With 3 straight eagles on 17th hole at Tour Championship, impending Colorado Golf Hall of Famer Jennifer Kupcho caps off her 2nd-best LPGA season; Coloradan Martin Laird loses fully-exempt status on PGA Tour, while ex-AFA golfer Tom Whitney falls short of keeping card
By Gary Baines – 11/24/2024
The top men’s and women’s golf tours in the world concluded their seasons on the same day — in fact nearly at the same time on Sunday afternoon. When all was said and done for the 2024 campaign, the news was largely positive for a Colorado native on the LPGA circuit, while much less so for a Denver-area resident and a former Air Force Academy golfer on the PGA Tour.
On the positive side was Jennifer Kupcho, who will be inducted into the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame on Dec. 1, finishing 12th in the CME Group Tour Championship in Naples, Fla., culminating the second-best season of her professional career.
But things were far less than ideal for Denverite and former Colorado State University golfer Martin Laird and former Air Force Academy golfer Tom Whitney on the PGA Tour. Laird, a regular on the PGA Tour since 2008 — and a four-time winner on that circuit — finished the 2024 season with conditional (rather than fully-exempt) status on the Tour. Meanwhile, Whitney lost his Tour card following his rookie season on golf’s premier circuit. Should they choose, Laird and/or Whitney could try to improve their status by playing in the final stage of Q-school next month.
— Jennifer Kupcho: Kupcho, a three-time winner on the LPGA Tour in 2022, continued her record of finishing in the top 40 on the money list for every season since she turned pro in 2019.
In this case, with Sunday’s 12th-place showing earning her $94,000, Kupcho placed 24th on the 2024 LPGA money list with $1,158,094. For the record, in previous years, she’s placed 39th in money in 2019 (a partial season after not turning pro until late spring), 29th in 2020 (when she also won the Inspirato Colorado Women’s Open), 35th in 2021, seventh in 2022, and 39th in 2023.
While Kupcho didn’t add to her win total in 2024, the Jefferson Academy graduate recorded six top-10 finishes, including second- and third-place showings, and only missed three cuts in 26 starts. The 27-year-old went into the season finale No. 53 in Rolex World Rankings.
At the Tour Championship, Kupcho went 70-69-69-68 for a 12-under-par total, which left her 10 strokes behind champion Jeeno Thitikul. Kupcho played the par-5 17th hole in a remarkable 7 under par for four rounds, with three eagles and a birdie.
For all the scores from the CME Group Tour Championship, CLICK HERE.
Martin Laird is left with conditional status on the PGA Tour. (Photo: PGATour.com)
— Martin Laird: Laird has played in 20 or more events every PGA Tour season except one since 2008, but his schedule in 2025 will likely be far less certain. He helped his cause with a 17th-place finish on Sunday in the RSM Classic in St. Simons Island, Ga., but that left him 145th in the FedExCup Fall ranking, with those with those in the 126-150 range earning conditional status on Tour. (He also has past-champions status, but the 126-150 category is higher on the priority ranking.)
Laird, 41, has posted PGA Tour victories in 2009, ’11, ’13 and 2020, but the exemption from each of those extends just two seasons. The only season since 2008 that Laird has played fewer than 20 tournaments on the PGA Tour was 2019-20, when he was limited to a dozen by the Covid-19 shutdown and a knee injury.
Laird has played in 405 PGA Tour events in his career, making 256 cuts. Besides his four wins, he has seven runner-up finishes.
— Tom Whitney: Whitney needed to finish in the top 150 in the FedExCup Fall to have at least conditional PGA Tour status moving forward. But a missed cut at the RSM Classic kept him from moving up, and he finished 164th in the standings. Unless he can secure a 2025 PGA Tour spots via the final stage of Q-school, Whitney will likely return to the Korn Ferry Tour, where he’s played 117 tournaments over the years.
Whitney, now 35, competed in 27 PGA Tour events as a rookie in 2024. He made 10 cuts and posted three top-25 finishes, including an 11th place in the Black Desert Championship in Utah last month and a 13th place at the Farmers Insurance Open in late January.
For all the scores from the RSM Classic, CLICK HERE.
About the Writer: Gary Baines has covered golf in Colorado continuously since 1983. He was a sports writer at the Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder, then the sports editor there, and has written regularly for ColoradoGolf.org since 2009. The University of Colorado Evans Scholar alum was inducted into the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame in 2022. He owns and operates ColoradoGolfJournal.com