Asian Tour
_{After an opening round of 62, Canadian Richard Lee wins the BNI Indonesian Masters!}

If you’ve been following the Asian Tour recently, you had to know that Richard Lee was going to end up in the winner’s circle soon. In 2024 alone he’s had 8 finishes of T10 or better, including a T9 at the Black Mountain Championship two weeks ago, and then a T2 last week at the International Series Thailand.

So when he opened up with a first round of 62, it felt like it was time, and in the end it was. He had a one stroke lead after one round, a 3 stroke lead after two (where he’d shoot 67), a SIX shot lead after three (3rd round 66) and finally win by four shots over Chang Wei-lun after a comfy final round of 70.

This moves him into second place in the International Series Order of Merit, which awards a full exemption into LIV Golf for the following season. While his point total of 660.64 is still nearly 240 points behind leader John Catlin, some of the events in the coming weeks have higher points distributions, so Catlin’s lead is far from safe.

Congratulations to Richard Lee, his win this week is his first on the Asian Tour since the Donghae Open of 2017!

This week on the Asian Tour:

The Asian Tour is off this week - but they’ll return the following week for the Taiwan Glass Taifong Open, the last non-International Series event of their 2024 season.

In Case You Missed It

Flushing It Golf and Jake Hower from Beyond the Tour joined us to last week to give three bold predictions for the upcoming year in professional golf:

Also, after Sergio Garcia made some comments this weekend about wanting to be on two of three more Ryder Cup teams in his career, we did a little dive into the stats to see if his play really supports that:

Next week in golf:

Both the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour return this week. The PGA Tour visits El Cardonal at Diamante for the World Wide Technology Championship where Erik van Rooyen will look to defend his title, and the DP World Tour playoffs kick off this week with the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship at Yas Links where Rory McIlroy currently holds a significant lead over Thriston Lawrence in the points race.