After a fabulous end to the 2024 DPWT season, there is no time to reflect on and we are straight off to Oz and South Africa to start the 2025 Opening Swing.
The first of the country's big two events, the Australian PGA Championship preludes next week's top-class Australian Open, but whilst the latter has seen a cosmopolitan list of champions, it's going to take a Herculean effort to wrest the trophy out of the country on Sunday night.
Whilst Kiwi Greg Turner won this event in 1999, the 23 subsequent runnings of this event have seen just one non-Australian winner, Harold Varner in 2016, who held off a quartet of home players to win by two shots at Royal Pines. It's total domination from the Aussie contingent, who have won all five events held at Royal Queensland, both courses linked by the man with the keys to the city, Cameron Smith, back-to-back winner at Royal Pines in 2017 and 2018 and at this week's host course in 2022.
Looking down the list of entries, the Category 10s are the names we know and love from each week of the DP World Tour but they face a tough task here against a handful of players both proven on this track and in prevailing conditions.
We don't have a lot of strokes-gained info for the event but defending champ Min Woo Lee brings in recorded stats that correlate to his best efforts over the last 12 months.
The 26-year-old led last year's field for strokes gained off-the-tee, based more on accuracy, whilst a solid second-shot game meant he ranked in the top-10 for approach and 2nd overall tee-to-green. Those figures were repeated (give-or-take) at the following Australian Open and, in 2024, at the Amex, Cognizant and Rocket Mortgage Classic It helps, of course, that he is a cracking putter on undulating, linksy greens, leading the way for putting on the DPWT, despite a small 15 round sample.
Those tee-to-green stats are repeated by last season's runner-up, Rikuya Hoshino, who also followed up in similar fashion when reversing places with Min Woo a week later, only to be outdone in a play-off by Joakin Niemann.
As a winner in Qatar, the Japanese star follows the names Adam Scott (twice) and Andrew Coltart as a strong formlink to the desert event, while Nick O'Hern followed up his PGA win with a runner-up position behind Retief Goosen at the same track, Doha.
It's a who's-who of players that have no weakness in windy, desert, links events so whilst we may have been mentioning these for a while now, form at St. Andrews, Himmerland, Qatar and much of the Asian Tour should be strongly taken into account.
Selections
It may be the end of the main season on the DPWT but the events this week hold a strong interest. Ludvig Aberg returns at the RSM Classic after two months of injury; Tom Kim, Justin Rose, Peter Uilhein and Patrick Reed are in Hong Kong, and Dean Burmester and Branden Grace tee it up in their homeland.
To that end, the quality of the Australian PGA field has been a surprise given the expectation was that Smith, Lee and last week's New South Wales champ, Lucas Herbert, would dominate.
Instead we have a very strong top five that now also includes a past USPGA champ in Jason Day and multiple major-placed Marc Leishman, making a handful of players who enjoy the likely conditions they'll face this week.
Pre-Sunday, it looked as if Cam Smith would be a warm favourite here. Ignore the skewed official world ranking, he's a top-10 player and certainly in the right conditions, as he's shown three times in this event already. His wins at the 2017 and 2018 PGA came after a top-10 at the Australian Open and his current form suggests he'll be fine-tuned to the minute in what looks a perfect scenario.
Current form is hard to crab, even if some may see negatives surrounding the last fortnight.
Third place at the Queensland PGA may seem disappointing, but that was behind the very promising Phoenix Campbell, a player that turned pro only after winning the same event 12 months earlier. A week later, it looked as if he would gag up last week at the New South Wales Open but a back-nine 2-over par left him trailing three shots behind Herbert, the 28-year-old recording a round seven shots better than his more illustrious compatriot. He could be cherry-ripe now and is potentially a few points bigger than he probably should be. He has to go in a saver at anything over 11/22, but his recent victor makes more appeal.
