Newly crowned AIG Women’s Open Champion Shiho Kuwaki is the first golfer to win a major championship with a yellow golf ball, but not the first to win a professional golf tournament with a coloured ball.

On the PGA Tour Peter Malnati won the 2024 Valspar Championship when he was playing a yellow ball, which he started playing with after his son Hatcher said he liked the colour.

However Malnati was not the first either, we have to go way back to the eighties.

The first arrival of coloured golf balls in professional golf that we are aware of was on the PGA Tour in 1981 when Jerry Pate first played with orange golf balls that his sponsor Wilson produced. Pate duly won the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic in June and the Pensacola Open in October of that year.

1982 dawned and fellow Wilson Staff Professional Wayne Levi won the Hawaiian Open in February with a yellow ball and then two months later Jerry Pate won the Players Championship with an orange golf ball again.

Fred Couples has played with a yellow ball, while Bubba Watson has famously played with pink ones.

When asked why she uses the yellow ball, Shiho simply answered…….“I’ve been using a yellow ball pretty much since I started, and it’s because it’s easy to watch around the golf course, keep an eye on it.”

Photo: Shiho Kuwaki of Japan tees off on the 13th hole at Royal Lytham & St. Annes. (Photo by Morgan Harlow/R&A/R&A via Getty Images)