WHAT happened in China at the weekend ought to end all arguments about who is the Golfer of the Year.
But that is not a reference to Rory McIlroy claiming the sport’s biggest – many might say most obscene – cheque of £1.25million at the 30-man Shanghai Masters.
For the US Open champion a second victory of the season came just as fellow 22-year-old Yani Tseng captured her 11th in Suzhou little more than an hour’s drive away.
That matches the best years of Tiger Woods’ career, although Tseng still has some way to go to equal the mark of Byron Nelson in 1945. He won 18 times that season, 11 of them in a row.
But for one so young her achievements are truly remarkable.
When first Annika Sorenstam and then Lorena Ochoa, the Swede’s successor as women’s world number one, stepped away from the game the search for the next dominant player began.
There was not long to wait. Having lifted her first major at 19, Tseng added two more last year and two more this season, including a successful defence of the Ricoh Women’s British Open.
She is the youngest golfer male or female to have won five majors and, with the announcement this summer that the Evian Masters in France will become a fifth major in 2013, the chance is obviously there for her to challenge the women’s major record of 15 held by Patty Berg – and, of course, the men’s record of 18 set by Jack Nicklaus.
“It’s incredible,” Tseng said recently.
“I wish this year would never end. I’m really happy what I did this year and I want to keep learning and get some more experience and try to make more history.”
There could not be a greater contrast between the men’s game and the women’s game in terms of a dominant figure at present.
Much has been made of the fact that in the last 13 men’s majors there have been 13 different winners – the last seven of them all first-timers.
But the unpredictability of golf since the demise of Woods and the more gentle decline of Phil Mickelson goes deeper than the sport’s four biggest events.
The HSBC Champions tournament in Shanghai this week completes this season’s world championships and the last nine of them have had nine different winners.
Moreover, the last five – Adam Scott, Nick Watney, Luke Donald, Francesco Molinari and Hunter Mahan – had never won a world championship or a major before.
And it would be no surprise to see that sequence grow this weekend. World number two Lee Westwood does not have a major or world championship to his name and nor do the likes of KJ Choi, Justin Rose, Paul Casey, Robert Karlsson or Thomas Bjorn.
Meanwhile, 45 events so far on the European Tour have had 35 different winners and the PGA Tour’s 46 events have produced 36 different winners.
Some of those are rewarded this week with their first appearance in a world championship.
For 20-year-old rising English star Tom Lewis it comes in only his fifth professional start, while for Northern Ireland’s Michael Hoey it comes nine years after he played in The Masters as British amateur champion.
The 32-year-old held off compatriots McIlroy and Graeme McDowell to take the Dunhill Links title at St Andrews a month ago and will now try to do so again in China.
Lewis came bursting through the field to lift the Portugal Masters only a month after leaving the amateur ranks, where the obvious highlight was his record-breaking first round of 65 in The Open at Sandwich in July.
Now he lines up in an elite 78-man field, but one that contains only four of the world’s top 10 – Westwood, McIlroy, Martin Kaymer and Scott.
Number one Donald is missing because his wife is expecting their second child, but with so many leading Americans – and Australian Jason Day and back-to-form
Spaniard Sergio Garcia – deciding not to play and others like Woods, Padraig Harrington and Retief Goosen failing to qualify, the event has undoubtedly lost some of its lustre.
Westwood, second to Italian Francesco Molinari 12 months ago, is glad there is at least one world championship being staged outside the United States.
“They should move around and encapsulate the whole world because it’s in the title of the tournaments,” he told europeantour.com.
“They should be played by players from all over the world and be played all over the world.
“China’s an emerging market for golf – there are so many courses being built, people taking up the sport and people getting interested in the sport – and it is somewhere that World Golf Championships should be played because it could turn into such a dominant force in the sport.
“The more tournaments that are played in China the more interest there will be.”
Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/R5AnlLykvo8/post.aspx
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