Ken Borland

The Sunshine Tour has spent much of the Covid-19 Lockdown trying to mitigate the dire financial strain put on many of its members and most especially their caddies, while also showing solidarity with the amateur game and all its stakeholders, who have been far more severely affected by the closure of golf courses.

But the Sunshine Tour has also devoted their time in Lockdown to ensuring that they can grow the game further once normality returns, by boldly pursuing new markets, especially through the digital space. Their groundbreaking Virtual Golf Challenge reached out to potential new fans and gave their sponsors exposure at the same time.

In the absence of live golf, fans were able to watch several head-to-head challenges between professional golfers, culminating in a knockout final featuring eight contestants on June 6-7, playing for R6500 of prizemoney. Rookie Nikhil Rama claimed a comfortable three-shot win over Heinrich Bruiners in the final.

International campaigners Brandon Stone, Haydn Porteous, Justin Harding and Oliver Bekker all took part in the series at some stage.

And, most importantly, during the whole series viewers were able to interact with the professionals in a way that would be virtually impossible in normal tournament golf.

Not only could they hear the banter between the golfers, who maintained their usual competitive spirit, but also ask them questions ranging from what are the best Open Championship courses (Carnoustie received a few votes), who are the naughtiest pros on tour (Andy Sullivan was mentioned), the longest hitters (between Wilco Nienaber and James Hart du Preez, confirming the stats) and what was the best chirp ever heard out on the course?*

The Virtual Golf Challenge took place on PlayStation’s The Golf Club game and the front nines of Glendower Golf Club and Royal Johannesburg and Kensington’s East Course, as well as Soweto Country Club for the final, were especially recreated for the series.

“We wanted to create something fun for our fans and they certainly seemed to enjoy watching the pros play these games. The banter was great fun and the viewers could see what type of guy a Brandon Stone or a Jared Harvey is, it gives the fan an insight into their personality. The public loved it, the players said they were just as nervous before their rounds and they were very much on-board in terms of it being serious competition. What more is sport?

“We created the virtual tour to be fun, but the biggest thing was that we have a captive audience that loves pro golf but we need to look outside that at younger viewers. We need to start thinking out of the box, push the boundaries a bit. It’s most important to attract the youth and women’s tennis has the youngest viewership globally, while golf on TV is mostly watched by people aged 55 and over,” Thomas Abt, the deputy commissioner of the Sunshine Tour, said.

“That’s why we’ve gone heavily into things like Instagram as well, because that reaches a much younger market, which gives you longevity in terms of support. The Virtual Tour was for fun but at the end of the day in this economic climate, it’s important what we can get out of it – which is speaking to a completely different market, people who might not ever go to a tournament or watch golf on TV. Our sponsors, and those of the players, have obviously not been able to promote their brands as much during Lockdown and we’ve been able to give them and our partners some value.

“The virtual tour definitely gained motion, it has shown us a positive way going forward and I’m just surprised that no other sport in South Africa really tried something like that in Lockdown. It was fun and something different, a new way of doing things, and the idea was to make ourselves more relevant. Hopefully those who saw it will say it was fun to watch and now they’ll want to go and watch the golfers in real life,” Abt said.

One of the biggest attractions of the Virtual Golf Challenge is that it offers an insight into the game plans of the golfers faced with certain holes which are instantaneously recognisable on the program thanks to the superb job done by the techies building the digital courses.

And the golfers enjoyed the realism of the game and just how tough it was, feeding into their competitive juices.

“Lockdown was like all of us sitting in our cages and champing at the bit for any opportunity that reminded you of competitive golf. Haydn Porteous and I jumped at the opportunity to play each other and we’ve now competed against each other through junior golf, to the amateur champs, at professional level and now virtually!” Brandon Stone said.

“The actual playing of the game was tricky, especially around the greens, and it mimics the toughness of golf quite well. After many hours of playing the game I can now grasp how it feels, understand the frustration, of most golfers. It was quite difficult to play technically, even though it doesn’t mimic the actual swing as much, but from a golf strategy point of view it was very similar to the real game. We had similar game-plans as we would in real life.”

