IS LAMENTING OVER THE LATISSIMUS
The final field has been set for next week’s ShopRite LPGA Classic at Seaview in Galloway Township, N.J., and 47 of the top 50 on the tour’s current money list have committed to play.
All eight of the LPGA’s 2012 tournament winners, including three-time champion and world No. 1 Yani Tseng, will be in the field for the 54-hole event over Seaview’s tricky Bay Course, which carries $1.5 million in prize money.
Other tournament winners from this year who are in the field includes past ShopRite LPGA Classic champion Angela Stanford, Ai Miyazato, Stacy Lewis, Jessica Korda, Sun Young Yoo, Pornanong Phatlum and Azahara Munoz. Munoz won last week’s event, the Sybase Match Play in Gladstone, N.J.
Defending champion Brittany Lincicome is back.
Eight of the top 10 players in the world will be at Seaview, headed by Tseng, along with No. 2 Na Yeon Choi, No. 3 Suzann Petterssen, No. 4 Miyazato, No. 5 Cristie Kerr, No. 6 Lewis, No. 8 I.K. Kim and No. 10 Shanshan Feng.
Other stars in the field include Paula Creamer, Laura Davies, Natalie Gulbis, Sophie Gustafson, Morgan Pressel, So Yeon Ryu, Lexi Thompson, Karrie Webb and Michelle Wie.
One of the tournament’s two sponsor exemptions went to Meghan Bolger Stasi, the world’s No. 3-ranked amateur, who is originally from Voorhees.
A note: Seaview is now officially known as Stockton Seaview Hotel and Golf Club.
--Joe Juliano
Four club professionals from the Philadelphia Section PGA are competing in the 73rd Senior PGA Championship, the season’s first major on the Champions Tour, which has begun at Harbor Shores in Benton Harbor, Mich.
George Forster of Blue Bell, Stu Ingraham of Newtown Square, Bill Sautter of Ocean City, N.J., and Pete Oakley of Lincoln, Del., are in the field for the 72-hole event. Facilities represented by the four players are Radnor Valley (Forster), M-Golf (Ingraham), Philadelphia Cricket (Sautter) and The Rookery (Oakley).
Another player in the field with Philadelphia ties is Joe Daley of Scottsdale, Ariz., who graduated from Plymouth Whitemarsh High School and played for a time on the PGA Tour.
A total of 156 players, including 40 club professionals, are competing in the 72-hole event.
To follow the scoring, click http://www.pga.com/seniorpga/2012/scoring/index.cfm
The painfully deliberate pre-shot routine of Kevin Na at The Players Championship earlier this month resulted in heckling from impatient fans in the gallery, and created plenty of conversation among those who would like to see the PGA Tour get tougher on slow play.
Asked about slow play Monday at a press conference during AT&T National media day, Tiger Woods said he recalled the same issue at the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage, where he was paired in the final round with Sergio Garcia. Garcia was hounded by many fans for re-gripping the club as many as 30 times before starting his backswing.
“The fans were kind of on him a little bit at times, telling him to expedite a golf shot,” Woods said with a chuckle.
“You don’t even pay attention to it. I knew Sergio was struggling with that part of his game, and so be it. So other guys are playing slow. You just play your own game and go about your own business.”
Woods said that as “the figureheads of our sport,” it is imperative that PGA Tour players set the example on faster play. But he added that he doesn’t see the tour taking some steps to speed up play any time soon, noting that rule changes have to be examined by the Players Advisory Council and then the PGA Tour Policy Board.
“It’s going to take some time,” he said. “Do I see that happening this year? Obviously, no. But down the road, I certainly could see there could be some type of adaptation somewhere. There’s got to be some type of change. Where that change is, we’ll find out.”
At the time of his press conference, Woods said he was not familiar with the slow-play penalty assessed against Morgan Pressel in Sunday’s semifinals of the LPGA’s Sybase Match Play Championship. After her match against Azahara Munoz was put on the clock, Pressel was ruled to have taken too much time to play the 12th hole, resulting in the loss of a hole that she had actually won.
Munoz eventually won the match, and captured the championship with a victory over Candie Kung that afternoon.
“It’s unfortunate that it happened to her,” Woods said. “But that’s unfortunately part of the game.”
