The Cap Cana Championship, part of the PGA Senior Tour, is being held 23-29 March at the Jack Nicklaus Signature Course at Punta Espada Golf Club in the residential development of Cap Cana.
Tournament director Efren Garcia-Estrada says that this year’s players again include many golfing legends. In addition to course designer Jack Nicklaus, who is here for the tournament, others include Australian Greg Norman who himself has designed a golf course for the country. Norman is the winner of 91 golf titles worldwide, including 20 PGA Tour titles. He was admitted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2001.
Others include fellow World Golf Hall of Fame members Hale Irwin, Bernhard Langer, Larry Nelson, Nick Price, Gary Player and Curtis Strange. Returning this year is defending champion Mark Wiebe, who cruised to a four-stroke, wire-to-wire victory over Vicente Fernandez at last year’s Cap Cana Championship, the first-ever Tour-sanctioned event held in the Dominican Republic.
The 54-hole, stroke-play Cap Cana Championship will feature a 78-player field and official prize money of US$2.1 million, with the winner collecting US$315,000. Golf Channel will broadcast all three rounds in the United States and coverage of the event will be distributed internationally.
Punta Espada Golf Club, the first of three Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Courses to open in Cap Cana, is operated by Troon Golf and opened for play in November 2006. The par-72 course incorporates the surrounding natural beauty of Cap Cana, stretching along a coastline where on each hole golfers look out into the blue expanse of the Caribbean Sea.
The Cap Cana Championship is part of the Champions Tour’s “The Road to the Charles Schwab Cup”, a season-long points race that kicks off in Hawaii with 25 official events and culminates in Northern California at Sonoma Golf Club 26 October – 1 November 1, with US$2.1 million in payouts awarded to the season’s top five leading performers.