Well the golfing year is all but done.
Only the one event of interest to us last weekend, the Grant Thornton Invitational played in Naples, Florida.
The defending champions in this combined men’s and women’s team event were Lydia Ko and Jason Day. The ANZAC duo put up a good fight and finished in a respectable tie for 6th place this year, 6 shots behind the winners, Patti Tavatanakit from Thailand and Jake Knapp, a young American pro.
It wasn’t too bad a pay day for Ko and Day who shared US$200,000 for their short stay in Florida.
With the year done, it’s probably appropriate to look back over the last 12 months and do a bit of a roll call on our leading golf talents.
So who has been the NZ Golfer of the Year? Well, there can’t be much argument here. Clearly Lydia Ko was our most outstanding golfer in 2024. When you win a gold medal at the Olympics and follow that up with a win in the Open Championship a week or two later, you far and away take the crown for this country’s leading golfer.
Lydia for all of her success in 2024 nonetheless didn’t get the much coveted USLPGA Player of the Year. That title quite rightly went to Nellie Korda for her 7 wins in 2024, including a run of 5 straight consecutive wins mid-year, one of which was a Major title, the Chevron Championship. But just to show us all that she’s not a automaton, she then promptly missed the cut in the year’s next two Major championships.
All up Lydia won 3 times on the USLPGA Tour and in total had 7 top tens, along of course with that Olympic Gold medal at the Paris Olympics. And her pay packet for the year from prizemoney winnings alone - just under US$3 million.
Next, at Number 2 on our Kiwi golf rankings for 2024, has to be Ryan Fox. This wasn’t a vintage year for Foxy who ends the year with his world ranking sitting at 83, a big drop from those heady days a couple of years back when he climbed inside the world’s top 30.
However, 2024 was a transitional and a tough year for Ryan. His recent successes in Europe saw him gain a playing card to the USPGA Tour in 2024. It meant having to effectively shift house from Europe to the USA for his wife and baby daughter and him, all the while on the road most weeks playing on a new Tour, the toughest in the world. While he didn’t enjoy the type of success he’d reaped in Europe, his tough grinding skills saw him make enough to keep his playing card for 2025 in the USA and that, I suspect, was his top priority in 2024. To hang onto his playing card on tours as demanding as the USPGA Tour, with its extraordinary depth of playing talent, was a major personal achievement for Foxy. He will, I’m sure, be much more competitive in the US in 2025, now that he’s familiar with most of the courses he’ll play on.
Also hampering his game in 2024 has been a niggling hip injury which hopefully he will have rectified by the time his 2025 season starts after the Christmas/New Year break.
Rounding out my top 3 Kiwi golfers for 2024 will be a name that will surprise some, Ben Campbell, who doesn’t play on either of the world’s 2 top tours, the USPGA or the DP World Tour. Yet Ben, this year, pocketed the best part of NZ$2.5 million playing on the rejuvenated Asian Tour, where for the second year in a row he registered a win - this year the Indonesian Masters and he came very close to successfully defending his Hong Kong Open which he won in 2023. This year he missed out on a sudden death playoff in Hong Kong by 1 shot. One of the features of his game this year has been his consistency with a host of top 10 finishes.
The Asian Tour has forged a close relationship with LIV Golf. This makes sense to some degree for both tours. LIV golfers who play in Asian Tour events are eligible for official world golf ranking points, which in turn raises the credibility and appeal of events on this tour. So well done to Ben Campbell. His series of high finishes this year on this Asian Tour has seen his world ranking jump from 244 at year’s beginning to a now career high of 139. He has well and truly overtaken Daniel Hillier who wasn’t able to repeat his 2023 form this year and now ranks outside of the top 200.
Others who deserve mention in passing in 2024 include Kazuma Kobori whose brilliant form on the Australian PGA Tour at the start of his professional tour a year ago has seen him earn his full playing card for 2025 on the DP World Tour. Sam Jones, another rookie who turned pro a year ago and promptly secured his DP World Tour card for 2024 via the Qualifying School, had a tough first up year as a touring pro. Despite a few healthy pay cheques he couldn’t quite finish inside the top 115 on this Tour and had to go back to Q-School where he came up short and so lost his full playing card for 2025. However, he showed me he has enough strength in his game to suggest he’ll be back on the big tours sooner rather than later.
That’s it from me for 2024. I’ll be back when the big tours kick off in mid-January. In the meantime, I hope you all have an enjoyable Christmas and New Year and find time to get in plenty of good golf.
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