LPGA Tour star Hannah Green may have won the Women’s PGA Championship in 2019, but it’s unusual for her to dream about golf. However, ahead of the final round of the TPS Murray River event in her native Australia on Sunday, she did.
"It's weird, I don't normally have golf dreams," she said. "Very, very rarely, but I actually had one last night of me after winning. It was just me holding the trophy and people spraying me with champagne. And then I woke hoping it wasn't just a dream."
It wasn’t. The 25-year-old shot a 5-under 66 at Cobram Barooga Golf Club to win the tournament by 4 strokes, becoming the first woman in history to win a professional mixed-gender golf event. The event is part of The Players Series, a series of tournaments on the PGA Tour of Australasia that feature men and women competing in the same field. The previous best result for a female golfer was Su Oh’s third-place finish at TPS Victoria last year.
Golf fans in Europe will have 2 chances to see something similar, albeit the tournaments are formatted slightly differently from one another.
First up is the Scandinavian Mixed, which is hosted by Swedish golf legends Henrik Stenson and Annika Sorenstam and will be held at Halmstad Golfklubb from 9-12 June. Like the TPS events in Australia, this competition directly pits everyone in the field – 78 men and 78 women – against one another for a USD $2 million prize fund and a single trophy. It is the only such event on either the PGA or DP World Tours, and it is a joint venture between the latter and the Ladies European Tour.
Having started life as the Scandinavian Masters men’s event, the 2021 edition was the first held in this new mixed format. Jonathan Caldwell of Northern Ireland claimed top spot, while England’s Alice Hewson finished 2 strokes behind in third.
As for the ISPS Handa World Invitational – which was formerly the Northern Ireland Open men’s event before it first adopted a mixed format in 2019 – it is a unique joint venture by the DP World Tour, LET, and LPGA Tour, but the men and women do not compete against one another. Instead, it features full fields of 144 men and 144 women competing alongside one another on the same courses (Galgorm Castle and Massereene Golf Club) for equal prize money, a $3 million purse divided evenly between the 2 fields.
Daniel Gavins won the men’s competition last year, while Thailand’s Pajaree Anannarukarn edged out the United States’ Emma Talley in a dramatic playoff in the women’s competition. This year’s event will be held from 11-14 August, returning to Galgorm and Massereene.
