COURSE
Ranked as one of the better layouts in the country, Royal Queensland has been a revelation since it resumed hosting duties of the Australian PGA Championship in 2022.
Its history includes a visit from the peerless architect Alister MacKenzie, who passed by almost 100 years ago to throw in his highly valuable two cents on the routing.
However, the course was rerouted by Mike Clayton in 2007 after the Queensland government compulsorily acquired 30 per cent of the course’s land to upgrade the nearby Gateway bridge that dominates the landscape.
The course sits on a mainly featureless piece of land next to the Brisbane River.
But even with wide, contoured fairways, well-placed bunkers and tricky green complexes, the course is designed to reward great shots, while good-to-average shots just won’t cut the mustard.
It means that whoever lifts the Joe Kirkwood Cup on Sunday will have undoubtedly played some stunning golf.
TOP AUSSIES
Alongside tournament headlining banana benders Adam Scott and Cam Smith, Min Woo Lee, Lucas Herbert and Marc Leishman (pictured above) will tee it up at Royal Queensland this year.
Lee will join Herbert full time on the PGA Tour next year after earning enough points as a non-member this season.
The 25-year-old from Royal Fremantle made 14 out of 15 cuts this season on the DP World Tour and banked 2.4million Euros, along with a victory at the Asian Tour’s Macau Open last month.
Lee is one of the favourites this week and is coming off a T15 at the season-ending DP World Tour Championship in Dubai on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Leishman, who plays on Cam Smith’s Ripper GC team on the LIV Tour, will be hoping his hot form from the second half of the year continues.
Leishman posted a runner-up finish in Chicago and a third in London, which came about after his coach visited him mid-year and corrected a flaw with his putting.
Once he was straightened out, the putts began dropping for the big man from Warrnambool and he’ll use this week and next week’s Australian Open to hopefully bag some valuable world ranking points.
Leishman didn’t tee it up in any of this year’s majors, with his world ranking plummeting to 401 after joining the LIV Tour.
OH BROTHER
Alex Fitzpatrick has an opportunity to step ever so slightly outside the overbearing shadow of his famous brother when he tees it up at this year’s Australian PGA Championship.
His older brother Matt is a superstar who won the 2022 US Open, played in Europe’s winning Ryder Cup team in September and won the Dunhill Links Championship last month.
Meanwhile, Alex only turned pro last year but locked up his DP World Tour card at his first go, thanks to a stunning performance after qualifying for the Open Championship in July.
Alex finished T17, beating his older brother, and his subsequent results suggest it delivered a welcome dose of self-belief that he could compete with the world’s best.
After the Open, he finished second at the World Invitational in Northern Ireland before a T5 at the European Masters in Switzerland.
With Matt nowhere to be seen in Brisbane, it could be Alex’s time to shine.
TOP INTERNATIONALS
Spain’s Rafa Cabrera Bello will be hoping to end his year on a high note at the Australian PGA after a disappointing season.
The four-time winner on the DP World Tour has been struggling to put it together of late, with just two top 10 finishes and 11 missed cuts for the man from the Canary Islands.
Rafa (pictured above) can only hope the start of the new DP World season at Royal Queensland brings with it a change in fortune.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Poland’s Adrian Meronk, who looks the form player of the Europeans teeing it up this week.
The world No.48 finished T48 here last year but went on a red-hot tear after the tournament, winning the Australian Open the following week in Melbourne before collecting two more victories at the Italian Open in May and the Andalucia Masters last month.
Meronk finished fourth on the Race To Dubai last season and his form looks ominous.
HAYDN BARRON
Haydn Barron makes his first start as a fully-fledged member of the DP World Tour after winning his card at Q school just a fortnight ago.
The young gun has shown a liking for the big stage after he finished fourth at last year’s Australian Open.
It was a result that proved vital for his nascent professional career, gifting him a start at the Open Championship and opening a pathway in Europe that saw him finish tied 25 th at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship in Scotland last month before flying home and finishing runner-up in Kalgoorlie at the WA PGA.
A brilliant final round at the second stage of Q school saw him claw his way into the final stage, where he showed immense patience and played superb golf to emerge with one of the 33 cards following a six-round marathon.
While he missed the cut last year at Royal Queensland, he finished T12 in the 2021 edition (which was played in January 2022).
A strong result here would be an excellent way to start his DP World Tour career.
CURTIS LUCK
Curtis Luck will make a rare appearance in Australia after receiving an invitation to play the Australian PGA.
The 27-year-old Perth pro, a former gun amateur who won the US and Asia Pacific titles in 2016, has been plying his trade on the Korn Ferry Tour in the US for the past four years in the hope of graduating back to the main PGA Tour (which he last played full time in 2019).
A trip home and a change of scenery might be all the inspiration Curtis needs to display his wealth of talent in his first Australian event since 2018.
He is coming off his best KFT season, which included a runner-up finish at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Championship — which has become a pet event of his after he won the tournament in 2020.
With the top 10 DP World Tour players earning a PGA Tour card, could a win at Royal Queensland see Luck change tack and chase it in Europe this year?
ADAM SCOTT
Adam Scott is a classy Queenslander who knows his way around Royal Queensland better than most.
A member at Royal Queensland since he was 11 years old, Scott will be one of the favourites this year having already won the Australian PGA Championship twice — both at Royal Pines.
There aren’t many better-looking swings on the planet and if Scotty can get the flatstick fired up just a little, his ability to hit great shots into the Royal Queensland greens — which require extraordinary precision — might see him tear the place apart.
He finished fifth in Bermuda a couple of weeks ago, so his game is still trending late in the season.
You’d think a third Australian PGA for one of Australian golf’s favourite sons would be well received, especially coming at his home club.
THE PARTY HOLE
The Party Hole at Royal Queensland isn’t new, but it will be bigger this year.
While it won’t be as insane as the 16 th in Phoenix or the 12th at LIV Adelaide, capacity has been doubled this year to accommodate an estimated 3000 punters.
And they’ll all be seated much closer to the green this year, making it feel even more claustrophobic.
At only 125m, it’s the shortest hole on the course. But with the wind blowing, the drinks flowing and the music pumping, it will probably be one of the most intimidating shots on the course this year.
Expect the house to erupt when local heroes Cam Smith and Adam Scott enter the amphitheatre.
JED MORGAN
After winning the delayed 2021 edition of the Australian PGA Championship early last year by a record 11 strokes, Jed Morgan appeared to have the golfing world at his feet.
He was soon drafted into Cam Smith’s Rippers team on the LIV Tour, but things haven’t been quite so effortlessly easy for the Royal Queensland member as it was a couple of years ago.
Unfortunately, Morgan was one of four players cut from LIV after he finished near the tailed of the individual standings.
However, before we feel too sorry for Jed, he still banked more than US$7million from his 21 LIV tournaments — a remarkable payday for a 23-year-old rookie pro.
He’ll receive a potential lifeline back to the LIV Tour at a qualifier next month, with the top three players winning their way on to a LIV roster.
If he can recapture the invincibility he displayed around Royal Queensland a couple of years ago, don’t bet against him getting back on the LIV Tour quickly.
|
Written by Jamie Martin Jamie Martin is currently locked in a battle to keep his handicap hovering around the mid-single digits. Despite his obvious short-game shortcomings, Jamie enjoys playing and writing about every aspect of golf and is often seen making practice swings in a mirror. |