Im Jin-hee takes final trophy of the 2023 KLPGA Tour

Golf

Published: 12 Nov. 2023, 17:30

Im Jin-hee takes final trophy of the 2023 KLPGA Tour

Im Jin-hee plays her shot on the first hole during the final round of the SK Shieldus-SK Telecom Championship at La Vie est Belle Golf & Resort in Chuncheon, Gangwon on Sunday. [NEWS1]

Im Jin-hee clinched the final KLPGA title of the season, carding 16-under par, 200, to win the three-round, no-cut SK Shieldus-SK Telecom Championship on Sunday.

Tournament of champions to close out KLPGA season at SK

Im, ranked No. 6 on the KLPGA Tour heading into the tournament, played a bogey-free final round to comfortably beat runner-up Lee Da-yeon, who finished with 11-under-par, 205.

Both of them placed well ahead of the rest of the pack, with just six of 75 total golfers filling out scoresheets in the negatives.

Individual title holders this season and defending course champions were all on the green at La Vie est Belle Golf & Resort in Chuncheon, Gangwon this weekend. But what could have been a tough battle with multiple contenders for the trophy turned out to be a competition between just Im and No. 8 Lee by moving day.

Defending champion Park Min-ji, who holds the most KLPGA titles with 18 career wins and has held the KLPGA’s No. 1 spot for the last year, carded 10-over-par, 226, tying for 50th place with two others.

And Lee Ye-won, who locked in this year’s KLPGA Money List and Wemade awards after finishing as a runner-up at last weekend’s S-Oil Championship, tied for 11th, carding two-over-par, 218.

The Money List is the title conferred to the golfer who has accumulated the biggest prize money bag from KLPGA events of the season while the Wemade goes to the golfer with the most amount of “Wemade” points, earned by those who've managed a top-10 finish in a KLPGA event.

Im’s victory on Sunday marked her sixth career-title and fourth KLPGA win of the season — her most successful yet. She won the Sangsangsin Korea Economic Broadcasting in October, the Jeju Samdasoo Masters in August and the NH Investment & Securities Ladies Championship in May.

The pool of golfers played under tough conditions at their season’s close.

A chill fell over much of Korea this weekend, with the temperature in Chuncheon hovering around five degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit) and wind gusts peaking at around 26 kilometers per hour (16 miles per hour) on Sunday.

Golfers donned heavy parkas — colloquially known as “long paddings” — as they walked from one hole to the next on the course. The competition took place under a clear sky on Sunday, but birdies for most of the golfers were few and far between, with even the best struggling to stay bogey-free.

The SK was the last official tournament of the 2023 season, but an unofficial Wemix Championship will tee off on Saturday.

The Wemix Championship will be an exhibition event in which 24 golfers compete to earn prize money — in Wemix, a cryptocurrency issued by game runners Wemade.

BY MARY YANG AND PAIK JI-HWAN [mary.yang@joongang.co.kr]