Lydia Ko Gets Her First Sponsor

In case you haven't heard, Lydia Ko inked her first sponsorship deal Thursday. And while it's no surprise that it's a New Zealand company, it may surprise you to hear that it's not a golf company.

Lydia is now sponsored by the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited, better known as ANZ. ANZ sponsors a number of Kiwi athletes, including "Olympic rowers Eric Murray, Hamish Bond and Emma Twigg, along with former Olympians Sarah Ulmer and Hamish Carter, and Paralympic swimmers Rebecca Dubber and Cameron Leslie."

And just like she did when she turned pro, Lydia announced it with a video of her golfing her way through the bank... and then depositing her first victory check from the Swinging Skirts World Ladies Masters (which GC is broadcasting -- with a week delay, of course -- tonight at 6:30pm ET).



If you want more details, you can get them from these three links:

• a post at GC's GolfTalkCentral blog
• this article at Golfweek (the video came from here)
• the Scoop InfoPages site in New Zealand (where I got the athlete list)

and I'm sure there are a dozen more. After all, Lydia Ko is hot stuff now.

And she's only going to get hotter if she keeps playing the way she's been playing. She's #4 in the world already, you know.