First-year event offering $1.3 million purse, $195,000 to the winner
This week’s Navistar LPGA Classic is the third inaugural tournament on the 2007 LPGA Tour schedule and, with most players having nearly two weeks off, it promises to be a show that will not disappoint.
There will be 144 women traveling to the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail’s Capitol Hill venue in Prattville, Ala., where they will take on The Senator course. At the top of the field is Lorena Ochoa, reigning Rolex Player of the Year and the current dominating leader of the 2007 LPGA Official Money List. Ochoa was on a roll in August as she won three consecutive events at the RICOH Women’s British Open—her first LPGA major championship victory—followed by the CN Canadian Women’s Open two weeks later, then the Safeway Classic Presented by Pepsi. Ochoa may have taken a month off, but it will mean the 2006 Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year is all the more rested to go for her fourth win in as many events en route to a record set by Nancy Lopez in 1978 and matched by Annika Sorenstam in 2005, by winning five of five-consecutive events entered. A win would also put the Tour’s leading member from Mexico as the first woman in Tour history to earn $3 million in one season.
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