Full-throttle start at the Maybank Championship, the event that returns the LPGA Tour to cruising speed after the always-interesting International Crown interlude, which ended with Australia’s victory in South Korea. We’re at Kuala Lumpur Golf & Country Club in Malaysia, and the cards are already on the table after round one: you have to pile up birdies to have any chance of winning.
The lead rests on the shoulders of Korea’s Hye Jin Choi (-8), a golfer with far more talent than her résumé suggests. She still hasn’t won on the LPGA Tour, but this year she’s finished inside the top ten in three of the five majors. One of these days she’ll break through that glass ceiling and win in America. These things happen; sometimes victories get stuck. It’s certainly not because she doesn’t know how to close—otherwise she wouldn’t have 12 wins on the Korean Tour, five of them in a single season (2019).
Choi leads alone, but the board is tightly packed: 20 players are separated by just three shots. Italy’s Benedetta Moresco and Scotland’s Gemma Dryburgh share second at -7. Within that slim three-shot window sit big names like Lydia Ko (-6), Hannah Green (-6), Ingrid Lindblad (-6), Angel Yin (-5) and Linn Grant (-5). A bit further back but well placed after the first of four rounds—remember, there’s no cut—is Jeeno Thitikul (-4), the clear favorite and the only player with two wins this season.
At this birdie pace, the starts by Julia López (-2) and Carlota Ciganda (E) look a bit thin. It’s not so much the gap to the lead—entirely bridgeable over the next three days—as the sheer number of players already between them and the top. Either way, the task is to post three really low rounds over the next 54 holes. Both are more than capable.
Julia once again hit it very long off the tee—her main weapon—averaging close to 300 yards. She did miss a few fairways and found some trouble, hence a bit of a back-and-forth card. Starting on 10, she signed for five birdies—three of them nearly in a row between holes 3 and 6—and three bogeys. The best news is she figured out the always-tricky Malaysian greens.
Carlota, for her part, was tidier than the Malagueña with her long game but struggled more on the greens. That’s where she left shots out there, unable to capitalize on good looks. She was particularly sharp from the tee, which is usually a recipe for success for the Navarrese star. There’s plenty to make up, given she shot even par and only 15 of the 78 players in the field lost this first battle with the course.
