The John Jones Steel Harewood Open starts today at the Greg
Turner designed Harewood Woodlands course, and has attracted one of the best
professional fields in the history of the tournament. Elsewhere, Ryan Fox resumes his European
campaign in the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, and Liv Cheng has a last
chance at a 2018 LPGA Card in the season-ending Symetra Tour Championship.
John Jones Steel
Harewood Open
This $50,000 Charles Tour event is the first in the 2018
series for the Jennian Homes Trophy, played for over five tournaments
culminating in the Muriwai Open in April 2018.
Last year’s winner Gareth Paddison will be teeing it up at Harewood
today, and has plenty of serious opposition to contend with, including Mark
Brown, Brad Shilton, Kieran Muir, Doug Holloway, David Klein and Harry
Bateman. The possibilities don’t end
there though, as based on recent form Dongwoo Kang, Luke Toomey, Hayden Beard,
Martin Pettigrew and NZ Professional Champion John Bae would all have to come
into consideration as well.
But wait- there’s more, with a “blast from the past” theme
around Richard Lee, David Smail and 2003 NZ Open Champion Mahal Pearce, who is
teeing it up in a professional tournament for the first time for some
years. He’s sure to have put in plenty
of preparation time down at Balmacewan, and there will be much interest in how
he goes.
Weather is normally a factor in at least one round of the Harewood
Open, and with the tournament starting three weeks earlier than normal, is
bound to have some influence this year.
However, the tradeoff is that the scheduling works well for a number of
our PGA Tour of Australasia players, as reflected in the excellent field.
You can follow the scoring at www.golf.co.nz
European Tour
Ryan Fox will be playing the Old Course at St Andrews in
Round 1 of the iconic Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, before moving on to
Carnoustie (the 2018 Open Championship venue), Kingsbarns, and then hopefully
the concluding round back at the Old Course.
Ryan performed very well in the 2015 Open Championship at St
Andrews in conditions likely to be very similar to those this week, even though
it was supposedly the Scottish “summer” back then.
As usual, the field is one of the strongest on the European
Tour, with Rory McIlroy in particular looking to extract something from what has
been a disappointing 2017 season by his standards.
Coverage of the Links Championship is on SS 51 from 1.00am
Friday morning.
Symetra Tour
Liv Cheng made a promising move early on in last week’s
Symetra Tour event, but eventually finished T14 after a last round of 75. That left her 22nd on the OOM,
with total earnings of just on $NZ 44,000.
She now gets a last chance at a 2018 LPGA Card in the
Symetra Tour Championship at Daytona Beach, Florida, starting tonight. Liv would basically win though to be sure of
finishing in the Top 10, although it is possible that more than 10 cards may be
awarded this year.
You can follow scoring at www.lpga.com/symetra
Other News
A number of our top players are not in action this
week. Steven Alker and Tim Wilkinson
will now have a decent break before the Web.Com Tour starts up again in
mid-January in the Bahamas.
Danny Lee is not in this week’s PGA event – the Safeway Open
in Napa, California, which signals the beginning(!) of the 2018 PGA Tour
season. He will be hoping to put a spate
of recent injuries behind him when he eventually resumes.
Michael Hendry is understandably sitting out this week’s Japan
Tour event before he gets into an extremely demanding schedule with eight
consecutive tournaments starting with the Japan Open next week, and ending with
the Australian PGA Championship at Royal Pines in December.
Three New Zealanders are currently trying their luck in
Web.Com Stage 1 Q School: Nick Voke in Nebraska, and Ben Campbell and Steven
Heyes in Lantana, Texas. Voke is
currently the best placed of these, being T31 after one round, but both
Campbell (T63) and Heyes (76) are well off the pace in Texas. In both cases, the top 24 and ties advance to
Stage 2.
Finally, Josh Geary and Fraser Wilkin are both in the latest
China Tour event, the Shenzhou Peninsula Classic, starting today.
Special Offer to Friends of the PGA from our official
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The Professional
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Under the
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direct to access our room availability screen
Step 3 / input promo code (the promo code for the
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