Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson head the list but the likes of Padraig Harrington, Henrik Stenson, Sergio Garcia, Geoff Ogilvy and last week’s World Match Play Champion Ross Fisher amongst many others ensure this event has genuine credibility in its first staging as a World Golf Championship.
The US$5 million World Golf Championships come to Asia for the first time this week when the WGC HSBC Champions event is played at the Nelson Harworth designed Sheshan International Golf Club in Shanghai.
A field of 78 of the world’s golfing elite will tee it up on Thursday having gained the right to play the event via a range of criteria including wins in Major Championships, World Golf Championship and a series of other events worldwide.
In the four years since the event was introduced in 2006, David Howell, Y.E. Yang and Sergio Garcia have taken the title.
Tiger Woods has not taken the title in two visits but on both occasions he was runner up while Phil Mickelson won the event in 2007 and following a solid enough finish in Singapore last week Mickelson has a great chance of challenging the world number one.
Woods finished runner up to Mickelson at his last start at the Tour Championship and his battle with Mickelson is expected to be the highlight of the week.
The chances go well beyond that however as Padraig Harrington has played well in his four visits to the event and while only average last week in Singapore his form prior was very impressive in fact he was inside the top ten in seven of his eight previous starts.
Robert Allenby, fresh from his third place finish at the World Match Play last week, is perhaps the best of the Australian chances given the recent indifferent form of Geoff Ogilvy.
Rod Pampling, Nathan Green, Greg Chalmers, Scott Strange, Mark Brown and Danny Lee are the other Australasians in the field.
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