Anders Hansen

ELIGIBILITY CODE: 6

Started the game at age 10. Influenced by the fact that his parents both played. Brother, Nicolai, is a scratch golfer. Was the highest-ranked player without a victory in 2011, finishing a career-high seventh in The Race to Dubai after five top-three performances. One of those came at the US PGA Championship, where he missed out on joining Americans Keegan Bradley and Jason Dufner in a play-off by one shot. His last European Tour victory came at the 2009 Joburg Open in his first event of the calendar year. Won for a second time in South Africa a month later at the Vodacom Championship, on his way to claiming the 2009 Sunshine Tour Order of Merit, the first European to do so since 1972. Previously he won the BMW PGA Championship for a second time, five years after his maiden victory, when he held off the challenge of Justin Rose at Wentworth Club in 2007 in a playoff. His first two victories therefore came in The European Tour's flagship event. In 2002 he won in record breaking style, setting a new low aggregate for the West Course, a 19-under-par total of 269 which beat the previous best of 270 held by Bernhard Langer and Colin Montgomerie, but which was subsequently matched by Scott Drummond in 2004. Went to University of Houston and enjoyed two victories on the collegiate scene in America. No relation to his namesake Søren, but they often seem inseparable to the extent that both holed-in-one in successive weeks on The European Tour in 1999 and both claimed their maiden European Tour victories within a month of one another in 2002 and second victories in 2007. That closeness even stretched to their finishing positions on the 2005 and 2006 Orders of Merit, Anders in 35th and Søren 36th in 2005, followed by their respective 33rd and 34th place finishes in 2006.