On Saturday afternoon, Lucas Herbert was looking like the each-way bet on the card, particularly with a record that reads top finishes in Dubai, Irish Open, Bermuda, Scottish Open, Bay Hill, Sicily and at the Dunhill Links. Whilst he had been steady enough on the LIV Tour, it was sensible enough to consider he would raise his game a notch when back home, with his recent record in Australia being 7th place at the 2023 Australian PGA and Open, having sat within the top-5 going into Sunday. Let's not forget he left the 'official' line ranked just outside the top-60 in the world, and note that he led at the halfway stage last week (65/65) before a pair of untimely double-bogeys late on in his third round.
Herbert can be very tough in a finish with two of his wins (Dubai and ISPS in Japan) coming via two-hole play-offs, whilst his Bermuda win came via a single stroke victory over Danny Lee and Patrick Reed - the LIV influence again. It's that factor that gives him more appeal than his four immediate rivals, he's easily amongst this lot on windy links tracks, and double-figures is very fair.
Of course, none of those quality foes can be ignored, with Min Woo Lee probably more dangerous than the returning Jason Day (three months off and a first look at Royal Queensland) and yet another LIV player, Marc Leishman, who last won alongside Smith at the 2021 Zurich Classic and flew later here last year to nick third place (64). Either way, Leishman doesn;'t deserve an OWGR ranking of 914 even if few, let alone the bookmakers, believe this.
With so much invested in the top, I'll travel down a way for the supporting act.
Kiwi Daniel Hillier was very much of interest but hasn't taken to this venue in both tries (61st and 70th). He is left off in the win market but does make appeal in the side-markets. Winner of the British Masters last season, he followed up with a closing 18th at his defence, before 25th at the Dunhill Links (opened with 63 on the Old Course) and 22nd at the Genesis. That form should be good enough to land a top-20 at around 6/4, or top-30 at 'evens' for those that play these things.
However, I am struggling with the rest of the visiting DPWT players. Rasmus Neergaard-Peterson has been excellent in his few tries at the top level and is certain to win a trophy or two very soon, but hasn't played in Australia at anywhere near this level and is probably still celebrating gaining his full card, despite throwing away the Challenge Tour Grand Final. Jordan Smith is your archetypal tee-to-green merchant but finds it too tough to win and, again, hasn't played here for a long while, whilst Victor Perez isn't telegraphing anything other than yet another okay finish.
Winner of the Rocket Mortgage in June, Cam Smith went off around 30/1 for last week's Shriners, his first event since finishing 5th at the second FedEx event, the BMW. A long hitter, he continues to pepper the top echelons of the tee-to-green tables and, promisingly, finished in seventh place here in both his tries. Back home, he'll go close but at 14/1, I'll let him.
Already mentioned, 22-year-old Phoenix Campbell could be anything and quotes of 200/1 are likely to be long gone at this time next year. We don't know enough about him to make a judgement, but I see him as one of a small group that could easily 'do a Rasmus' and go from triple-figures to sub-33/1 in not very long. Purely on that basis, and the win from Smith and much of this field, he is in, if only for tiny stakes.
Ahead of him in the market is Japanese-born Kiwi, Kazuma Kobori, and the 23-year-old appeals as yet another possible improver but with a slightly hardier profile. Winner of multiple amateur trophies, Kobori turned pro for last year's Queensland PGA Championship, finishing with a joint-best of the day to finish just two shots off the champion Campbell. Two weeks later he led the Victorian PGA Championship through three rounds before a numb final round 77 allowed the (then) flying David Micheluzzi to pinch his pocket and overturn his six-shot lead.
2024 has seen steady progress, starting with three consecutive victories on the Webex Tour, containing pretty much all the home players we will see this week (bar the elite). Results since then have been acceptable, if not particularly special, but he caught the eye when finishing 12th at the Alfred Dunhill Links with a 67/65 finish before top-20s at Black Mountain and in Jakarta at the beginning of the year. Another that might find a shot or two per round now back in Oz, he is clearly a better player than when missing the cut here last year and that by only a single stroke.
