Kobori equals feat of Adam Scott with successive wins on Challenger Tour

By Martin Blake for the PGA Tour of Australia

Kazuma Kobori followed in the footsteps of top Australian golfer Adam Scott when he won for the second time in two weeks on the Webex Players’ Series in Victoria last month.

The emerging star New Zealand golfer’s second win came at the Rosebud Country Club on the Mornington peninsula a week after he had won on the same series at Cobram Barooga on the Victoria-New South Wales border.

Caption; Kazuma Kobori with his second trophy as a professional golfer. Photo credit: PGA of Australia.

The feat of successive wins on the Challenger PGA Tour of Australasia had not previously been achieved since Scott in 2013. Scott, these days, is a long-established player on the PGA Tour in the United States.

Kobori’s two wins have come from just eight starts since turning professional in November of last year. Each of the wins were worth $A45,000.

The 22-year-old from Rangiora in Canterbury jumped to second in the tour’s order of merit, giving himself a strong chance of earning a DP World Tour card for next season.

Kobori finished at 18-under par to win by one shot from Malaysian women golfer Ashley Lau with another shot to veteran Mathew Goggin in third.

“They always say the first win’s hard, and I’ll tell you what, I can speak about it now that the second one’s just as hard,” Kobori said after the win.

“But I’m glad to get the job done.”

It was Goggin who presented the biggest challenge for the Kiwi for most of the final day, playing in the same group.

From the first hole, when Kobori three-putted to give the Tasmanian a share of the lead, to the very last, it was a dogfight.

Ultimately the New Zealander led by a shot from Goggin when they reached the 18th tee, a shortish par four, and Goggin hit a nice approach to 25 feet, pin high. Once Kabori dumped his second shot into the right greenside trap, it was game on.

But Kobori hit a decent bunker shot to just beyond the hole, and Goggin ran his birdie putt – potentially for the win – six feet by.

Now it came down to Kobori’s par putt, which was for the outright win. It rolled in dead centre, much like a lot of important putts that have fallen for him this past two weeks.

“I was very nervous as you probably saw,” Kobori said.

“A few tips that my coach gave me just came back to me. I just took my time, and then the putt wasn’t difficult. It was dead straight. I had it there, and I knew it was going to drop.”

Kobori has had an amazing past 12 months, winning the Australian Amateur, the World Amateur with New Zealand, the Australian tour school, and now two tournaments as a pro.

Emigrating from Japan to New Zealand as an infant, it was his elder sister Momoka who he followed into the sport and fittingly it was his touring professional sibling who greeted him with a hug soon after the last putt dropped at Rosebud.

Lau played in the second-last group and appeared to be out of the running until she started rolling in birdies on the back nine. At the 18th, she had a 60-footer up the hill that could potentially have put her in a playoff, and it sat on the lip of the hole.