Minjee Lee has climbed the leaderboard to remain in the mix for the biggest cheque in women’s golf’s history.<\/p>\n
Lee’s 5-under-par 67 in the second round vaulted Australia’s world number four into a tie for fifth at the halfway point of the $17 million Tour Championship in Naples, Florida.<\/p>\n
She is five shots off the pace, with world number one and defending champion Jeeno Thitikul firing a dazzling 9-under 63 to seize a commanding three-shot lead over South Korean Sei Young Kim.<\/p>\n
Thai Thitikul won last year’s Tour Championship with a 22-under total and remains on track to eclipse that score.<\/p>\n
Surging to 14-under, Thitikul was bogey free on Saturday AEDT after being three shots behind Somi Lee following the first round.<\/p>\n
Kim, the 2019 winner, is again in the hunt for a second season-ending championship after moving to 11-under with a second-round 66.<\/p>\n
South Korean’s Lee (69) and Japan’s Nasa Hataoka (67) share third place a further shot back at 10-under.<\/p>\n
On a star-studded leaderboard, Australia’s Lee is tied at 9-under with US world number two Nelly Korda (64), Canadian Brooke Henderson (67) and Thailand’s Pajaree Anannarukarn (67).<\/p>\n
Three-time major winner Lee was only a shot back after negotiating the front nine in 4-under.<\/p>\n
But she could only manage one more birdie on the back nine in an otherwise blemish-free round.<\/p>\n
“I had a pretty nice start,” Lee said.<\/p>\n
“Four birdies on the front and then one birdie on the back. But I feel like I’m going pretty steady out there. For the most part it was pretty solid.<\/p>\n
“Just going to try and clean up my shots a little bit and hope for a really great weekend.”<\/p>\n
Lee looks like Australia’s only weekend contender after Grace Kim and Steph Kyriacou both fell off the pace with even-par rounds of 72.<\/p>\n
Kim and Kyriacou both started round two tied with Lee in seventh spot at 4-under but have slumped to joint 27th place on the leaderboard.<\/p>\n
At 3-over following a second-round 71, fellow Australian Hannah Green is last in the 60-player field.<\/p>\n
AAP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Minjee Lee has climbed the leaderboard to remain in the mix for the biggest cheque in women’s golf’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300445,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,2755,755,121700,58251,20776,171805,87399,85,42336],"class_list":["post-300444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-florida","tag-golf","tag-jeeno-thitikul","tag-lpga","tag-minjee-lee","tag-second-round","tag-sei-young-kim","tag-sports","tag-tour-championship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300444","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=300444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}