CHASKA, Minn. — Hannah Green held her nerve and saved par from the bunker with a 5-foot putt on the final hole to win the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship Sunday at Hazeltine National Golf Club.
It was her first major championship, and the first by an Australian in 13 years.
Green closed with an even-par 72 for a one-shot victory over defending champion Sung Hyun Park, whose 18-foot birdie putt on the 18th hole gave her a 68 and put the pressure on Green, 22.
Green pulled a 6-iron into the bunker, blasted out to 5 feet and made the biggest putt of her life.
“The most nervous I was all day,” Green said.
Among those to celebrate with her was Australia’s most prolific major champion, Karrie Webb, which was meaningful in many ways.
Webb was the previous Aussie to win an LPGA Tour major, in 2006, at the Kraft Nabisco. She also supports junior girls in Australia, bringing two scholarship winners to America each year.
Green was one of those recipients four years ago.
Now she’s a major champion.
“I’m speechless,” she said through the tears. “I was really nervous playing the last five holes.”
She finished at 9-under 279 and won $577,500.
In only her second full year on the LPGA Tour, Green became the first wire-to-wire winner of this major since Yani Tseng in 2011. She also is the third player in the past five majors to make it her first LPGA Tour victory.
“To win a major championship as my first is crazy,” she said.
It was hard work, even though she never surrendered the lead on a cloudy day at Hazeltine with some light drops of rain at the end.
Green rolled in a 5-foot birdie putt on the par-5 seventh for a four-shot lead. With the group ahead still waiting to tee off, a 7-year-old girl handed her a blue sheet of paper — a poem she wrote to Green, who had given her a golf ball at the ANA Inspiration this year. Green read the poem and hugged the girl, Lily Kostner, and drilled another tee shot to birdie range.
But as she approached the turn, the nerves began to kick in.
She hit a poor lag putt from 45 feet on the ninth that led to a three-putt bogey. She missed an 8-foot birdie attempt at the 10th, a 5-foot par putt on the 11th and she came up woefully short on a standard chip from the collar of the rough short of the 12th.
Green becomes the 11th player to win the past 11 majors on the LPGA Tour, a sign of growing parity.
First Published: June 24, 2019, 1:54 a.m.