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LA Woman!Congratulations to Hannah Green. Green won her third JM Eagle LA Championship on Sunday in a playoff over Sei Young Kim and Jin Hee Im. Hannah birdied the first playoff hole to take home the title. That's Green's third LA Championship win in four years (2023, 2024, 2026)! Quite the accomplishment since two of the three wins came on different golf courses. The win jumps Green to fifth in the Rolex World Ranking and gives her two wins this season. We all remember the first win at the HSBC back in February. A nice +2700 RTL ticket. Hannah now has two wins and a seventh place in four starts this year. Is she the favorite to win the Chevron Championship? Green is not the only player with two wins in 2026. Hyo Joo Kim won back-to-back events in March. How about the number two ranked golfer in the world, Nelly Korda? Korda has three straight runner-up results in her last three starts. Forty-one of the top 41 players in the world descend upon a new destination for the first major championship of the season. They are heading to Memorial Park Golf Club. If that sounds familiar, it should. MPGC is a public facility located in downtown Houston. The PGA TOUR has contested its Texas Children's Houston Open at the course since 2020. A field of 132 players is competing for $9 million. The top 65 and ties will play the weekend, trying to capture the $1.35 million first-place check. I think the move south to Houston will really help this event. Carlton Woods was 40 miles north of Memorial Park and downtown. Inside the city limits, the LPGA can now draw on a metropolitan crowd. Doak designMemorial Park Golf Club dates back to 1936. In 2019, Tom Doak was hired to renovate the golf course. A mundane municipal landscape was transformed by Tom and his consultant, Brooks Koepka, into a wonderful par 72 layout stretching 6,811 yards. If you recall, the men play a par 70 course. Holes one and 14 have been converted from a par 4 to a par 5. I love the resulting card with five par 3s and 5s, and eight par 4s. The Chevron (Dinah Shore) was contested in Palm Springs at the Mission Hills Country Club for decades. In 2023, the event moved to Carlton Woods, and now will take place in downtown Houston. Memorial Park is the best venue this championship has seen. Doak's design just moves with the land. Very few LPGA courses challenge these ladies from 100 yards and in. I'm excited to see the world's best navigate these green complexes. The putting surfaces are 7,000 sq/ft (on average). Covered in a mix of Poa Trivialis and Bermudagrass fighting its way back through the Poa. Handling the agronomy will be a big part of the winning equation. With just 24 bunkers, four holes where water comes into play, and the forecast, I think these women will be able to score. One month ago, Memorial Park was extremely dry. Gary Woodland tore up the tournament with an excellent combination of power and touch. Now the surfaces have been significantly softened. What will that do to playability? More on that in the outright breakdown. We have witnessed a domestic four-event, five-week lead into the season's first major championship. The pre-tournament odds board has five players under +2000. Of those women, four have at least one win in 2026. Miyu Yamashita is the lone favorite without a victory this season. Both Hyo Joo Kim and Hannah Green have two wins. Kim is the third favorite, and Green is the fifth. Tough to break through around here. The good news for any hopefuls, you are all rookies. The LPGA has not competed at Memorial Park before. After hosting a PGA TOUR event four weeks ago, the course is in impeccable shape. The LPGA moved to Texas three years ago, away from Palm Springs. Although the venue has changed, I believe the Texas trend will continue. Much like the Masters, the players showing the best 2026 form will contend and ultimately win. Three years ago, in 2023, Lilia Vu came into Carlton Woods with a win and three top 14 results in four starts. The following year, Nelly Korda won four tournaments in a row before capturing the Chevron. Last year, Mao Saigo owned three top 11 finishes (T11, T5, T9) in her last five starts entering Chevron week. It is unlikely that a player comes out of nowhere to take this title. We have mentioned her more than once this year and in Texas before. Who is she? Keep reading. How to win?We know Memorial Park GC, let's get right into it. When the PGA TOUR comes to town, ball speed reigns supreme. Very rarely do we handicap an LPGA event and say distance will be a strong determining factor. Do I believe length will be an advantage? Yes. As much as it is for the men remains to be seen, but 100% an edge. Much of that