Lee and fellow Australian LPGA Tour stars Hannah Green, Grace Kim and Steph Kyriacou all have the chance to collect a monster $US4 million ($A6.15 million) winner’s cheque at this week’s season-ending Tour Championship in Florida.<\/p>\n
Only the top 60 players in the season-long points race qualified for the showpiece finale, which offers a record total purse of $US11 million ($16.9 million).<\/p>\n
World No.1 Jeeno Thitikul admitted she splurged after winning last year’s event.<\/p>\n
“I bought a car in Thailand. Uh-huh. A Mercedes Benz in Thailand,” Thitikul said ahead of Thursday’s first round at Tiburon Golf Club in Naples.<\/p>\n
“But I planned it before I went. Luckily have the cheque to pay.”<\/p>\n
With $US3.82 million ($A5.87 million) already banked from on-course earnings in 2025, Lee leads the LPGA Tour’s money list entering the final event of the year.<\/p>\n
The world No.4 is more focused on adding another prestigious trophy to her collection having won a third career major at the Women’s PGA Championship and gone undefeated in Australia’s victory last month at the International Crown teams’ event.<\/p>\n
Her PGA crown, along with a joint third at the Evian Championship – won by Kim – and top-15 finishes at the British Open and Chevron Championship earned Lee a second major player of the year award in four seasons.<\/p>\n
The Perth prodigy was presented with the gong this week.<\/p>\n
“It’s just really special to be able to have won it twice, the RAMA Award,” Lee said.<\/p>\n
“It just goes to show my consistency in the majors. I’m constantly working towards trying to play well in the majors and contending.<\/p>\n
“This year, obviously I won KPMG and that was really special to just where I was in my game at that point and in my career.<\/p>\n
“So overall this year has been really solid, and we have one more week for me to go. Excited to hopefully have a good week this week and contend come Sunday.”<\/p>\n
Statistically among the worst putters on tour last year, Lee credits a switch to a broomstick in 2025 for her stunning turnaround.<\/p>\n
The 29-year-old is second on tour for strokes gained in putting.<\/p>\n
“With changing to something new, I didn’t really have big expectations,” Lee said.<\/p>\n
“So I was just trying to work through my processes and just see where it took me.<\/p>\n
“Obviously I’ve had quite a lot of success with it this year and hopefully I continue to do that.<\/p>\n
“It’s given me a lot of freedom and allowed me to essentially win KPMG. A lot of my goals are around winning majors and contending in big events – any event really.<\/p>\n
“And it’s just given me the freedom to play more confidently on the course. Because of my putting, I feel like I’ve had more pressure on the other parts of my game.<\/p>\n
“So it’s given me a bit more confidence in my long game and chipping and even my irons.”<\/p>\n
Contesting an incredible 11th straight Tour Championship, Lee will play the first two rounds with Japan’s world No.14 Rio Takeda.<\/p>\n
Green has been paired with Swede Maja Stark, Kim will go out with Canadian Brooke Henderson and Kyriacou is grouped with American Sarah Schmelzel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lee and fellow Australian LPGA Tour stars Hannah Green, Grace Kim and Steph Kyriacou all have the chance…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-294084","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-golf","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}