--Joe Juliano
Meghan Stasi, one of the nation’s top-ranked amateurs and a seven-time winner of the Philadelphia Women’s Amateur, has been given a sponsor’s exemption to play in the ShopRite LPGA Classic beginning June 1 at Seaview in Galloway Township, N.J.
Stasi, the former Meghan Bolger, is a native of Voorhees, N.J., and starred at Eastern High School and Tulane. She now lives in Oakland Park, Fla.
Stasi, the nation’s No. 3 amateur in the Golfweek rankings, has won three U.S. Mid-Amateur Championships and was a member of the victorious U.S. team in the 2008 Curtis Cup at St. Andrews.
In January, she won the prestigious Jones/Doherty Championship in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
“It will be a thrill to play in front of a large gallery at the ShopRite LPGA Classic,” Stasi said in a tournament release. “And it gives two of my most devoted fans the opportunity to see me play, my parents, who are from Haddonfield, N.J.”
The tournament granted another sponsor’s exemption to Marina Alex, who was the 2010 and 2012 Southeastern Conference player of the year while competing for Vanderbilt. Alex is from Wayne, N.J.
--Joe Juliano
FAR HILLS, N.J. – Mickey Wright was one of the greatest golfers in the history of the LPGA. Her swing was admired by legends of the game such as Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan and Tom Watson as the best of any professional golfer, male or female.
“I wanted to watch her swing when we played together but you couldn’t really because you had to pay attention to your own game,” said fellow Hall of Famer JoAnne Carner. “But I always loved to watch her practice, even though it was hard to get her to stay long enough for you to really see” her swing.
Wright, winner of 82 events including 13 majors, has donated more than 200 personal artifacts to the United States Golf Association Museum. The newly created Mickey Wright Room at the museum will open next month, joining galleries dedicated to Hogan, Bob Jones and Arnold Palmer.
Carner and LPGA Tour stars Morgan Pressel, Wendy Ward and So Yeon Ryu were present Tuesday as the USGA previewed the collection at a reception.
Wright, now 76, who captured 79 of her tournament titles between 1957 and 1968, is the first woman to have a display in her honor.
“It’s just so wonderful,” Carner said. “She was a four-time U.S. Open champion and to have (the USGA) do it is just amazing. No one has ever honored a woman before in golf. They had a women’s championship in the second year of the USGA, about 1895 or something like that. They’ve been active in women’s golf. So to have them finally do it is terrific.”
Wright, who holds the LPGA record for most victories in a year with 13 in 1963, told Golfweek she sent 34 boxes of artifacts and memorabilia to the USGA. The material includes medals, trophies, awards and films from her career, including the 1955 Bulls-Eye putter that she used in 81 of her 82 victories.
“This is a here and now and forever feeling that honors not just me, but the history of women’s golf,” Wright said in a USGA release. “This is also for all the women who came before me – the Patty Bergs, Louise Suggses and Betsy Rawlses. It’s a tribute to their tenacity in making women’s golf a legitimate, recognized national sport.”
--Joe Juliano
Penn, the Ivy League men’s golf champion, has been seeded 13th for the NCAA Men’s Golf Championship regionals and will compete in Bowling Green, Ky.
The Quakers, who won the title in a three-hole sudden-death playoff over Dartmouth on April 29, will begin three days of regional competition on May 17 at The Club at Olde Stone.
The top five teams in each region and the low individual not on any of those five teams will advance to the NCAA finals, which begin May 29 at Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, Calif.
Delaware’s Greg Matthias, winner of the CAA individual championship, will compete at the regional in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Fans of the LPGA Tour will get two chances to see their favorites over the next month on courses that are a reasonable drive from the Philadelphia area.
The ShopRite LPGA Classic is back for its third year since being restored by a group led by tournament executive director Tim Erensen. The 54-hole event begins June 1 on the Bay Course at Stockton Seaview Hotel and Golf Club.
The field is led by defending champion Brittany Lincicome, who won last year’s event by one stroke over Cristie Kerr and Jiyai Shin with an 11-under-par 202 total, and Yani Tseng, the world’s No. 1-ranked golfer who already owns three victories this season.
Tournament officials said 94 of the world’s top 100 players, including 2012 tour winners Jessica Korda, Angela Stanford, Sue Young Yoo, Ai Miyazato and Stacy Lewis, will be competing. Others scheduled to play are Kerr, Shin, Paula Creamer, Suzann Pettersen, Karrie Webb, Morgan Pressel and Michelle Wie.
