In the mix: The PGM have set the stage for women professionals such as Natasha Andrea Oon to showcase their talent.
PETALING JAYA: For the first time, the Professional Golf of Malaysia (PGM) will host a tournament just for the ladies.
The tour operator will start with the inaugural Ladies Championships from Aug 5-7 at the Mines Resort and Golf Club in Selangor.
The tournament will be one of the 10 competitions sanctioned by PGM for the tour this year and the total prize money offered is a staggering RM300,000.
Usually, in the PGM calendar, ladies’ competitions would be held together with some of the men’s competitions but this is the first time that the ladies would have a stand-alone meet.
PGM general manager Nik Mustapha Nik Mohamed said it would be a special tournament for the tour.
“This is a special tournament that will be hosted and sponsored by the Mines. It would be called the Ladies. It will have a big prize money and it is open to all the female golfers in our country,” he said after the launch of the PGM calendar for this year at the Seri Selangor Golf Club yesterday.
“It’s for professionals and amateurs. This is the first time a tournament of such nature is sanctioned by PGM.
“It will be a stroke play tournament. We will speak to the sponsors whether to hold the qualifying round but for now it will be stroke play and will run over a period of three days.”
Mustapha said the tournament would cater for the locals first but does hope it would see regional participants in the future.
“For the first year, it will be very much local. The ambition of the sponsors is to encourage more ladies to play professional golf and that kind of incentive will bring lots of encouragement. We have 20 tour card holders. And there will be more than 20 amateurs in the game. We believe we can get 60-70 in this tournament.”
With the conclusion of the Seri Selangor Closed Championships recently, the remaining tournaments left in the calendar are the Tun Ahmad Sarji Trophy (May 6-8), KGPA (May 20-22), Penang (June 24-26), Royal Pekan (July 22-24), Royal Pahang (July 29-31), Port Dickson (Aug 19-21), Kelab Rahman Putra (Sept 23-25) and Palm Resort (Nov 18-20).
In the last two years, the title sponsor for PGM was Toyota, but this year, the PGM would be running on their own but Mustapha said he was in discussion with some sponsor prospects for some of the competitions.
“We are thankful to Toyota for sponsoring us the last two years. The experience was good for both of us. I’m sure they will come back one day, but we will work on that.
“Right now, we are running the tour on whatever funds we have kept over the years. We have written to a few sponsors and we are looking forward to having title sponsors for one or two events or even more.
“We will end the tour in November to allow our players to compete in other tours around the world.”
