Ken Borland

The Royal Johannesburg and Kensington Golf Club is one of the oldest in the country, with golf being played on the Linksfield premises since 1909, but it’s the new crop of European Tour stars who will be taking centre-stage from Thursday when the Joburg Open starts.

Most attention will be focused on the 11:00 tee-off on the East Course as two former champions, Branden Grace and Charl Schwartzel, are paired together, with young English prospect Danny Willett completing the three-ball.

Although Schwartzel is a major winner and an international star ranked 18th in the world, he has almost become part of the furniture at the historic Johannesburg club and was the champion in 2010 and 2011. He has decided to start his 2013 season at the venue for seven South African Opens.

“There are great memories about this place, starting back from junior days. It’s the highlight of the year for me to come back and play here. I’ve always loved playing this golf course, I grew up here on the Highveld and these are the sort of courses we played. It suits my eye and my game,” Schwartzel said on Wednesday.

Schwartzel was unable to defend his title last year as he was struggling with his putting after the Christmas break and missed the cut by one stroke. But the 2011 Masters champion was in great form just before he went on holiday, ending 2012 with a fifth-place finish in the SA Open, tied third at the World Tour Championship finale in Dubai, a runners-up berth at the Nedbank Golf Challenge at Sun City and then successive wins at the Thailand Golf Championship and the Alfred Dunhill Championship at Leopard Creek.

“It was good to finish like that and it’s been one of the longest breaks I’ve ever taken – six weeks. I did some practice and I’m looking forward to getting back and competing again.

“Now it’s my time to start, I’ve got five tournaments in a row now and if I can continue where I left off, that would be great. After resting my body I feel refreshed, so now there are no excuses. I’ll try to go with the same thoughts and processes I used at the end of last year,” Schwartzel said.

Grace was the Joburg Open winner last year and it was the starting point of an incredible 2012 season that saw him win four more titles on his first full year on the European Tour.

But while Schwartzel and Grace are the headline acts, it would be foolish to ignore the challenge posed by Richard Sterne, the 2008 champion, or George Coetzee, who is surely due a European Tour triumph after seven top-three finishes in the last three years.

After his 2008 win, which came after a three-man playoff, Sterne waged a nasty battle with back problems and, after surgery, he finally seems to have shaken off the problem with a seventh-placed finish in the Alfred Dunhill Championship and then runners-up spot in last week’s Dubai Desert Classic.

“It was nice to be in contention for the whole week and to be in the last group for two rounds. It was good to play under that pressure again, even though I got a bit unlucky at the end. But I’m happy with my game and to be in position to win is all you can want. And I enjoy it here too.” Sterne said.

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When Rory McIlroy is on song, he makes the infuriatingly tricky game of golf look ridiculously easy. And the 23-year-old from Northern Ireland was largely on song in 2012, winning his second major, the PGA Championship, by a whopping eight strokes, and doubling his number of career titles from five to 10.

That McIlroy is indisputably the number one golfer in the world is borne out by the ease with which he topped both the US PGA and European Tour money-lists this year, only the second golfer to achieve this daunting feat of trans-Atlantic dominance.

With the future of Tiger Woods still cloudy – he has not won a major since 2008 – McIlroy is poised to become the pre-eminent golfer of his era.

And while Woods bristles with indignation whenever it is suggested he has lost his aura, McIlroy has won many admirers for his warm smile on the course and his willingness to handle awkward questions ranging from his relationship with tennis star and former world number one Caroline Wozniacki to whether he will represent Northern Ireland or Great Britain at the 2016 Olympics.

It is a measure of McIlroy’s tremendous ability that several of the game’s greats are on alert for the kid from Holywood to start hauling in Woods’s haul of 14 major titles and even challenge the record of Jack Nicklaus (18).

“I think if anybody can break Nicklaus’s record, McIlroy could,” former world number one Greg Norman said.

“McIlroy is young, he is ahead of the game, he is ahead of the curve on a lot of things, and he has a very balanced life across the board. So I will keep my fingers crossed for him, because I would love to see that happen. Somebody will surpass Nicklaus’s majors record, and it could be Rory,” Norman said.

Even Woods himself has acknowledged McIlroy as his greatest rival.

“Rory is younger, so this is the next generation of guys… Rory is the head of the class of that by far. He’s had an amazing start to his career, winning two major championships and winning tournaments all around the world,” Woods said.

And in terms of his game, McIlroy has the ammunition to back up the rave reviews.

An easy swing still provides tremendous power and he ranked fifth in driving distance on the US PGA Tour this year. His short game is marked by a deft, imaginative touch and he is also hot with the putter.

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It may not be on the same grand scale or as classy as Paris, but golfing fans are busy thinking “we’ll always have Sun City” to paraphrase Casablanca.

The Nedbank Golf Challenge (NGC) – or the Million Dollar as it was formerly known – is a local sporting institution, the way Corporate South Africa celebrates the end of the year, and a high-profile event in the golfing world.