Two weeks before the ShopRite, the LPGA will be in Gladstone, N.J., about 30 miles north of Princeton, for the Sybase Match Play Championship, the only non-stroke-play competition on the tour. The tournament begins May 17 at Hamilton Farm Golf Club.
A field of 64 players will begin the tournament in 32 first-round matches on May 17, with the pairings based on the May 14th update of the Rolex World Rankings. The second round will be played on May 18, followed by the third round and quarterfinals on May 19, and the semifinals and championship match on May 20.
Pettersen is the defending champion, having defeated Kerr in last year’s 20-hole final. The field includes Tseng, the No. 1 seed, along with all the players mentioned above who are competing at the ShopRite LPGA Classic.
Further information can be obtained by visiting the web sites of the respective tournaments:
www.sybasematchplaychampionship.com
--Joe Juliano
West Chester’s Sean O’Hair has gotten his 2012 PGA Tour season off to a terrific start.
The 29-year-old O’Hair fired rounds of 67, 67, 68 and 67 to finish in a tie for second place last weekend at the Sony Open in Hawaii, two strokes behind winner Johnson Wagner, and flew home with a check for $363,000.
The previous week, O’Hair wound up in 17th place at the Hyundai Tournament of Champions on Maui. He followed an even-par 73 with rounds of 70, 70 and 69.
Through two events, O’Hair is fifth on the money list with $462,000 and tied for fifth in the FedEx Cup points race. His world ranking has risen to 66th.
O’Hair is sitting out this week’s Humana Challenge in partnership with the Clinton Foundation.
--Joe Juliano
The ShopRite LPGA Classic officially announced that the 2012 tournament will run from June 1 through 3 over the Bay Course of the Seaview Resort in Galloway, N.J.
Tournament week gets underway on May 28 with open qualifying followed by a practice round and the Pro-Am before the 54-hole competition begins.
Brittany Lincicome is the defending champion.
The tournament raised $1.1 million last year for its beneficiaries including the Community Food Bank of New Jersey, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and New Jersey Special Olympics.
The race for the money title on the PGA Tour is going down to the final event for the first time in 15 years.
The Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals Classic, which began Thursday at Disney World, features the Tour's top two money-winners – Webb Simpson and Luke Donald. Simpson, who lost in a playoff to Ben Crane last week at the McGladrey Classic, holds a $363,029 lead over Donald.
Winning the Arnold Palmer Award as the season’s top earner could ultimately determine whom the players select as PGA Tour player of the year. However, you figure that PGA champion Keegan Bradley also would be strongly considered since he won a major, something that neither Simpson nor Donald did.
According to the tour, the worst Donald can finish if he wants to pass Simpson is a two-way tie for second. Simpson could hold on to the lead by finishing second if Donald wins, or by finishing eighth or better if Donald takes second by himself.
“It feels a little bit like the FedEx Cup and the Tour Championship,” said Donald, the world’s No. 1-ranked player. “Third place isn’t going to get it done.”
Actually, Donald, a graduate of Northwestern, had been invited to serve as an honorary captain for the Wildcats Saturday night against Penn State. However, he chose to enter the final tour event in an attempt to become the first player to win the PGA Tour and European Tour money titles in the same year.
Whatever happens with Simpson, it’s been a terrific year. He finished last season as the world’s 207th-ranked player and was grateful to secure his PGA Tour card. Now he’s No. 12 in the world.
“The year has been a success throughout,” he said. “Whatever happens, we’re going to be happy. But we want to finish strong and try to have a clean sweep. It would be awesome.”
Of course, the tour’s final event of 2011 also has the drama of players seeking to finish in the Top 125 on the money list to keep their Tour cards for next year. In order, the players ranked from 123 through 127 entering the event are D.J. Trahan, Bobby Gates, James Driscoll, Bill Lunde and Billy Mayfair.
After Thursday’s opening round, Driscoll and Donald are part of a 7-way tie for the lead at 6-under-par 66. Simpson is two shots back.
The last time the lead on the money list changed hands on the final week of the season was 1996, when Tom Lehman won the Tour Championship to pass Phil Mickelson.
--Joe Juliano