It’s undeniable though that the Virtual Golf Challenge did not have the same heat of battle as one gets coming down the back nine on Sunday afternoon and Oliver Bekker, the 2017/18 Sunshine Tour Players’ Player of the Year, acknowledged that pro golfers would probably have to stay out of the heat of the kitchen if they were to take on proper gamers.

“Internationally, gaming has been around for a while and the games earn millions of dollars per year. But it’s a whole new thing for us and if it had to come down to golfers just being able to play Online, being a pro golfer would definitely not mean you’re a great Online golfer. It’s completely different.

“But I’m glad the Sunshine Tour are being innovative, they put something out that showcased professional golf and it didn’t really matter what we shot, it shows that something is still going on in South African golf. And the game they used is a lot more realistic than some of the others in which Rory McIlroy shoots 56 every time! The Golf Club almost feels real, it’s more up to the standard of real golf,” Bekker said before his match against Justin Harding, which he won to go through to the final weekend.

For realism in the world of virtual golf, however, nothing beats what the outstanding European Tour digital and social media team put together – the BMW Trackman Invitational.

Powered by the Trackman golf simulator, this series was a true test of golf played on digital versions of major courses like Wentworth, St Andrews and Valderrama.

By choosing tough settings in terms of factors like the wind and speed of greens, the golfers, hitting actual practice balls into their nets at home, had to shape shots to avoid the same obstacles that are out on those famous courses in real life. The auto-putt function that meant golfers were given putts within 2.5 metres and sometimes longer was annoying, while one wonders how troubled they were by bad lies given that they were hitting off a mat at home, with the simulator then tracking all the details of the club and ball data. At a glance though, it was difficult to differentiate between it and real golf.

The equipment is extremely expensive – ranging from $20 000 to $50 000 – but it does seem to be the new toy of choice for professional golfers.

The deep pockets of BMW and the wonderful exposure Trackman have received made possible what must have been a very expensive undertaking for the European Tour, but Abt said the Sunshine Tour are looking to follow suit.

“We’re very close to doing something similar, testing is going on in that sphere. But it’s not just about the playing of golf for us, it’s also very important for the fans to get to know the players better. The Virtual Tour may not have been real golf, but it was a platform for our professionals to present themselves,” Abt said.

Justin Sampson is the CEO of S-Factor Sponsorship, the digital PR company running campaigns for the Sunshine Tour, and he has been delighted with the success of the Virtual Golf Challenge.

“We’ve tried to engage social media across the board, from the virtual tour to Robbie Kruse’s Out of Bounds player interviews on Instagram, that included an episode with Louis Oosthuizen. The Virtual Tour had 600 000 viewers in the first six weeks, the majority of those from Facebook, then Instagram and then Twitter. We had 4500 people watching live on YouTube on Sunday afternoons. Those are the kind of numbers you get on SuperSport Channels 6-8.

“We wanted to reach the younger market, position the Sunshine Tour in a different market, not the traditional platforms. It was all part of a bigger strategy and nobody had even heard of Covid back then. But we had to adapt to tough circumstances and we’ve grown a new base, which I think is pretty cool. What the European Tour has done is pretty cool too and we copy each other a bit,” Sampson said.

The rise of eSports, which is now a billion dollar industry globally, means the line between virtual and real sports is going to blur, offering another big commercial platform for sports organisations. And while virtual golf is unlikely to ever replace the real thing, it could become more mainstream.

As Brandon Stone pointed out, if a golfer has never seen a course before he or she can gain valuable insight from the digital version and the fact that so many pro golfers now carry around their own tracking devices and simulator shows how useful a tool it can be in coaching.

*Best chirp ever sidebar

The diminutive Keenan Davidse, light in weight but heavy in game, was playing in the Zone VI amateur championships and was up against a big, burly Zimbabwean.

His opponent tried a bit of sledging on the first tee by saying “How’s a small little guy like you going to hit the ball far enough to beat me?”

Davidse said nothing but laced his first drive miles past the Zimbabwean. They walked to their balls and when Davidse reached his, he turned back to the Zimbabwean and shouted “How small do I look now?!”