PROFESSIONAL GOLF
Quigley here to pick up more cash
The defending champion hopes to become the event's first repeat winner in 13 years
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Wie to play in LPGA event at Ko Olina
DANA QUIGLEY should buy a piece of prime property off the Hualalai Golf Club. Goodness knows he can afford it.
The top money winner on the Champions Tour last year with $2.17 million in earnings was voted the 2005 player of the year by his peers. At 58, he is the oldest golfer to win the award and the Jack Nicklaus trophy that goes with it.
Quigley also took home the Arnold Palmer award given to the man who pockets the most cash in a single season. Part of the reason for that windfall was the nearly $400,000 he put in his bank account after winning the 2005 MasterCard Championship at Hualalai and finishing second to Hale Irwin at the Turtle Bay Championship a week later.
He is close to winning $1 million in this event alone as he tries to do something beginning tomorrow that no one has done since Al Geiberger turned the trick 13 years ago at La Costa Golf Club in California -- a successful title defense. Quigley captured the MasterCard Championship in 2003 and 2005, but lost to Fuzzy Zoeller in a playoff in 2004.
Last year, Quigley won the event that is limited to golfers who are major championship winners over the last five years and tournament winners in the last two, in a three-hole playoff over Tom Watson. Watson, who has never won a tournament in Hawaii, got a measure of revenge by finishing first at the Schwab Cup Championship tournament at the end of the year.
After leading the Schwab Cup standings for 17 weeks, Quigley finished second to Watson in the overall standings, thanks to that victory in Sonoma, Calif. Quigley donated the $500,000 second-place prize to charity, which gives you an idea how well life is treating the golfer, who never won on the PGA Tour.
There are plenty of other players in the elite 35-man field who can say otherwise, including five in the World Golf Hall of Fame (Watson, Irwin, Ben Crenshaw, Tom Kite and Gary Player). This year's entire field has won a combined 36 majors on the PGA Tour and another 45 on the Champions Tour.
Crenshaw is one of four golfers to receive a sponsor's exemption. The other three are two-time U.S. Open winner Curtis Strange, 1977 PGA Championship winner Lanny Wadkins and Gary Player, who won nine majors on the PGA Tour and is one of only five golfers to manage a career grand slam.
Crenshaw and Strange are among eight first-timers to tour the Hualalai course. The other six are Jay Haas, Loren Roberts, Mark Johnson, Mike Reid, Des Smyth and Ron Streck. Haas and Roberts are among four at MasterCard who began their seasons last week at the Sony Open in Hawaii, the PGA Tour's first full-field event.
The other two are Peter Jacobsen and Craig Stadler. Roberts was the only one to make the cut. He finished in a tie for 18th at 4-under 276. Stadler wound up in a tie for ninth at last year's Sony Open, proving the guys on the senior circuit can still swing with the best of them.
The MasterCard Championship is the first of 29 events on the Champions Tour, which continues next week at Turtle Bay in the opening full-field tournament for the 50-and-over set. The 2006 Champions Tour will be held in 17 states and Scotland with a new event the last week of March set for Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The combined prize money is a healthy $56.7 million.
Two golfers on the current PGA Tour are set to join the Champions Tour later this year -- Scott Hoch and Fred Funk. Hoch turns 50 in March and Funk hits the half-century mark in June.
Wie to play in LPGA event at Ko Olina
Michelle Wie's father, B.J., said his daughter's next tournament will be the Feb. 23-25 Fields Open, a new LPGA Tour event at Ko Olina Golf Club, which has become her home course.
It was a tough decision, because Wie tied for second in the SBS Open at Turtle Bay last year, and there is a strong connection with the Korean-based company. Then again, Wie has playing privileges at Ko Olina and the family is close friends with the resort owner.
"But if she plays both," her father said, "there's nothing left for us in the summer."
Wie is allowed only eight starts on the LPGA Tour -- six sponsor's exemptions, plus the Women's British Open and U.S. Women's Open, provided she qualifies.
The early part of the season has her playing the Fields Open, then waiting five more weeks before she plays in the Kraft Nabisco Championship, the first major of the LPGA season. And then it could be another five weeks before she tees it up again.
Associated Press