KEY POINTS:
If the last nine months have been a defining time for Mark Brown, then the next four weeks could set him up for starts in all four major championships next year.
At the beginning of the co-sanctioned HSBC Champions tournament, which finishes today in Shanghai, Brown led the
Order of Merit, or money lists, on both the Asian and Australasian Tours.
If he can maintain those leads, then he'd be mixing regularly with golfing royalty during 2009. Not that he didn't this year. He made his first appearance at a major and had two other starts in World Golf Championship events.
If things go well in the next few weeks, Brown could be teeing it up next year at Augusta, Bethpage, for the US Open, in the Open Championship at Turnberry and Hazeltine for the US
PGA Championship.
It's been a quite extraordinary 2008 for the man who is now New Zealand's top-ranked player. By my count, the Champions in Shanghai is his 26th event of the year and he could play up to five more, depending on if he goes to Australia for their PGA or Open. Anybody who plays 30 tournaments or more a year has had a really gruelling schedule.
When you consider Brown has been to 17 countries since February, and has events in Singapore, Hong Kong, China and possibly Australia still to play, you know he'll deserve a seriously relaxing summer break.
It has been hugely rewarding too. His success in Asia has been nothing short of spectacular with two tournament wins in India late last summer. His official Asian Tour winnings were, before today, US$740,767.
On top of that is the US$123,750 he won in the US at the PGA Championship and in the WGC events, plus the equivalent of US$146,000 he collected on the European Tour in events not co-sanctioned with Asia. That means he and Tim Wilkinson are New Zealand's million dollar winners this year, although Brown's success has come in a considerably more diverse way and with frequent visits to passport control
and the bureau de change.
But the real bonus would be wins in one or both of the Orders of Merit. Before Shanghai, his lead in Asia was more than US$150,000 over India's Jeev Milka Singh and in Australia, he's about A$130,000 clear of Greg Chalmers.
Of the four majors, only the British Open actually stipulates direct entry for the Asian Tour winner, but both Augusta National and the USGA invited Lian Wen-chong, the 2007 money leader, to play in this year's Masters and US Open and it's thought they'd follow that example next year. The Australian Tour winner gets direct entry to the US Open if he's in the top 75 in the world rankings.
The Asian Tour title will be sorted over the next three weeks. Today the purse in Shanghai is US$5 million. It's the same next week in Singapore and there's US$2.5 million the week after that in Hong Kong.
Then Brown will team up with David Smail at the World Cup in Shenzhen, just over the border from Hong Kong, during the last four days of November. Counting last week's Volvo Masters at Valderrama, that will conclude a stretch of five tournaments in five weeks from Spain to China, and will mean 29 tournaments since February, a thoroughly solid year's work.
It would be great to see Brown at the two New Zealand events in March but a big finish to the year in Asia means he`ll likely become eligible for the two rich World Golf Championship events on about the same time. But let's not get too far ahead. November is a very important month for Mark Brown.
