[PHOTO: Zhe Ji]
The largest payday being claimed on the LPGA Tour this week is likely to go to someone who isn’t even playing at the Annika driven by Gainbridge, the penultimate event on the 2023 calendar. Angel Yin, the leader of the season-long Aon Risk Reward Challenge, stayed away from Belleair, Florida, in part due to being in position to win the $US1 million ($A1.568 million) prize awarded to the LPGA player who has the lowest scoring average on a designated hole from tournaments played throughout the 2023 season (an identical competition takes place on the PGA Tour, Tyrrell Hatton winning this year).
With the Annika event the last one counting towards the prize, Yin (-.933 for the year) can only be passed by Atthaya Thitikul (-.889), but it would require Thitikul to make two eagles at Pelican Golf Club’s par-5 14th over the four days. For the season, the Thai has made just seven eagles.
“I really didn’t think I had a chance, because to me, Aon is a lottery,” Yin said last week with the knowledge she was all but certain to be the 2023 winner. “It’s really difficult to maintain under-par consistently throughout the entire year and not mess up.”
For Yin, making $US1.6 million on tour this season before the Aon prize, and with the CME Tour Championship’s $US7 million purse and a likely $1 million first-place payday remaining, it creates quite a different economic situation compared to the start of her year. Despite $US2.9 million in LPGA career earnings before 2023, the California resident’s seventh year on tour, Yin acknowledged that she had entered the year in a challenging financial position.
“COVID really took a hit on a lot of people, and me including, because I was just injured during that time,” Yin said. “So it’s not always that tough. It’s tough when you have a bad stretch of a few years. Your bank gets pretty dry. That’s what happened.”
To compound her financial concerns, Yin started the year with some of the worst status of her career, leading her to contemplate writing to tournament directors at the Asia Swing tournaments that start the season to request sponsor’s invites into their limited fields. Playing in those no-cut, guaranteed-pay-cheque events could get some helpful cash in the bank. Despite having played on two U.S. Solheim Cup teams (with her third coming later in the season), the 25-year-old has not had a sponsor besides Titleist for balls and gloves during the past four years on tour, giving Yin no financial buffer at the beginning of the season.
Instead, Yin teed it up for the first time in March, a month later than when she would normally start to make money. She quickly eased any immediate money concerns during her third start of the season at the Chevron Championship in April, where her playoff loss to Lilia Vu netted $US479,680, the largest pay cheque of Yin’s career.
She continued playing consistently through the middle of the season, posting four top-10s and finishing in the top 30 at all five majors before becoming aware she was in contention to win Aon. Yin didn’t discover that possibility herself, as her mum texted her to let her know that she was in second place ahead of the Kroger Queen City Championship in September. From then on, Yin diligently eyed the leaderboard, asking multiple friends and her caddie, Markus Zechmann, to check if she was doing the convoluted calculations of what she needed to score to maintain her lead correctly before getting comfortable with the maths.
After the Walmart NW Arkansas Championship at the end of September, where Yin did not play, she realised while sitting on her couch that she had moved into first place. “It’s hard not to know about and do the math on it because you would be kind of stupid not to,” Yin said. “It’s $1 million. Doesn’t matter how much inflation is going on in this world. It’s a lot of money.”
After her third career Solheim Cup appearance, where Yin went 2-1-0 in Spain, she entered the autumn Asia Swing atop the Aon leaderboard. If there was any pressure of the possibility of a $1 million cheque affecting Yin, she certainly didn’t show it. She went out and won her first career LPGA event at the Buick LPGA Shanghai, then followed that with a fourth-place finish at the BMW Ladies Championship in South Korea.
Yin initially planned to play the remaining two events in the Aon race, the Maybank Championship, since she has not played in Malaysia since 2017, and the Annika, since its $US3.25 million purse is one of the highest on tour. However, on her caddie’s recommendation, Yin chose to take two weeks off due to her back flaring up.
The decision continues what’s now becoming an unofficial tradition of the Aon leader ahead of the final counting event skipping it. All of the past LPGA Aon winners—Carlota Ciganda (2019), Hannah Green (2021) and fellow Australian Minjee Lee (2022)—did not play in the last event. Why risk a $US1 million prize on a tour with only four seven-figure cheques so far this year, for a possible win worth nowhere near that amount?
“The truth is everybody is doing math,” Yin said. “By the last two months everybody is just talking to me about Aon. Anyone and their mums are texting me about Aon.”
Should Yin win the Aon and nearly double her career earnings in a single season, she plans to continue the financial strategy she started earlier this year. Yin invested in two small businesses, one of which is a women’s apparel company run by women in Malaysia. The additional earnings also have given Yin more philanthropic opportunities, as she is in discussions with the Southern California PGA Junior Tour about having her own tournament there. Her investment philosophy is rooted in providing what Yin has lacked over her career—becoming the sponsor of her fellow sponsor-less chasing their own dreams.
“Since the way it’s progressed the past few years, I just know that I’m my own sponsor, and I won’t take this money for granted and just spend it,” Yin explained. “I will be a lot wiser with it. Hopefully. Hopefully a lot wiser with it. Invest it well and do whatever I want with it.”
