Parker, the solar probe launched by NASA in 2018, holds the record for the highest speed reached by a spacecraft. It reached 635,000 kilometres per hour. At roughly this pace, Kazuma Kobori, a talented New Zealand golfer born in Japan, is travelling towards the elite. He has just won his third tournament in four weeks on the Challenger PGA Tour Australasia, the Australian golf circuit.
Kobori triumphed this Sunday at the Webex Players Series Sydney, a tournament shared with women, juniors and golfers with different abilities held at the Castle Hill Country Club course. He signed off four rounds of 65, 64, 69 and 66 strokes to finish with -24, one stroke less than Jenny Shin, a member of the LPGA Tour, and two less than veteran Brendan Jones. He consolidated his victory with an exceptional five under par in the first nine holes and finished it off with one more birdie at the 13th. There he gained a three-stroke lead that he managed perfectly with five pars to finish.
Kobori is a rising star. It’s true that he’s only 22 years old, that his career has just begun and that he turned professional at the end of last October, but what he’s doing is out of the ordinary. Among other things, because he had been warning for a long time. As a junior he was a prodigy. At 16 years old (he was born on 25 October 2001) he played his first professional tournament in New Zealand and at 17, in 2019, he won it. It was the SEC NZ PGA Championship.
His experience in professional tournaments as an amateur has been extensive. He has played 32, won two and finished in the top 10 on 18 occasions. Most of his tournaments have been on the New Zealand national circuit. As an amateur he has also dazzled. He has won almost everything there is to win. His 2023 was to frame. He won the Western Amateur, one of the most important events in the world on the amateur calendar, and the World Championship held in Abu Dhabi in October, shortly before turning professional. There in the United Arab Emirates he won ahead of Nick Dunlap, the recent winner of the The American Express on the PGA Tour while still an amateur.
His first tournament as a professional was the Queensland PGA Championship in the first week of last November. He finished ninth with the best round of the last day. Since then, he has played ten tournaments, won three and finished six times in the top 10. These are world-class numbers in the making. His three victories in four tournaments have allowed him to become the first golfer to receive the 70 percent bonus of the world ranking as a multiple winner. He will be around position 430 in the ranking.
As is logical, what Kobori is doing is not going unnoticed. He will soon receive invitations to play in more important circuits than the Australian one, such as the DP World Tour or the PGA Tour itself. In fact, in 2023 he played the two European Circuit tournaments in Australia, the Australian Open and the Fortinet PGA Championship and missed the cut on both occasions. More opportunities will come for a golfer, raised at the Rangiora Golf Club and son of professional Momoka Kobori, who is currently challenging Min Woo Lee for victory in the Challenger PGA Tour Australia order of merit.