But now, after 32 years, it is under threat by a pair of tournaments, one brand new, the other the second oldest national open in the sport.

The Tournament of Hope is the new kid on the block and, with a prize pool of $8.5 million, only the Players’ Championship on the U.S. PGA Tour offers more money. It is sanctioned by the International Federation of PGA Tours, comprising the American, European, Australasian, Japanese, Asian and Sunshine tours, and, like the World Golf Championship events on which it is modelled, it is aimed at the top 72 players in the world.

It will be played for the first time from November 21-24, 2013, and it is still looking for a host course.

The Tournament of Hope is also the first in a series of co-sanctioned events the Sunshine Tour is hosting, to be followed by the South African Open, the Nelson Mandela Championship and the Alfred Dunhill Championship.

With eight co-sanctioned events now featuring on their summer swing, the Sunshine Tour schedule is looking increasingly cluttered, leaving little room for manoeuvre. The 109-year-old SA Open (only the British Open is older) is, at the moment, set down for the week following the Tournament of Hope, which is why the NGC is under threat.

Sun City’s showpiece sporting event is always held on the first weekend of December, but its future is now uncertain.

The original Million Dollar Challenge was formulated by Gary Player and Sun International founder Sol Kerzner in 1981 to beat sporting isolation and bring the world’s top golfers to the homeland of Bophuthatswana – the only chance South Africans would have to see them play live.

With its million dollar prize pool, it was also the most lucrative tournament in the world.

But both South Africa, the value of the rand, and the golfing world have changed dramatically since then and there is a feeling that the NGC may have served its purpose, had its time and is now a relic of the past.

Moving forward, the Sunshine Tour, sponsors and many fans would like to see Sun City take over the Tournament of Hope.

Negotiations are underway for exactly that to happen, but there is still a rocky road ahead.

“We have had discussions with the Sunshine Tour and Sail [the Tournament of Hope promoters] about merging with the Tournament of Hope.

“But it always comes down to money and it’s a very complicated business model. It would be very costly for us, about twice the cost, to host the Tournament of Hope in terms of what Sun International would have to deliver,” NGC tournament director Alastair Roper told The Daily Maverick on Wednesday.

Accommodation is believed to be one of the stumbling blocks in negotiations, with Sun City now having to host 72 golfers rather than just the 20 that participate in the NGC and the Champions Challenge for seniors.

The NGC only became a sanctioned Sunshine Tour event, with world ranking points, in 1999 and it seems the professional tour is now putting the squeeze on Sun International.

Roper confirmed that there was the threat of world ranking points being withdrawn from the tournament, but he said they could then just operate as “an unsanctioned invitational event like we did before 1999”.

Title sponsors Nedbank, meanwhile, are not opposed to change but, with three years remaining on their contract, will support whatever decision is made.

“We will do what is best for South African golf at large. We’ve supported golf at a very high level for many years and we still want to do that.

“We really hope that the talks come to a logical conclusion and what is best for the game. We do believe Sun City is an appropriate venue though for an event of the magnitude of the Tournament of Hope,” Andy Scott, Nedbank’s head of sponsorship, said.

While change is understandably anathema to many at Sun International – the NGC is a much-loved, highly successful product that has given them fantastic international exposure for a long time – the average golf fan would think it an easy decision to take over the Tournament of Hope.

But one of the problems with the new event is that there is no guarantee that most of the world’s top 20 golfers will attend, whatever the prizemoney.

At the end of November, when the major golf tours have finished their season, it is not easy to get the big names to fly long-distance to Africa, whatever the financial reward.

“Look at the field for the HSBC Champions in Shanghai, which has the same prizemoney but is a WGC event counting for the money-lists. Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy were in China the week before, but they didn’t play.

“They had a better field than the previous year with about eight of the top 20, but we have to be realistic – just because you have $8.5 million prizemoney, that does not guarantee Tiger or Rory will play,” Roper said.

Nowadays, of course, television is a major player in any sporting discussion and a lack of TV coverage would put a serious, if not terminal, dampener on any event.

SuperSport have been the NGC broadcasters since 1999 but their position is unclear. It costs them R7 million to cover the Sun City event, but viewership figures are mediocre in comparison to sports like football and rugby, which cost a fraction of the cost to produce.

Roper admitted that getting Sun City out on to the TV screens of the world was vital.

“Our primary objective is not so much making money directly off the tournament, but showcasing Sun City as a top destination hosting an event that sets us apart from any other golfing and wildlife venue in Africa.

“Ultimately it’s a marketing exercise for us and we need TV viewership for that. We’ve obviously posed the question to SuperSport, but if they see things differently to us then we can always go back to the SABC, who are launching four new sports channels next year, or even eTV.”

This year’s NGC had a rainy finale’, which is perhaps fitting considering the tournament’s cloudy future.

It may be called the Tournament of Hope, but for Sun International it currently just looks like rain clouds, however sunny it may appear to the rest of us.

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