Much like the pandemic around it, this month’s concurrent Australian PGA and WPGA Championships come with a guarantee of unprecedented drama – and not a moment too soon.
Change was well and truly on the horizon. Australian golf’s increasingly stale tournament scene had long been earmarked for an urgent upheaval after years of tiresome battles against geography, expanded international event calendars and the subsequent lack of zeros in its tournament purses. Golf’s big fish no longer had a reason to roam our shallow waters. Something had to give and, before it could, COVID-19 wreaked havoc on the world and made that reality inescapable for our powers that be.
These are indeed unprecedented times we find ourselves in. International borders slammed shut, mandatory quarantine periods presenting nightmare scenarios for both visiting and returning travellers, mystery strains of COVID-19 only adding to the unknown of it all. The one certainty for the sport Down Under, however, was it was time to think outside the square. And failing another breakout of community transmission, or some biblical east-coast rain event that many Queenslanders are familiar with, the country’s biggest week of golf in two painstaking years will deliver an array of firsts at the revamped Royal Queensland Golf Club this month.
A Webb of intrigue
While this month’s return of the Australian PGA Championship won’t solve the dilemma of clashing riches on offer to players of the PGA Tour and other parts of the globe, it will mark the beginning of a new dawn for the sport in Australia. For the first time ever, the Australian WPGA Championship will be staged – concurrently with the men’s event – welcoming 24 of the country’s best female players to compete for the Karrie Webb Cup – a trophy designed by the legend herself. Breaking new ground with one of Australia’s oldest professional championships is a significant statement to make, not least at a time when the sport, at a club level, continues its much-publicised boom. According to Golf Australia’s annual report for 2020/21, golf club memberships in Australia is up 6.3 percent for the calendar year to a healthy 409,970, signalling the biggest rise in membership figures since the numbers were first collated nationally in 1970.
With more women forming part of that uptake, the timing of a new major tournament backed by our most high-profile female player ever is pivotal.
“I know the Australian WPGA Championship and Karrie Webb Cup will grow and create its own history and I am sure fans at Royal Queensland will enjoy the chance to see our best male and female players side by side,” said PGA of Australia boss Gavin Kirkman.
“We have been working alongside the WPGA Tour of Australasia for the past year and given the difficulty in bringing players in from overseas, playing the two tournaments in the same week at the Royal Queensland Golf Club seemed the perfect fit.”
It’s a move that really struck a chord with Webb, who joked a priority in her trophy design would be the quantity of beverage it can hold.
“I’m honoured that my name can feature on the Australian WPGA Championship trophy, but I am even more excited by Australia’s leading female players having another marquee event to play in,” said Webb, winner of 56 professional tournaments in her Hall of Fame career.
“Playing in the Women’s Australian Open and the Australian Ladies Masters was critical to my development as a tournament professional, so I know what having another 72-hole championship event will mean to the future of women’s professional golf in Australia.
“These playing opportunities and exposure will help this exciting group of girls to advance and take their games to the world.”
Headlining the WPGA Championship field will be the ever-popular Hannah Green, who landed back in the country before Christmas after another solid season on the LPGA Tour that saw her reach a career-high 13th in the Rolex World Rankings. It is here, though, she hopes to start channelling the ice-cold tenacity of her idol on the course while saving her trademark smile for off it.
“I feel like Karrie’s just such a lovely person and so different on the golf course compared to off the golf course,” admitted Green, who has not won a WPGA Tour event in Australia since 2017 and will commence her 2022 LPGA Tour season in Singapore in March.
“She was always in the zone and so focused and so wanting to win. That’s a quality that I need to take on. I need to be [more fierce] when I’m on the golf course and back myself.
“That’s definitely a quality that I saw in Karrie that allowed her to win seven Majors and so many other golf tournaments around the world.”
