Angel Yin is on the verge of claiming the biggest payday of her career without even picking up a club.
The American, who made her third Solheim Cup appearance in this year’s match at Finca Cortesin, is currently leading the LPGA Tour’s season-long Aon Risk Reward Challenge.
For the contest, one strategically challenging hole is selected at each course throughout the season, with the player emerging with the lowest overall scoring average claiming the $1m prize.
The Annika Driven By Gainbridge at Pelican is the final tournament of the season that counts towards the challenge, and Yin is leading the way with a scoring average of -.933 for the year, comfortably ahead of former World No.1 Atthaya Thitikul on -.889. There is still a chance that the Thai player could take the first prize, but only if she eagles Pelican Golf Club’s par 5 14th twice during the tournament.
Perhaps mindful of the windfall likely to come her way, Yin is sitting out this week’s tournament, and given the financially precarious position she encountered earlier in her career, it’s hard to blame her.
Yin is enjoying a hugely successful season that, as well as her Solheim Cup appearance, included her maiden LPGA Tour win at the LPGA Shanghai in October. That has helped bolster her career earnings by over a third since the turn of the year, to $4,408,908. To get there, though, it has taken her 151 LPGA Tour starts in a professional career that began in 2016.
Over that time, there have been a lot of hidden expenses, too, particularly for a player who has been largely without a sponsor in recent years. Yin recently explained how tight things became for her in an interview on The Golf Channel. She said: “It’s very expensive, which people don’t really realise that nothing is covered.
“Everything comes from our own pocket and, yeah, our entire earning is public, but you have to understand a big portion goes to tax, a big portion goes to my caddie and a big portion goes to travel, and people who are on my team – let’s say physios who help me week to week.
“So there’s a lot of expenses, and when Covid hit it took a big hit on me as it did for everyone and with that, with my poor golf performance, without making that much money there was a point in one of the seasons where it was like, I need to make money now or I’m not going to have enough money to fund me for the rest of the year.”
Yin is not the only high-profile LPGA Tour player to feel a financial pinch. Last year, 2017 Women’s PGA Champion Danielle Kang revealed she made $6,000 at an event and didn’t break even.
There are signs those days could soon be in the past, with increasing purses, including $3.25m at this week’s tournament, which is the highest outside the Majors and CME Group Tour Championship.
Even though Yin isn't taking the chance to claim some of that this week, the days of wondering how to fund her career appear to be behind her, with another welcome boost to her bank balance apparently now just days away – without even needing to tee it up at the Florida tournament.
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