– Today, Wednesday, in just a while, due to the nine-hour time difference with our antipodes, the BMW Australian PGA Championship will kick off, along with the 2026 DP World Tour season. It is the 55th season of the European circuit since its inception in 1972. As happens every year for decades, there has been almost no time to digest everything that happened in the previous campaign, which ended less than two weeks ago, and the machinery, the game, the rankings are already starting up again…
– It will be from nine o’clock at night (Spanish peninsular time) when New Zealander Josh Geary and the trendy Englishman, Marco Penge, will respectively open fire from the 1st and 10th tees at the Royal Queensland Golf Club (Brisbane, Australia). A curious fact: with the amount of seconds Penge spends over the ball before hitting from the tee, it is normal for Geary to be the first to strike…
– Each with their own stories. Geary, who will turn 41 in a few days, has been winning the Charles Tour ranking for three consecutive seasons (2023, 2024, and 2025), the New Zealand national circuit whose tournaments do not count for the world ranking, although he completes his calendar with some events on the PGA Tour Australasia, where he incidentally won the Vic Open last February, just to make a point. Completing his match from the 1st tee (six in the morning, local time on the Australian East Coast) are a 29-year-old Australian, Blake Proverbs, and the young 23-year-old Portuguese Daniel Rodrigues, who recently earned his playing rights on the European circuit brilliantly through the School. This new talent from the sister nation should be closely followed.
– Penge’s match is high-flying and, in some way, a perfect summary in itself of top-tier world golf. The Englishman has just secured his PGA Tour card, a circuit he will combine in 2026 with the European one, exactly the same as Min Woo Lee, who finished 59th in the FedEx Cup in 2025 and also retained his playing rights on the DP World Tour without too much trouble in just nine tournaments. The third man on that 10th tee, Cameron Smith, completes the virtuous circle of global golf, as he represents the multimillion-dollar Saudi league, LIV Golf.
– The first Spaniard to play in this 2026 season of the European circuit will curiously be one who does not yet have the DP World Tour playing rights, Josele Ballester, who starts from the 10th tee at 21:20 (Spanish peninsular time). Then will come David Puig (21:30), Quim Vidal (22:50), Sebas García (2:10 on Thursday morning), Rafa Cabrera Bello (2:50), Rocco Repetto (3:10), the 395th Spanish player to debut in the history of the European circuit, and Adri Arnaus (3:40).
– From this point until we meet again with the 2026 Australian tour, the next year will fly by. Or in other words, the next 52 weeks will fly by, and 41 of them will be occupied by a DP World Tour tournament (or even two, when the Scottish Open and the ISCO Championship coincide in July). New names will dominate the headlines (Elvis Smylie, for example, won this PGA twelve months ago at just 22 years old) and a new Ryder qualification year will have started, while the echoes of the continental triumph at Bethpage still resonate.