It’s Min’s to win
Min Woo Lee has never entered a marquee event in Australia as the raging favourite. And he’s definitely never teed up at home as a top-50 player in the world. Yet that’s the reality the younger sibling of LPGA Tour star Minjee Lee faces this month when he attempts to reduce the new-look Royal Queensland championship course to a pitch-and-putt exhibition. The big-hitting Perth product arrives home as one of the hottest young talents in world golf after a breakthrough season on the European Tour, where he capped of a host of top-10 finishes with the 2021 Scottish Open title and a sixth-place finish in the lucrative Race to Dubai standings.
But if you think taking on the added pressure of tournament favourite ahead of illustrious names like 2006 US Open winner Geoff Ogilvy will unsettle the 23-year-old, think again.
“I’m sure there’s going to be pressure when I get there, but I feel like I’ve proven to myself that I can get through that stage and not be afraid of the challenge,” says Lee, who helped kill time in hotel quarantine on his return to Perth by staging live Instagram Q&A sessions with fans.
“I’m looking forward to it. When I was at the Vic Open (which he won in 2020), I felt like I was one of the top players there and could be the one that holds the trophy at the end. A bit of that law of attraction I guess, feeling like I belong there and feeling like I’m at the top.”
He will certainly feel like he belongs at Royal Queensland, a course renovated by Mike Clayton that employs many of Alister MacKenzie’s age-old design principles of width and hazard placement.
“Royal Queensland is a course that was designed to place an emphasis on strategic golf,” says Clayton, who took to Twitter in the build-up to this year’s event to voice his displeasure at tighter mowing lines being sanctioned to restrict scoring and, presumably, rein in bombers like Lee. Australian Golf Digest can reveal those plans are indeed true, but not before discussions with the course’s current consulting architects, Ogilvy Cocking Mead.
“The width and space afforded to golfers from the tee gives them every opportunity to decide for themselves where best to play,” Clayton adds. “There are very few shots on the course where the architecture dictates where the golfer must play. At most of the two and three-shot holes, the test from the tee is of accurate driving to position as opposed to simple straight hitting.”
Lee, not afraid to show his cheeky side, weighed in on the course setup: “I saw on Twitter that they’re closing up the fairway and making it a little tighter… I was a bit annoyed at that,” he laughed. “I was looking forward to the first week back on tour and blasting drives left and right, and be OK. I guess if it’s tighter it’s probably going to be better for me for the tournaments in Europe.”
Regardless of the final setup, it will be the first time this prestigious club has hosted a national pro event on the new layout – a testament to everyone involved in its restoration.
The Australian PGA Championship and Australian WPGA Championship will be played at the Royal Queensland Golf Club in Brisbane from January 13-16, 2022. Tickets, hospitality and VIP experiences are on sale at ticketek.com.au
Players to watch
Geoff Ogilvy: 2006 US Open champion and 2008 Australian PGA champion
“Adding my name to the Joe Kirkwood Cup in 2008 was a significant moment in my career and I’m very much looking forward to the opportunity again at Royal Queensland Golf Club in January. My interest in course design is quite well known and as part of the OCM team who are now the consulting architects at Royal Queensland, it presents a great opportunity to put my understanding of the golf course into practice in tournament conditions.”
Hannah Green, 2019 KPMG Women’s PGA champion
“I was fortunate to have Karrie there with me to help celebrate when I won the Women’s PGA in 2019 and to now have the opportunity to win the Karrie Webb Cup gives me extra motivation. Her wins provided inspiration to countless young girls such as myself to get into golf, so now it’s our turn to continue on that legacy. It’s wonderful to see a new tournament for the girls to play in and winning the trophy in honour of Karrie Webb is definitely a new goal I want to achieve at least once in my career.”
Min Woo Lee: 2020 Vic Open champion and 2021 Scottish Open champion
“I can’t wait to get home and to play in front of Aussie fans again. Winning my first professional event at the Vic Open gave me a lot of confidence and the crowds at 13th Beach were amazing. I’ve got no doubt that given the difficulty in staging tournaments the past 18 months, we’ll see massive galleries at Royal Queensland and the inclusion of the girls adds another element that I’m sure the fans will enjoy.”
Player shots: Getty images: Jack Thomas, Michael Reaves
