after the Open Championship a month later, 2025 became the first year since 2009 that Australians collectively managed just one top-10 result at the major championships (Jason Day\u2019s T-8 at the 2025 Masters).<\/a> In July,\u00a0Australian Golf Digest\u00a0editor Steve Keipert dug the statistic up from his cumulative majors record book.<\/p>\nCertainly, Australian golfers played great golf in certain weeks, but no tour pros in the top 40 on the OWGR is a real surprise. <\/p>\n
What must be acknowledged is LIV Golf doesn\u2019t receive world rankings for its events, so Smith, Leishman, Herbert and Jones have less access to points than their countrymen on the PGA and DP World Tour. <\/p>\n
There is plenty to be optimistic for 2026, particularly with Smith \u2013 arguably Australia\u2019s best golfer when he\u2019s on \u2013 coming close to a victory in a great Australian Open field at Royal Melbourne last month. There\u2019s a strong chance that launches him back to world-beating form this year. Lee is also becoming more consistent and improving his iron play, while Vilips is on the rise and still only a PGA Tour sophomore. Smylie, at just 23 years of age, also appears to be close to really taking off.<\/p>\n
Australian men\u2019s golf has always been cyclical and perhaps 2025 was just one of those sub-par years. Leishman played some of his best golf in 2017 and 2018, when the Warrnambool lad was the shining light during those two lean seasons (by Aussie standards). From 2019 to 2024, Australian pro golf enjoyed a massive surge highlighted by Smith\u2019s maiden major win at the 150th Open Championship at St Andrews.<\/p>\n
Hopefully, the cohort is on the cusp of another glorious purple patch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[Photo: Getty images] Australian male golfers enjoyed plenty of victories around the globe in 2025 but the nation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":391977,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,29976,6409,118461,755,14239,139396,5488,44,209753,1747,85],"class_list":["post-391976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-golf","tag-cam-smith","tag-dp-world-tour","tag-golf","tag-liv-golf","tag-majors","tag-min-woo-lee","tag-news","tag-official-world-golf-rankings","tag-pga-tour","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391976","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=391976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/391977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}