PGT still looking for first two-leg winner this season

Tony Lascuña keeps getting better with age.

The Philippine Golf Tour (PGT) season will be heading into its seventh event with the ICTSI Forest Hills Championship next week, but so far, there hasn’t been a dominant force with no one yet to win multiple legs.

“It’s tough, because you really need consistency,” Rupert Zaragosa, the Sta. Barbara leg in Iloilo winner, told the Inquirer over the phone, as he pointed to some of his struggles after that breakthrough triumph early in the season. His closest brush to a second leg win this year was an 11th place finish at Caliraya which Antonio Lascuña ruled two weeks after.

Lascuña, meanwhile, will be coming into the 72-hole event starting Tuesday with the belief that he can win again, being the de facto defending champion by winning the event the last time it was held there in 2017.

“You have to find ways to pick up birdies because it is a difficult course,” Lascuña said in a separate interview. “Your short game has to be on point and you must know when to hold back because birdies aren’t on every hole.”

The second of Lascuña’s two victories saw him tally 16-under, something he doesn’t see coming this time with the course undergoing massive work on its greens.

“But you need at least to average three-under per day to have a chance,” Lascuña said.

“I have been struggling with my irons,” the diminutive Zaragosa said as he and father-coach Boyet slowly got that aspect of his game working again, just in time for the P2 million championship that will have the men of the tour returning to Antipolo after the Valley Golf Challenge.

Reymon Jaraula won at Valley, running away with the title in the fourth round. But the Del Monte ace talked cautiously of his chances as the Jack Nicklaus-created gem of Forest Hills poses a more difficult challenge.

“I need to toughen up and work on some parts of my game to win again,” Jaraula said in Filipino.