determination will be affected by how tournament officials set up the competition. Memorial Park is not a "rough" setting. The men play the rough at 1.25”, and the women will raise the mower to 2.5". This setup feature gets me right back to total driving and strokes gained off the tee. If you are the type of player who can separate with your driver, this is your major championship. Seven of the 13 tee shots favor a right-to-left ball flight. LPGA players are far more accurate than their male counterparts. I'm not as concerned about the fairway movement as I am about getting as far down there as you can. Take the best women in total driving and SG: OTT, and that's a great start for your outright card. Approach play is really where this event will be won and lost. If officials set up the daily yardages in line with the official whiteline yardage supplied by the LPGA, the average approach length will be over 160 yards. That's long by LPGA standards. Translation: Two-thirds of the field was just eliminated. Most LPGA players do not have the ball speed to compete in the deep mid-iron to long-iron range. Trust me, they are all great, but against the world's best women, it is a huge issue. Here's where Nelly, Jeeno, and Haeran really differentiate themselves. Start with the five(!) par 3 tee shots. Those average 181 yards. The best approach players will dominate those holes, and that's 28% of your scoring for the week. The second spot they separate is the par 5s. It takes elite-level approach work to position yourself properly on the par 5s in two. There are five more of those; another 28% of your four-round score. Nearly 60% of your total will come from these approach shots! Memorial Park has five par 4s over 400 yards. With the average drive on tour under 250 yards, all of those holes require a 160+ iron shot. Add it up, and that's 14 long iron shots. Need a little more proof, 11 of the top SG: APP players at the Houston Open finished in the top 15 for the week. The closely mown areas around these green surfaces were a hot-button topic of conversation last month. That focus has not changed. The combination of great ball striking and a precise short game is not common among the very best in women's golf; the outright field just got smaller. There will be some outliers who go crazy with the putter, but overall, the path to contending will include short game skill. The guys showed how difficult it was a month ago. It might get slightly easier with softer conditions, but the lies around these greens are wild. Toss in the wind, and too many (great) players are going to find themselves off the putting surface. Getting up and down to save par and scoring from close range on par 5s is going to make a considerable difference. Think about the significance of the short game at Shadow Creek. It quickly separated the field. Players will be able to score at Memorial Park. Keep your birdie-to-bogey ratio positive, and you'll be in contention. Doak and Koepka combined to make some devilish green surfaces. Not necessarily difficult to manage for short putts, they cause a high three-putt percentage. Throw in the wind, and you're going to see a bunch of 40+ foot approach putts. Inside 10', the greens are not super scary. Go outside 30', and you start crossing swales, tiers, and shelves. That's when the putting really ramps up at Memorial Park. The last five winners of the Houston Open all finished inside the top 3 for strokes gained putting that week. Gary Woodland has finished in the top 2 the last two years on the leaderboard AND the strokes gained putting list. We all realize Woodland is not a wizard with the flatstick wand. I'm not overly fixated on the LPGA’s best putters, but rather those who have been good recently and have proven they can perform in major championships. That's the most important key. We aren't competing in a limited field event over in Singapore. It's major season, and the entire top 25 in the world rankings are playing. The top 40 are playing! There are 11 past champions in the field along with all six 2026 winners. With all due respect to a majority of the regular-season LPGA venues, only Shadow Creek has presented a similar well-rounded challenge. Get ready to play through some tough, windy conditions and heat. Bring that ball speed and short game. The favorite (Nelly) has it all and is sitting on three runner-up finishes in a row, but her odds make her unbettable. We have some "major" fighters on our card, and it's time to ring the bell. Outright Winners - Chevron ChampionshipRTL Weekly Editorials 📰(Golf Digest Zurich Classic Picks)Do you want to be a better bettor?Become a member of Read The Line today!
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